Graeme MacKay celebrates the opening of barber shops as Ontario eases up on things.
We haven’t been as strict as the Canadians, which is why they won’t let us up there yet. Our local mask mandate goes off Thursday, though some stores have already dropped masks for the double-vaccinated, which sounds a bit confusing but only because it is.
My barber reopened two months ago, with on-line reservations and only one person allowed in the shop at a time. Now that I no longer jet off to workshops anymore, I don’t see him that often anyway, but I did go in for a summer shearing and saw that he’d taken advantage of the shutdown to renovate, though it’s still an old-school, one-man barber shop.
I like MacKay’s idea of charging by weight, because I’ve seen some shaggy folks on Facebook, but here’s what’s funny, and what is a deeply held secret: You can shave even if the barber shop is closed.
Maybe in the city there are still guys who get shaved by the barber each day, but most of the ones I’ve seen doing that in the movies end up getting shot or blown to pieces, so I don’t recommend it.
And I haven’t been watching Ari-Raps-The-News on MSNBC lately, so I don’t know if he’s taken to regular grooming again, but I do find it funny that someone who presumably has make-up applied before going on air wasn’t able to include a quick shave among his ablutions.
Guys will take any excuse to grow a beard and see what it looks like, but the Don Johnson thing is just laziness, unless you include the white jacket, aqua shirt and sockless Italian loafers.
And another thing, consarn it
Tim Rickard does some entertaining advanced doodling in Brewster Rockit (Tribune) today, and if my kids are reading this, they’re already braced for the rant, because I continue to bluster over having taken them to The Empire Strikes Back when it first came out, and realizing in the opening sequence that I was trapped in a 124 minute toy commercial.
There is no possible reason a civilization that can make speeder bikes and land speeders would even want a slow, top heavy, preposterous thing like this except to sell replicas to the parents of small children.
Talk about an “evil empire.”
Rickard scored earlier in the week with this one, but this is an example of stupid, not evil.
I know all about stupid empires. First my bank came up with a new, safer on-line format designed to keep people from getting into my account, including me. I finally went into the office and had one of the tellers fix things so I could finally log in.
Then Facebook informed me my personal account had been hacked, suspended me for something the hacker posted and now is demanded that I prove that I’m 13 years old and permitted to have the account I opened in 2007.
Click on every square that contains a brain.
I’m not done ranting yet.
Pearls Before Swine caps the academic year by taunting college students with something I think I was gentle — by comparison — in saying last fall.
Even before the pandemic, I’ve championed gap years, having myself been the victim of the conveyor belt.
If I’d taken a year to work after high school, I’d have made some dramatically different decisions about college, albeit I was classmates with Joe Theismann, not Aaron Rogers, and Austin Carr, not Jason Kidd, which, yes, was entertaining.
But those are details. I learned more between classes than I ever did in lectures, and I’m not just talking about parties and protests. Surrounding yourself for four years with people many of whom are smarter than you, all of whom have had different experiences than you, is why you should go to college instead of just reading books.
Bottom line: If you paid tens of thousands of dollars for a Zoom experience, the “gap,” my young friends, is between your ears.
Might as well cut your own hair and then mail the money to your barber.
On a related note, Caulfield always seems to learn more in the hallways than he does in the classroom.
You might have to read today’s Frazz (AMS) two or three times to get it.
Maybe three or four.
Juxtaposition of the Dogs
I gather, from cartoons mostly, that a lot of people repeatedly ask “Who’s a good dog?” but, like Lizzie, I address my dog in declarative sentences, since dogs learn that questions suggest adventures or, at least, special treats.
I’ve always been able to get a head tilt from my dogs by starting a sentence, “Do you want …” and so I feel obligated to follow up questions with at least a bone, if not a walk or a drive somewhere.
Besides, it’s a stupid question: I know she’s a good dog, and, yes, seriously super cute.
She could, however, take a lesson from the shrink in Free Range, because she’s awfully eager to please and, if I could hitch that tail to a generator, I’d never pay for electricity again.
Though as she approaches her first birthday next month, she’s becoming, like the dog in The Other Coast, a little more cagey. She still stops and looks when I whistle, but she increasingly waits to see if I’m reaching for my pocket before she comes running.
And, yes, reaching for an empty pocket is every bit as much of a dick move as pretending to throw the tennis ball.
Or asking “Who’s a good dog?” without having an adventure in mind.
Still on the topic of empty promises
I got a laff out of today’s Sherman’s Lagoon (KFS), and I think there’s some value in ridiculing cryptocurrency if it makes people question the fad before they sink their life savings into it.
Then again, a decade-and-a-half ago social media was full of videos of people absorbed in their phones and walking into lamp posts or falling off curbs, and, as Macanudo (KFS) points out, ridicule hardly stemmed that tide.
(Here — Scratch that earworm)
Baby Bear and Bella say Ruff Ruff!! ? ?
We just got a dog. He’s six, and was someone’s pet in Texas before he was picked up abandoned in Houston. Texas dogs supply the country, our rescue foster told us–and two days ago, I met someone else in the neighborhood whose dog came from the Lone Star State.
As for haircuts, I learned to cut my own with scissors, so now I can always keep it as short as I want. I took advantage of the earlier part of the pandemic to learn while nobody else was looking at me.
I think it’s pretty obvious that Facetube/Youbook et al. have a strategy akin to the obviously-fake Nigerian prince scammers. In that case, the initial mails are super-obviously scammy so no one responds except the self-selected gullible (and the crusaders whose time is valueless).
For FB, the “customers” (product) that remain after their mindless challenges are the ones that are willing to do lots of interacting and click through lots of hoops, and since they basically sell customer clicks that increases the value of the product. I doubt it is as conscious as all that, but big companies are dinosaurs with little brains scattered through them like raisins in a pudding and I doubt many of the larger brains object….