CSotD: More or less a day of rest
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While Steve and Matt work this one out, we will eschew (and esspit out) politics for the day.
Tom Friedman’s November 2, 2001, analysis notwithstanding, this one ain’t going anywhere.
And, as this Anne & God suggests, there’s enough social media debate on the topic right now that looking for wisdom there reminds me of sparrows at horse barns picking undigested oats out of the heaps of digested ones.
The Lockhorns (KFS) drops a well-timed reference that allows me to link you to Clay Jones’ essay on the topic without getting into the politics of his cartoon.
For now, I’ll just suggest that, if you name your baby “Michael Richards,” fergawdsake don’t teach him how to talk.
No good will come of it.
(Apologies to anyone actually named Michael Richards. I have several friends named “Karen,”
and, while I don’t feel your pain, I’m sure they do.)
Today’s Pardon My Planet (KFS) reminds me that, at the paper where I was working in the late 90s, our assistant general manager indeed had the toilet paper locked down and had also installed seat cover dispensers in the stalls, presumably to prevent us from peeling off toilet paper if we felt a shield were necessary.
Peeling it off one sheet at a time, that is.
He could have taught Archie Bell all about tightenin’ up.
Andertoons (AMS) offers a look at bygone days, and they’re really bygone, because I don’t even remember my sons’ friends appearing on the doorstep the way we used to, and my firstborn turns 49 next week.
We didn’t have our kids overscheduled into play dates back then and we even let them leave the yard without supervision, but my recollection is that their friends — who lived within three doors — either called on the phone or just were outside anyway.
Knocking on the door was a generation earlier and we’re running out of earlier generations.
Speaking of showing up on the doorstep, or in the backyard, I think Wallace the Brave (AMS) exists not in the Olden Days but in a parallel universe where kids still roam and have fun and get into adventures and misadventures, and I hope my grandkids are having at least half this much fun and perhaps more.
Wallace and his cohorts live in a type of semirural seacoast community that still exists, but he’s aided by parents who must have grown up the same way, because they not only don’t hover but they take delight in his childhood.
I’ve told how my poor mother grew up in the ‘burbs and then had to raise her own kids in a world of snakes and bears and six million acres of forest in which kids could get lost, but then, having grown up there, I raised kids in a city of 300,000, full of concrete and traffic and stranger-danger, compared to which bears seemed pretty harmless.
Which, by the way, they are.
I’m quite sure that Agnes (Creators) lives in a parallel universe, and it’s a combination of sorrow and absurdity best viewed from a distance.
Trout’s insightful description, however, is a welcome relief, since the hoo-hah over the Olympics continues, at least in the promotional trashposts that Facebook “suggests” (erroneously) that I would like to find more of in my feed.
I’m so old I can remember when the Olympics were about sports. Which was two months ago.
These people live in a world of frabjous solidarity in which people are actually happy to have their online activities tracked.
I am not making this up. This is the disclaimer on their site:
We accept them, we accept them, one of us! One of us!
Meanwhile, at least when people use sticks to jump over goal posts in their underpants, the results are measured objectively and not by how artistically a group of judges feels that they managed the feat.
By the next Olympics, I expect Simon Cowell to be in charge of everything.
Dagnabbit.
This Argyle Sweater (AMS) also caters to the surviving members of ancient times.
Despite our letting the boys wander out of our sight, we had very few casts in the family. I’m not sure any of them were plaster, and fiberglass tape doesn’t take autographs very well, though I’ve seen kids adorn their casts with stickers.
Plaster casts remind me of the time my best friend, Bill, went skiing at Stowe with his social studies teacher, who proceeded to take a fall that resulted in both legs being plastered straight and Bill driving them the 180 miles home.
Bill was 15 and did not have a drivers’ license. I don’t know if the teacher knew that or not, but it was an excellent time not to ask the question.
Finished Business
I’d be in love with Wallace the Brave’s mom if I hadn’t already pledged my heart to Christy Sawyer, whose virtues I extolled a few days ago, comparing her not to Nora Charles so much as Laura Petrie.
Because of the tight security around Buz Sawyer (KFS)‘s latest mission, poor Christy not only thought they were on vacation but that her husband had resigned from the Navy.
Well, that story has wrapped up and Buz is now off on another which probably won’t include the mix of suspense and comic relief that marked this one.
I had a professor in college who asked us why Shakespeare wrote the gravedigger scene in Hamlet. After we all parroted the well-trodden need to break the tension, he reminded us that Shakespeare employed a comedian or two in his acting company and had to give them something to do.
Comic strip artists, however, don’t have to keep all their characters working and I suspect Christy will disappear throughout this next adventure. Still, it’s a good time to start reading.
BTW, the discussion around that previous post about continuity strips shows I apparently failed to differentiate within the genre between adventure strips, spoofs of adventure strips and soap opera strips.
What I mourn is the decline of pure adventure, and, particularly, the noir detective/cop strips. Thank god for King Features’ Vintage strips!
Meanwhile, here’s to the Christys and the Noras and the Lauras:
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