CSotD: While we await Bull Run
Skip to comments
Man Overboard provides our only semi-political observation of the day, and I’m sure there will be more to come after Trump has faced Cannon fire. But let’s have a day of silly things while we wait.
Though silly is as silly does (or something) and Mr Boffo reminds me of the lessons I learned at 16 when I waited tables at Camp Lord O’ The Flies and made friends with the younger contingent of the Black kitchen workers.
They were southern college students who specifically recounted the passive resistance going on in the Movement — as seen in John Lewis’s March — but also demonstrated the passive resistance that had gone on in the Black community for ages.
In particular, the owner of the camp was quite a short man and he had long microfibers, so one day he was giving some instructions to the chef, who was forced to maintain a straight face while Oscar stood behind the boss, blowing on his microfibers so that they danced out in front of him.
A small moment among many that taught me how contempt could be made humorous as part of a larger system.
Alex is similarly on the topic of how those at the bottom of the pile deal with those at the top. The pandemic provided a chance for everyone to step back and take a look at what they’d been doing more or less on automatic pilot.
The result was a lot of early retirements of people who might have held out for another decade, and complete career changes for young folks, but, as with these women, it also brought some small things to light that were previously assumed.
Many companies, having done work-from-home during the pandemic, are now ordering free-range workers back into their cages but people have learned that they can be just as productive, perhaps even moreso, without being directly under the boss’s eye.
Watch for microfibers floating in the breeze.
And speaking of restarts, Maeve has hit a reflective moment over in Between Friends (KFS). I’ve often commented here about her ability to screw up promising relationships, which is much more amusing in a comic strip than it would be in real life.
In fact, it is one of those things that makes office work less productive than work-at-home, because, if you like the person who constantly falls into such traps, hearing about it is a genuine distraction and concern, while, if you don’t, it’s simply an ongoing annoyance.
In this case, I like Maeve and wish her the best and hope she finally gets herself straightened out, but, then again, I don’t know what Sandra Bell-Lundy would do with the character if that actually happened.
In any case, you can always count on Joe Dator to add a discouraging word. In this case, the humor is derived by the fact that kids don’t give up, but we too often reach a point in life where we look back and try to figure out when we did.
You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack, or, then again, you may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife, and, either way, you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”
It’s a helluva question.
You’d better have a helluvan answer.
I thought you were going to be silly
Well, okay, here’s something silly from Matt Golding, and it doesn’t make me think any deep thoughts whatsoever.
It simply reminds me of coming home from last year’s CXC/AAEC convention where I happened to be on a flight with Keith Knight, which made for pleasant company and was then extended because some nitwit tried to jam an oversized carryon into the luggage bin.
It got jammed so it wouldn’t go in and they couldn’t get it out and so they couldn’t close the bin and so we couldn’t take off until some maintenance people could be summoned to pry it out in about 90 seconds once they showed up, which took about an hour.
I hate people who bring steamer trunks onto the plane, and I hate gate attendants who let them do that.
However, there are worse things in life than being forced to spend additional time with a Gentleman Cartoonist.
I suppose spending too much time with a philosopher might not be much fun, but I suspect Emily Flake may have been forced to take a course she didn’t much enjoy, because Socrates is about as harmless and amusing as they come, and, if he had asked a question this way, it would have provoked an interesting conversation.
The gag is more like Plato, who managed to turn interesting questions into deep, complex, uninteresting explorations, which is on my mind because I just read an Atlantic story yesterday under the headline “Philosophy Could Have Been a Lot More Fun: Two recent biographies, of Plato and Diogenes, show the divergent path Western thought could have taken.”
Which you can’t read without a subscription because Atlantic doesn’t let subscribers share a few pieces the way smart marketers do, but trust me. It’s largely about how Diogenes (and Socrates) were accessible and interesting while Plato turned everything into homework.
I enjoyed Plato’s reminiscences of Socrates and I liked the Republic, but after that, yikes. The article also points out that while Diogenes spawned Stoicism, by the time it got to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, they’d managed to beat the fun and life out of that, too.
Diogenes could be a pretty objectionable person, but at least he wasn’t a pedant.
Speaking of people who could be pretty objectionable when they wanted to, both Mike Lynch and Michael Maslin have posted their memories of Sam Gross‘s funeral, which was apparently just as predictably fun and occasionally outrageous as you might have expected.
Maslin sums up the occasion:
He also provides a link to a video of the funeral, which he warns will not be up there forever. I’d feature it as today’s video but it’s a little over an hour long, so I’ll leave it to you to decide when to watch. When the obituary says a viewing is scheduled, this generally is not what they mean.
Diogenes would approve. Plato would want to analyze it.
Comments 8
Comments are closed.