CSotD: Quips and quibbles quaint

Having outlined a major problem yesterday, I’m going to retreat into personal matters today, starting with this cartoon from Adam Zyglis’s forthcoming book, “You Know You’re from Buffalo If …” 

It’s hardly a new concept — there have long been Internet jokes about local identity and other cartoonists have turned the idea into books — but that’s like saying there’s nothing new about cookbooks. So what?

I’m not from Buffalo, but my folks and baby sisters lived in Tonawanda for about a decade after I’d left home, so I know about wings and beef-on-weck and Wide Right, which, I would note, would not have been nearly so tragic if they hadn’t been playing a team from New Jersey.

However, having grown up in the Adirondacks where there aren’t a lot of dairy farms, I’m sure familiar with Eustace Tilly and his progeny at the Center of the Known Universe.

 

Saul Steinberg famously spoofed their self-absorption in 1976, but he was a little late: His cover came four years after Johnny Carson moved the Tonight Show to Burbank, driving yet another nail into the coffin of Gotham Supremacy, which had begun dying a decade earlier when the Dodgers and Giants decamped for the West Coast.

Perhaps Steinberg was mocking their stubborn refusal to let it go: The Center of the Known Universe persists in thinking that way, and much of the country joins in the conspiracy.

Anything in New York State north of Yonkers is dismissed as “Upstate,” which provides no useful information except that they think we don’t count, which we already knew.

It can be amusing to read NYTimes articles about the rest of the state, which they venture into as if they were Henry Morton Stanley on safari.

I recall one such expedition to a Phish concert in Plattsburgh, in which Lake Champlain was described as a river and 1-87 dubbed “The Thruway,” but my favorite was a trip into deepest, darkest Speculator, which our intrepid explorer described as a town “so small it doesn’t have an ATM.”

How’d you find that out, hotshot?

I suspect Zyglis will do well with this book.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #1

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

(The Argyle Sweater – AMS)

Still on the topic of people who think they dwell at the center of the universe, here’s a pair of cartoons that adequately cover the change in parenting over the past few decades.

SMBC is a good explanation of the difference between a plan and an accident, and, with (sincerely) all respect to those who try valiantly to conceive, my guess is that a preponderance of babies in the world are wanted, but not planned.

The joke being that parents don’t explain it to their children with quite that much frankness, though, when people expressed wonder at the six kids in our family, my father would say, with a completely straight face, “We found out what was causing it.”

We who procreated in the 1970s thought babies were pretty cool, but it quickly started getting out of control. I had to fight my way into the delivery room for Son #1 in 1972; by the time #2 came along four years later, fathers needed a good excuse not to be present.

Which would have been a good stopping point, but then grandparents and older kids and best friends got into the act, to the point where hospitals nearly had to put up bleachers in the delivery room.

My own rule remains that, if you weren’t present at the beginning, you don’t get to be there for the result, but I don’t say it often for fear of touching off yet another intrusive fad.

Which brings us to gender reveal parties, which raise so many questions that I can’t begin to list them all. Granted, absent some reason to do an invasive amniocentesis, our reveal came in that not-yet-crowded delivery room.

But being able to know ahead of time doesn’t not change whether anyone but you really cares: The days when the queen’s future depended on her being able to produce a male heir to the throne are well past.

And the neighbors would rather you didn’t blow things up.

 

Which provides a segue to this Reply All (WPWG), because we’ve got little bits of metal confetti strewn all over the park where we walk our dogs, thanks to some gender-revealing litterbugs.

Though what I was actually going to comment on is Lizzie’s absurd idea that sniffing grass and shrubs is a substitute for sniffing other dogs.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dog in possession of a good nose must be in want of another dog to sniff.

 

And if that segue isn’t too smart for the room, today’s Macanudo (KFS) certainly is. I know there were Brontë sisters, but I didn’t major in English and I don’t remember which was which, except that I did know there was a third. And a brother.

But I still get them mixed up with the Alcotts and Beechers.

 

In any case, that sneaky segue was from someone else entirely, whose work I have now read and whom I hope has since been included in the list for our seminar, because nobody ever told me how wickedly funny she was.

 

Finally today, I was glad to see Real Life Adventures (AMS) bring up the Mystery of the Disappearing Jack.

Back in the Olden Days, we had Bumper Jacks and we also had tires that blew out or went flat fairly regularly. Not as regularly as a century ago, when people carried patch kits and tire pumps, but regularly enough that changing a tire was no big deal.

Tires have since become far more dependable, but god help you if you do get a flat, because that sturdy Bumper Jack has disappeared, perhaps because sturdy bumpers have done likewise.

Cars now come with a Silly Jack, a scissors jack combined with a crank which is simple to use if you don’t mind turning it 150 times for each centimeter you wish to raise the car.

I think it was designed by the people at Triple-A, so you’d call them instead.

 

(I doubt that the car raising itself helps you change the tires.)