CSotD: Quibbles

We’ll start with a somewhat serious issue today and then descend into more trivial matters.

Ed Hall is hardly the only person, or even the only cartoonist, to delve into the case of Sha’Carri Richardson, favored for the gold at the upcoming Secret Olympics, but suspended for a month after testing positive for THC, having smoked weed to deal with her grandmother’s death.

It has been several Olympiads since I was able to summon up much interest in the Games, in large part because the US coverage has increasingly focused on features about the local cuisine and on telling us the touching life stories of a handful of pre-selected stars in place of televising any actual sporting events.

But, by that measure, a blonde bisexual woman of color must have had them wetting themselves with excitement well beyond anticipating how fast she might run.

She’d have spent under 10 seconds on the track and over 10 hours on the telly.

My distaste for the Olympics is colored in large part by being old enough to remember Avery Brundage, depicted as the Antisemite in “Chariots of Fire,” the movie about a Jewish runner, not to be confused with “Wheels of Fire,” the song borrowed for a TV show about two women who were more averse to running at all than they were to smoking marijuana.

Brundage was also featured in some movies and TV shows about Jesse Owens, who had tested positive for melanin to Brundage’s dismay.

Then, when he finally shuffled his elitist, amateurs-only butt off this sporting coil, the Olympics promptly sold out completely to corporate sponsors and, by the by, remain in the triad of trademark-enforcing piranhas, along with Dr. Seuss and Disney.

Where the hell was I?

Oh yeah, Sha’Carri Richardson.

You don’t just wander onto the track at the Olympics, and, while a relative newcomer to international competition, she had obviously trained hard. She certainly knew, and has conceded that she knew, that marijuana is on the banned list and that Olympic athletes are tested.

Working that hard for a goal and then screwing it up seems pretty foolish.

As Hall says, and as this expert pretty much told NPR, it’s a damn stupid, pointless rule that would make Avery Brundage proud.

This brouhaha should absolutely get them to drop the ban.

The question is, do you simply change the rule going forward, or do you also reinstate someone who knowingly broke it?

I don’t have an answer, but, if I took the Olympics more seriously, I’m sure I could come up with one.

 

The children of Baby Blues (KFS) offer a solution to a matter my young writers and I dealt with for a decade in my editing days.

In their book and movie reviews, they would note language they felt was inappropriate for their age group, but we never came up with the right descriptor, my objection to “adult language” or “mature language” being my insistence that it is neither, though the cultivation of perennial adolescents by the beer industry and Hollywood make me question if we even acknowledge mature adults anymore.

We now have a semi-network comedy called “F*ck Kevin,” and f-bombs, used as a common intensifier, have become so much a part of daily language that it makes me wonder what people say when they’re genuinely infuriated.

I like “HBO words,” though I think Scott and Kirkman are trailing the times. I remember when I dismissed the praise for HBO Original Dramas as fascination with the fact that, if you weren’t on network TV, you could feature f-bombs and titties.

I guess it just means that I’m old as f*ck, which, to the extent that it makes sense at all, is an oxymoron.

Now get the f*ck off my f*cking lawn.

 

Dagnabit, Lio (AMS), I’m even old enough to remember when Cracker Jack came in a box rather than a pouch, and I’m ignoring the spelling error because I’m more fascinated by this:

 

I’m also ignoring the bizarre modernification of the kid-and-dog mascots. No, my focus of fascination is “New prize inside!” because who wants a used prize?

However, Wikipedia explains that they quit putting prizes in the bag in 2016 in favor of a QR Code with which you could download a baseball-themed game, which makes me wonder how they could have come up with something so incredibly lame that it wasn’t even as good as the cheap, lousy crap they were putting in the boxes as prizes by the time my kids were old enough to buy the stuff.

Mind you, if Cracker Jack were any good, I’d have checked in more regularly. As it is, I didn’t really like stale, gummy popcorn even back when the prizes were amusing.

Cracker Jack has been in business for 125 years. It’s enough to make you believe in miracles.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Half-Full – AMS)

 

(The Other Coast – Creators)

Yesterday was not just the best day of the year for seagulls, but also for our dogs at the park, which was the fireworks venue the night before and was now like a canine Easter egg hunt, with the best food scraps having been tossed into the bushes.

Most of the time, they have to content themselves, as in The Other Coast, with finding dead things to either eat or roll on or to first roll on and then eat.

Which is pretty funny since so many of their owners overspend on exotic dog food blends.

If the dogs were consulted, there’d be a free dead crow in each bag. And it wouldn’t be new.

 

Finally, in even less serious less serious matters, The Heart of Juliet Jones has dealt itself a strange hand over at Vintage Comics Kingdom, with a storyline about Pops going to England to trace his roots. Too bad the strip wasn’t named “The Heart of Juliet Farffenagle.”

I’m hoping tomorrow will feature this old fellow saying, “Why, I haven’t heard anybody call me ‘Jones’ in years,” and then recounting how his wife ran off to Niagara Falls with another man.

But the best I can come up with is this wimpy response.