CSotD: Things that may amuse only me

I’ve been thinking of posting that, dammit, there are two O’s in “Mastodon,” but realized it would only result in people saying that they were opening accounts on Moostadon. And I had a lot of trouble finding this 1959 Peanuts strip because Google Images assumes — wisely — that people can’t spell and kept correcting “ggogles” to “goggles.”

Consarn it, I remember back when searching for “Mastadon” would have come up empty and we thought that, if nothing else, the Internet would teach people to spell.

At least they didn’t keep changing it to “Google.”

 

My first response to this Davey Jones piece was that, while Classics Illustrated did a relatively respectful job of compacting great literature, this seems like what would happen if Disney ever got the rights to Proust’s masterpiece.

From that point on, it would be how everyone would insist the story went. For instance, while Jones drew a pretty good madeleine, in the Disney version, it would be a Double-Stuf Oreo.

Then I drifted into a Proustian reverie, recalling how, while putting me through my senior year in college, my wife had an editorial-assistant job so blissfully undemanding that she was able to hit all her deadlines, fulfill her responsibilities with distinction, and still read Proust’s entire seven-volume novel at her desk, as well as “War and Peace.”

If I’d had another semester left, she might have gotten through “Ulysses.”

 

She was pregnant through most of my second semester, and, while it was possible in those days to do some kind of amniocentesis if you really needed to know what was going on in there, we didn’t have the easy spoilers alluded to in today’s Pearls Before Swine (AMS).

Howsoever, assuming you had faith in hippie voodoo, you could dangle your wedding ring over her belly on a thread and see if it went in a circle or swung back-and-forth. I don’t remember which indicated what, but we made several tries, which is related to that thing about how, if you flip a coin and it comes up heads five times, the odds on the sixth flip don’t change.

Still, it appeared to work, and, in any case, we got the final answer in the delivery room, which, as Rat suggests, mattered to us a great deal more than it did to anyone else, while, however accurate the ring, we weren’t desperate for a particular outcome anyway.

Speaking of temps perdu.

 

Betty (AMS) seems more realistic, or at least more positive, than most comic strips, and this week’s story arc reminded me of my own kids, because, while Junior was initially puzzled by his grandfather’s slide rule, he was not only willing to find out how it worked but then got into it.

Most kids in comic strips are shown as sullen, incurious and easily bored, and I wish there were no such kids in real life, but I have met some. However, while we took our kids to amusement parks, we also took them to museums and concerts and to restaurants where the food came on plates and you ate it with silverware.

Which brings this to mind: Yesterday, I mentioned my editing of Frank Linderman’s collection of Cree, Blackfoot and Ojibwe folk tales.

In checking his bona fides with the superintendent of schools at Rocky Boy Agency in Montana, she said that those stories, which contained moral and cultural lessons, were told around the fire in winter, when everyone was often confined indoors by the weather.

In the summer, she explained, adults modeled cultural values to children simply in the course of their daily lives.

Seems like a pretty good system.

 

Most of our friends in Colorado were people who had kids the same age as our kids, and that naturally led to the kids calling us by the same names their parents used, which seemed natural enough at the time, despite Lemont’s objections to the practice in Candorville (WPWG).

However, when I moved East some 15 years later, my sons’ teenaged friends called me “Mr. Peterson” and it took awhile for me to stop looking around for my father. Maybe Colorado was a lot less formal or maybe it was because these kids hadn’t known me when they were toddlers, but I guess it was more respectful or something.

Wotthell, I was still the grown-up they called when they’d locked themselves out of their car at a woodsie.

Different kind of respect.

 

Non Sequitur (AMS) brings a less cheerful memory, because a few years after our divorce, I started a men’s group, or tried to, for more recently divorced guys who were still processing the split.

We had a couple of good meetings, until a guy came in who seemed determined to get through it all by macho denial. He more or less hijacked things along the lines Wiley shows here, and, to my dismay, the others got sucked into his approach and it degenerated into a bull session.

Those who remember 1979’s film, “Starting Over,” mostly remember Candice Bergen’s hilariously awful singing, and there were a lot of funny sequences in the movie.

 

But it was, IMHO, Burt Reynolds’ best performance ever, playing a well-intentioned man in a lot of pain from his divorce, and if parts were hard to watch, I guess it’s not surprising that a lot of guys find dealing with it in real life even harder.

 

On a Lighter-Than-Air Topic

Il n’y a qu’un pas from Proust to Fontanelle, who gets credit for possibly originating the idea that “there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous,” which can be applied both to madeleines and fauxburgers, as seen in this Speed Bump (Creators).

I will confess that I have not tried pretend meat, in part because, while I am sensitive to the environmental impact of deforestation and cow farts, real meat is expensive enough and pretend meat costs even more.

Burger King offers pretend-Whoppers at the same price as real ones, but BK is, by far, the slowest fast food franchise, and endlessly idling in their drive-up cancels out any environmental benefits.

Mostly, if you’ll pardon my honesty, when I’ve tried vegeburgers and vegesausages and other morally superior soy by-products, the main result has been swapping bovine methane for my own.

It’s just impassible.