CSotD: Friday Funnies

Edison Lee (KFS) offers me another chance to feel old, and, gosh, real life doesn’t offer enough of those.

I agree with his dad that there are all sorts of electronic doodads that I don’t need, but there’s always that nagging sense that maybe the kids are on to something.

I’m getting over it.

Most of the magical marvels I’ve ended up trying haven’t worked out. I’m not a technophobe — I picked up Photoshop and Corel and Quark and InDesign without problems, though I know that people who have really been trained on them can make them jump through hoops.

But I’ve never needed hoops; I just needed to process images and lay out pages, so my on-the-job mostly-self-training worked just fine.

And I finally broke down and got a SmartPhone, but my chief use of it beyond phone calls is Googling the menu at the Chinese restaurant, then using it as a phone to call in my order.

Last week I remembered to pick up a menu and put it in my glove compartment, so that’s the end of hi-tech usage for the thing.

I despise video conferencing, but that’s not technophobia. I despised teleconferencing, too.

I will admit getting one invaluable hack from the Internet, however: I now peel my bananas from the flower end rather than the stem end.

 

Though, judging from this old comic card, apparently peeling them properly was more of a “lost art” than something the kids invented.

 

Still on the topic of things some people learn the hard way, On the Fastrack (KFS) puts Dethany in the naive role and lets Fi lay out the facts of life. Fi may not be pleasant company, but, given her grasp of reality and her lack of sentimentality, she’s a valuable sidekick.

She’s sure got this one right: Pulling off a miracle leads to two temptations, and neither works well.

One is to announce it with excitement, the other is to pretend you never had any doubt you could do it.

Makes no difference: The first might get you 30 seconds of praise in a meeting, but, either way, the next time they need a miracle, they just toss it on your desk and, as Fi says, expect you to do it again.

Best idea? Pretend you didn’t do it at all.

My grandfather once committed some of his life-lessons to paper, among which wise things he said

It may not always work, but it probably works most places you want to be in anyway.

 

Pretty sure the approach used in this Free Range (Creators) won’t really work, but it got a laff from me.

It seems like an example of something I’ve suddenly been seeing pop up on-line, and, much like peeling bananas, it’s not new but is apparently new to a lot of people.

It’s called “espirit d’escalier,” or, literally “wit of the staircase,” and refers to that wonderfully clever thing you think of when it’s too late — as when you have left the party and are walking downstairs. It’s wasted wit for most of us, but cartoonists can go home, draw it and maybe make a little money. Not bad!

Meanwhile, I suspect that about three quarters of the terribly clever things people report having said are actually examples of things they wish they had thought of at the moment, but I could be wrong.

It might be more like 95%.

Speaking of witty repartee, I wish I’d seen this Will McPhail New Yorker cartoon sooner, because it sure fits my discussion of parties and how much I hate them. 

Come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever had a date that turned into anything interesting. Most of my relationships involved people I knew anyway, and the only one I can think of that kicked off with dinner at a fancy restaurant did not last long or end well.

But, oh my, how the witty repartee did flow that night!

Just the way McPhail drew it!

 

Zits (KFS) is in the midst of a storyline based on bad teen horror movies, complete with the car breaking down on a lonely road with no cell coverage and a strange light in the sky.

I have no idea where this is going, but, speaking of horror, it gives me flashbacks to a period when a bunch of mostly collegiate and alternative comic strips added talking animal sidekicks. It never improved them.

This is not to be confused with Monty, which began as Robotman in 1985, and centered around a robot and his human pal, but then, in 2001, dropped the robot, changed its title and then brought back a different robot as a minor character in a much better strip.

But I’m going to assume the normally realistic Zits is not going through the kind of existential crisis that caused cartoonists to add clever talking animals to their casts and that this is simply a fun little departure and we’ll find out it was all a dream.

Y’know, like Alice in Wonderland.

I couldn’t find the John Tenniel or Arthur Rackham illustrations of that story, but here’s how Jack Davis drew it:

 

 

 

Finally today, I’m like Betty (AMS) and Bub, content to stay home, sit back and watch a movie, have a little popcorn and toddle off to bed.

Familiarity breeds content.

I remember those hours in the video store, which started by searching for the ones that weren’t there but then turned into sorting through the “seen its” and the ones picked by one of you but rejected by the other.

It was a way to fine-tune the relationship, because you don’t want the other person to simply agree with any choice you make, but, then again, you can learn a lot from her hopeful suggestions and her obdurate turn-downs.

Better to learn it then than later, yes.

The real laugh is that all the wasted time spent scanning the racks at the video store is now spent scrolling through the titles on Netflix or Amazon, though it doesn’t give you, as Bub says, the advantage of having gotten out of the house.

Getting out of the house having been, at a younger age, an occasion where, thank goodness, you didn’t have to worry about coming up with witty repartee.