The best part of this Daddy’s Home (Creators) is that he’s right, sort of.
That is, we shouldn’t believe what they say, because we all use more than 10 percent of our brain, though the people who keep saying this perhaps do not.
It’s appropriate that she’s on her laptop, because that’s a flowing river of such happy horsepucky. The 10 percent myth, according to that linked article, has been growing for over a century, but social media has certainly extended the reach of such stuff, particularly since so many people hit “Like” or “Share” without actually reading what they are endorsing.
And why bother, if it has a cool picture and a headline that seems to fit what they want to believe.
As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Here’s what I know for certain: Big Nate (AMS)’s story arc about Cheez Doodles and cheese curls this week is, IMHO, a rare case in which the boy is right.
As he notes, cheese curls are, basically, fat, orange, cheese-flavored packing peanuts, which crush up into a sort of caulk, smoothing out the surfaces of your molars. Nasty business entirely.
What you want are the crispy, irregularly shaped Cheetos, and, for some reason, they’ve been in short supply throughout the pandemic.
I don’t mind paying $4.25 a gallon for gas if it helps poor Ukraine, but it’s more than anyone should have to bear to scan the row at the grocery store and find nothing but those damned cheese curls on the shelf.
I suppose it would be worse if you called a delivery service to bring you a bag of Cheetos and they brought you cheese curls instead.
This Deflocked (AMS) doesn’t seem all that far-fetched, though I suspect food delivery services are a City Mouse/Country Mouse issue. If I lived in an urban center and didn’t have a car handy, I guess it would make sense to have a meal delivered, and, certainly both pizza and Chinese places have long offered the service.
But for this country mouse, having food show up late, cool and more expensive isn’t a reasonable trade-off, because it’s not only quicker and easier to just go get it yourself — no tipping needed — but it’s also possible to go to a well-stocked supermarket and get your own ingredients.
In any case, I’d want to pay that extra for something worth it. The trade-off for putting up with city life is supposed to be all the joys of metropolitan culture, and my mind boggles at the notion of having McDonald’s delivered.
Another benefit of country life is easy commuting, though I’d assume the rise in gas prices will encourage carpooling even out here.
However, Existential Comics offers a grim warning about forming a carpool with Jean-Paul Sartre, Immanuel Kant, Parmenides and Simone de Beauvoir.
If you were thinking of doing that, you should click the link and read the rest.
A different level of philosophy takes place in Agnes (Creators), and, while I don’t know if she’s city or suburban, I’m hoping she’s in Florida, because, if she lives there, she might make a claim of religious freedom and get away with it.
The governor and senators there have put reality up for personal interpretation, as long as you come up with the correct theory. If they can do that with history and health sciences, why not geography?
After all, it fits with their overall approach to arithmetic.
This David Sipress cartoon popped up on my feed yesterday, on International Women’s Day, which makes it nice that he puts the caption in the man’s mouth instead of hers. It also made me both laugh and groan, since I’ve been on both ends.
Still, I question whether many guys vocalize the conflict in such pop-psych terms and, as it happens, I also recently stumbled onto an episode of Hidden Brain in which Shankar Vedantam interviewed Deborah Tannen, whose work on male/female conversational style a quarter century ago made a huge difference in my perception of such things.
The show is worth a listen, the book is a must-read and you should also check out DD Degg’s roundup of David Sipress interviews in connection with his new book.
There’s been a flood of whataboutism over the war in Ukraine, some honest, some corrupt.
We’ve probed the racial side of being horrified when war breaks out in Europe but not if it strikes brown folks somewhere else, but there are also a lot of ways of unpacking an invasion that distinguish it from insurgencies and civil war.
We should discuss it, so long as the answer is not to do less for Ukraine but to also do more for those other places.
In Candorville (WPWG), Lemont tries to take a historical view, and Susan is right that media has changed so much that it’s a completely different ballgame.
In the first Gulf War, in 1990, I ended up holding the phone to the TV, since I had CNN but my son and his college buddies had only broadcast, and the networks were doing a shit job. But that’s not the conflict of which Lemont speaks.
In the 2003 invasion, news organizations did better, but, as Lemont complains, there was little social media coverage because, as he concedes, there still wasn’t a whole lot of social media.
However, the Internet offered an inside view, and this cartoon sent me scrambling to the googles, where I discovered that Riverrun is still alive and apparently well, or, at least was when she wrapped up her coverage a few years ago, explaining what Iraqis learned:
That’s only part of it. Some of her lessons are unique to Iraq, others may apply to Ukraine if they don’t keep the resistance going.
Most are applicable to all wars and invasions, and she has an archive on the side that you can toggle to read from the beginning.
It wasn’t so easy to find such views in them thar days, but the superior quality sure made the search worthwhile.
And, wotthehell, it’s not like any of it goes out of style.