CSotD: You can quote me, and I hope you will
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Between the death of Queen Elizabeth and the Anniversary of 9/11, things are tedious over on the editorial pages, so we’ll stick to the funnies today. I was surprised to see this Pardon My Planet (KFS) this morning, since sensitivity might have called for pulling it, but, then again, it would have already been sitting in newspaper mailrooms around the country in pallets of pre-printed comic sections anyway.
Besides, it’s just a silly joke. The political cartoons showing a palace guard weeping are far more insulting to their discipline and professionalism.
So enough about all that, and let’s instead focus on something more interesting:
Me.
For instance, this Super-Fun-Pak Comix (AMS) would simply be an amusing pun on Chekhov’s famous dictum that, if there is a gun on stage in Act One, it must be fired by Act Three, had Ruben Bolling not specified “Bubblicious.”
When my boys were little, I instituted a rule against having Bubblicious in the car because the sweet, fruity stench of the stuff was so overpowering.
I think I’d have rather they were back there annoying a skunk.
The good part of it was that it added to my reputation for Paternal Omniscience, because I would, without looking back, demand that whoever had it needed to spit it out, wrap it up and get rid of it.
Granted, the stories they now tell at Thanksgiving about all the things they got away with as teens make chewing grape Bubblicious seem like pretty small potatoes, but for one shining moment, I knew what they were up to.
Which brings us to a true parenting mystery and this Stephen Collins discussion of how to drop your kids off at college, a phenomenon I genuinely don’t understand.
My folks shipped my stuff off somehow — I forget how — and then put me on an airplane and wished me luck, which combination of raising your kids with roots-and-wings I repeated with my boys. Being empty-nested was something of a jolt, but their leaving was fore-ordained.
It was similar to that sense, when your kid is 13 of “Dear god, he’ll be driving in three years,” which fades by the time they’re old enough because, well, by then, they’re old enough. Assuming you’ve done your job.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Like the fellow in Macanudo, I had my heart ripped out and stomped on in college, a full decade before Dr. Hook sang “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman” but with that same traditional storyline about best girls and best friends that goes back to someone or other, possibly David and Bathsheba only I was cast in the role of Uriah the Hittite.
It happens all the time, yes, but this was the only time it happened to me.
The boulder dropped on my head at the start of junior year, so I began running into people I hadn’t seen in three months. They’d would say, “You okay? You look really tired or something,” and, like the Ancient Mariner, I would stop them in their tracks and make them listen at great and dramatic length to my tale of woe.
Until someone said, “Hey, you got a pair of those glasses that change colors in the sun!” and I realized that the reason I looked really tired or something was that those glasses never did quite become fully transparent, though a crushed and broken heart was a far more interesting explanation.
To me, that is.
Certainly not to anybody else.
Ah well. I got over myself and soon, like this fellow in Speed Bump (Creators), my love life was back to normal.
I often showed up for class in college and even did a fair amount of the assigned reading, though most of what I learned in those years happened elsewhere, which makes me feel very sorry for kids who just spent two years isolated in their dorm rooms going to class on Zoom.
But the little I did learn formally makes me, like Dark Side of the Horse (AMS), extremely suspicious of dubious quotes from philosophers who rarely wrote about such things.
To start with, quoting Aristotle — in Greek or in translation — would require a Sunday strip and eliminating pictures of a horse in order to make room for the logorrhea in which he specialized. After which we could take up the probability of his passing along personal advice.
Which he did, if you believe Goodreads, but not if you believe Wikiquotes, which lists the glib remark under “Misattributed” and traces it, instead, to Elbert Hubbard, who not only said that, but also said “Every man should have a college education in order to show him how little the thing is really worth.”
With which I would agree except that, if nothing else, it might slow the flood of sentimental drivel being attributed to extremely unsentimental people like Aristotle.
Though at least this is only foolish. The really offensive part is when wipopo post noble-sounding drivel and attribute it to Confucius or to American Indians — sometimes actual Indians, sometimes just anonymous photographed Indians.
They seem to be under the impression that visible minorities are endless fonts of Eternal Wisdom, a belief based on the fact that they don’t know Confucius from Charlie Chan or Chief Sequoyah from Chief Thunderthud.
When my father quoted obviously stupid things, he would often add a phrase he lifted from the Phantom: “Old Jungle Saying,” but he was joking.
These folks are serious.
Meanwhile, I think the Lockhorns (KFS) may have set a new standard for “Too Smart For The Room.”
John Cage, by the way, also has a page at Wikiquote, though you’ll more easily find his words at Goodreads or possibly at Brainyquote, perhaps innocently misattributed:
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