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CSotD: Sunny days and Mondays always cheer me up

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Mike Peterson November 8, 2021 1 minute 5 comments

Arlo is right. Whatever the benefits or failures of Daylight Saving Time, it sure gives people a lot of latitude for conversation, and I use the word pointedly, because the United States extends through enough latitude that, when it comes to sunlight, most of us don’t know what the rest of us are talking about.

When I moved my boys from Colorado Springs to Plattsburgh, NY, I warned them that, once the snow hits in late December, it’s there until March. I still, 30-some years later, miss the part-time winter of Colorado’s Front Range, where you can have a lock-down snowstorm one day and people back playing golf by the end of the week.

But in the Spring, the boys told me it wasn’t the snow that bothered them, but the darkness. I’d moved them from 39 degrees north to 47 degrees north, and they found it oppressive to both go to school and come home in the dark.

By comparison, my stepdaughter spent several years in Alaska, and she is not alone in testifying that endless dark is not nearly as discombobulating as endless daylight.

It wouldn’t bother me to scrap the whole back-and-forth system, but I’ve lived on the border of a time zone, and, unless you plan to go back to horses and buggies and everyone marking their own time at noon, I can assure you there is no perfect solution.

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the globe, First Dog on the Moon was getting his first good look at the Aurora, which, as he says, requires more Southern exposure than most people get, but living in Tasmania adds a little extra potential.

The Northern Lights are more spectacular, but, then again, seeing them is one of the benefits of walking the dog well after that aforementioned early sunset, and often at temperatures well below zero (F, not C).

At which point, you run back into the warm, lighted house and invite everyone outside, because it’s worth it.

Speaking of the dog, Harry Bliss suggests some of the adjustment issues of going back to the workplace, since, after several months of working at home, the dog has not only become used to being a confidant but has absorbed most of the necessary background.

Though the fact that we don’t really hold this sort of conversation with our dogs is probably why they don’t divorce us but our spouses frequently do.

And, on the topic of “It depends on where you live,” Rhymes With Orange makes a joke that is probably less grim in some places than others.

I did have a cat disappear for several days when we lived in the city, but it turned out he’d gotten himself locked in someone’s garage during a snowstorm. Now that I live in the country, my response to missing cat posters is “Fox-owl-hawk food.”

Which sounds cold-hearted, but, then again, cats aren’t terribly apologetic about celebrating their place on the food chain.

Keep your kitty inside.

Speaking of the Missing

Comics Kingdom has lost a week’s worth of classic Judge Parker strips from 1978. I found them:

And even Go Comics drops the ball once in awhile. Here are two strips — Barney & Clyde and Pickles — that were missing from yesterday’s Sunday lineup:

And Now The Sports

While I was poking around in the backfiles of the Detroit Free Press for those Judge Parker strips, I came across this article about irascible Ohio State Coach Woody Hayes, which is interesting in a comics sense because Dick Mayer illustrated sports features regularly and it’s a reminder of how valuable artists were at attracting those much-sought-after eyeballs.

But my interest was more about how people might have loved him or hated him in November of 1978, because, a month later, he punched an opposing player in the middle of a game and became “ex-Ohio State Coach Woody Hayes.”

Not that it erased him completely. First time I visited Columbus, I kept seeing signs for “Woody-this” and “Woody-that” and thought, “Man, these people are really into folk music.”

And then it hit me.

Just metaphorically. Not in the literal Woody Hayes way.

As long as we’re talking sports, I also came across this Doonesbury from then, which cracked me up.

As it turns out, Green Bay, in the absence of Aaron Rodgers, only ran that play once, though they managed to take a pretty good shellacking anyway, the question for casual viewers being whether you wanted them to lose and prove how he had hurt his teammates, or win and show they didn’t need the fool anyway.

Alas, the game didn’t seem to prove either contention.

Paul Berge, meanwhile, is not the only person suggesting a comparison between Rodgers and Colin Kaepernick, but he’s relatively calm in doing so, compared to the SJWs who are raging on social media over the so-far-unproven parallel.

For one thing, neither the NFL nor State Farm Insurance have had sufficient time to formally respond to Rodgers’ idiocy. It might be nice to see how they handle it before we condemn them.

It’s also the case that, while the NFL ownership obviously froze out Kaepernick — hardly their only flaw in judgment — he picked up a Nike contract after beginning his activist demonstrations, and now he’s becoming famous on Netflix, too.