CSotD: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

In such troubled times, a good laugh is of great value, and Fiona Katauskas gives up on ruminating over the true meaning of woke and the false meanings of woke and settles, instead, on the utter meaninglessness with which the dorks have endowed it.

And the flatulent pride with which they parade their ignorance.

This is not a caution against wrestling with pigs but, rather, against banging your head on a stone.

Anyway, it make me laugh.

Leaving politics aside but sticking with the topic of simple insights, I don’t know why the point in this Moderately Confused (AMS) hadn’t occurred to me before, but it occurred to Jeff Stahler for which I am grateful.

When I was the age of that young lad, we looked forward to the 60 mile drive to Watertown, not because there was any pleasure in trying on school clothes but because, in addition to seeing a movie, the trip would include a stop at Woolworths where we could spend our allowances on cheap toys and whatnot.

FW (Franklin Winfield) Woolworth was a local boy, born about 10 miles south of Watertown, and his stores were the first five-and-dimes. And don’t read this if you despise self-check stations, but he was also a pioneer in the practice of putting the merchandise out where people could select it themselves, which saved him the cost of hiring shop girls to bring it out for inspection.

Yesterday, I heard on Wait Wait that the rich folks are starting to shop at Dollar Stores because they’ve figured out that much of the merchandise is the same as in their chi-chi stores, and only the prices have been lowered.

It being only 144 years since FW opened his doors, this would count as being “fast on the uptake.”

But, as Stahler suggests, they missed the five-and-dime phase and I suppose my grandkids, grandkids will spend their allowances at Sawbuck City.

I don’t particularly envy the wealthy, but there’s a lot of that sort of thing going around, and Liam Simonelli is not the only cartoonist castigating the media for obsessing over Billionaires in Peril for the past week.

Which makes me suspect he does not remember when Baby Jessica fell down the well. She was 18 months old then and is 37 today, which kind of spoilers the story, but the world did stop to watch the efforts to drill a parallel hole and get across to the trapped toddler.

You may trust me when I tell you that there is only one plutocrat in this photo and it is not Baby Jessica nor any of her folks.

Nor were any of those kids on the Thai soccer team wealthy when they were trapped in a cave and the world stopped to watch them being heroically rescued, the only billionaire involved being Elon Musk, whose promise to help was praised by one of the cavers, saying, “He can stick his submarine where it hurts. … It just had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like.”

Okay, maybe not “praised.”

In any case, the ocean floor south of St. John’s is already littered with the remains of rich folks, and, as Glen LeLievre suggests, their spirits may be watching in horror as a few more join them.

But if you wish to debate the class issue in all this, it’s not about how much attention was paid to the frantic efforts to find and recover the Titan but, rather, to two questions:

1. Whether Greek authorities let that Pakistani ship founder for hours before mounting a half-hearted rescue and
2. Why the rest of the world paid so little attention while something might have been done for those people.

It’s a question for the people who make the decisions about when to dispatch rescue crews and the people who dispatch reporting crews, since the news folks are supposed to monitor the first responders.

But I suppose impoverished refugees dying is hardly news, is it?

Juxtaposition of Breaking/Broken News

(Andy Davey)

(David Rowe)

Yesterday, I wrote, of cartoonists and commentators, “I can hardly wait to see how they divide up whatever is happening in Russia right now between Putin and his hired gun.”

What a difference about 15 hours can make, which is the time between Andy Davey’s posting and David Rowe’s. And we’re still going to have to wait god knows how long to find out what that was all about, because the only thing we can be sure of now is that we’re not getting a straight answer.

I think we all would have agreed with Davey’s vision, until it suddenly collapsed. I will praise him for getting on the story quickly, and I’m sorry his cartoon became so quickly — to borrow Ron Ziegler’s term — inoperative.

It’s part of the collapse of print that we need to be fast and we need to be accurate and there are only so many times that can work in coordination with the printed page. For my part, I hate paying for an article I read online 12 or 24 hours ago.

Rowe, with the advantage of having seen the coup fall apart, was able to make a statement that is both insightful and relatively safe. Those bears may eat Putin, and, at this point, it’s hard to imagine that they won’t, but it’s likely the cartoon will not become immediately inoperative.

We’ll see who’s laughing a few months from now. Or maybe next week. The dark earth of Mother Russia makes it a funny place where nothing ever happens except when it does.

Arlo and Janis (AMS) point out without pointing it out that, if I were still in Plattsburgh, I’d have encountered a whole lot of Quebecers at the beach on Lake Champlain this weekend, la Fête de la St Jean Baptiste being particularly dear to their hearts, though it’s only a month before the two-week vacance in which construction shuts down and everyone else pretty much takes off with it.

Quebecers take their holidays seriously which is probably why they have so many. I find it instructive that most American veterans show up for work on November 11. If they bend the knee on that one, should we be surprised that American workers have so few days off?

Play that game with the Quebecers and the bonfires wouldn’t just be cheerful celebrations.