CSotD: Remembrance of Things Mostly Past

I’m not in the mood for politics today and we’ll certainly get a heapin’ helpin’ whether I want it or not. But I will share Marty Two Bulls’ take on the anniversary because it cracked me up. I think it’s the trunk/snout, combined with the desperate expression and the obvious falsehood.

If you want a more analytical look at January 6, go back a day. I want to hear what the President — the real one, the one we elected — has to say, which should happen just about the time I finish and post this. But I’m not going to bother guessing ahead of time.

Back in the olden days, the President would have made this a prime time speech, but I don’t think the networks would want to pre-empt Joe Millionaire or Young Sheldon, and we probably wouldn’t want them to. The world has changed since the days when matters of national importance overrode issues of personal entertainment.

 

As Mike Baldwin says in today’s Cornered (AMS), whatever gains we may make in fighting the coronavirus will not be measured in lives saved but in the restoration of our ability to amuse ourselves to death.

I’d reminisce about those bygone days, but I never actually enjoyed them. The closest I got — and it was pretty close — was back in Denver, when then-wife edited one of those entertainment guides that they put in hotel rooms.

Part of her job included eating at advertisers’ restaurants, so we did get to enjoy some meals that would have cost an obscene amount if we’d been paying for them.

One of the most memorable came when a very good local chef at a fashionable restaurant prepared a media preview for a major gathering of chefs from around the country.

He laid out an incredibly impressive groaning board of prime rib and seafood and duck and all sorts of fancy decorated delicious stuff, only he had scheduled it opposite the Colorado-Nebraska game and the only people who showed up were the two of us and the TV writer from the Rocky Mountain News.

He was understandably embarrassed and pissed off, and finally ordered the busboys to bring foam clamshells so we could load up with literally as much as we could carry. We tried to be polite, but he kept insisting, “No, no, take more” until we went home on the bus with our chins stabilizing teetering stacks of loaded containers, which we then shared with the equally-poor couple who’d been watching our young son, and both families ate like royalty for about 10 days.

Even the two babies got a little foie gras, which makes excellent finger food.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Dastardly stuff.

But rich folks eat all sorts of things. You should have been there when we visited the Fort.

 

Anyway, whatever geese may have been harmed in the preparation of that feast got their vengeance when we went camping and, like the idiots in this Other Coast (Creators), I believed an old tip that said free-flowing water was safe to drink.

I don’t know who all or what all was upstream — possibly beavers — but I’d lost about 30 pounds by the time I got to the Free Clinic for help, and I only weighed about 160 to begin with back then.

I could stand to lose 30 pounds today, but I’m not gonna do it that way. Once was way too many.

 

This may be the start of an extended storyline in Pickles (WPWG), but I can already guess a potential punchline, because even back then those things were popular and I was the aforementioned 160-pound athletic, slim young man, I could barely get back out of them.

If I were to sit on a beanbag chair today, they’d have to call Triple-A.

Don’t do it, Earl.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Reality Check – AMS)

 

(Mt Pleasant – Tribune)

I suppose, given the demographics of the average newspaper subscriber, it’s okay to aim for an aged audience, though, IMHO, Dave Whamond is appealing not only to a well-seasoned age group but a group sliced even thinner by being fans of the Steve Miller Band after it had jumped the shark and become a bar band.

Or, as Wikipedia more politely explains, “The style and personnel of the band changed radically with The Joker (No.?1, 1973), concentrating on straightforward rock and leaving the psychedelic blues side of the band behind.”

Along with Boz Scaggs and Nicky Hopkins, among others.

 

In any case, making a similarly ancient reference in a comic strip back in 1973 might have meant riffing on “The Charleston.”

The gag in Mt. Pleasant also reaches back, since I doubt many people under 30 have ever been in a classroom with a chalkboard, much less had the experience of browning up the teacher by clapping erasers.

Boy, are we old.

 

To return to the present day, In the Bleachers (AMS) did spark memories, because back when I used to go to Colorado College hockey games in the old Broadmoor Arena, I was still a smoker, so that, if I went alone, I’d go outside for a cigarette and a walk around the lake between periods.

But if I were with the boys, we had to stay to watch the Zamboni, which they considered every bit as entertaining and important as the hockey.

The present day connection being that I just saw something about a company that, for a fee, will teach you to drive a Zamboni and let you take a few laps around the rink.

It’s apparently become a thing, and if you’d like to maybe learn more than you wanted to know about that, here’s a very local TV station’s participatory-journalism report on the phenomenon.

 

Finally, because I am a very old man who responds to very old cultural references, here’s one triggered by this Macanudo (KFS), and I realize the song was not only released five years before “The Joker” but also five years before Macanudo artist Liniers was born.

But nearly a decade before the Moody Blues leapt the shark and became popular.

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere, but I have no idea what it is and I wasn’t planning to think too much today anyway.