CSotD: Monday Merriment

This is apt to be a tough week for finding outstanding comics, given the flood of Roz-at-the-Pearly-Gates pieces already flooding the zone, plus the mandatory Thanksgiving cartoons.

Nothing against Roz, mind you. Great gal. But I can’t imagine anyone breaking any new ground and, so far, I haven’t seen anything surprising or worth featuring here. I’m tempted to do an entire day of Roz cartoons, but you’ll probably see enough of them on your own, so let’s have some humor today and I’ll figure out how to round out the week later.

Candorville (KFS) isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, but manages to make social commentary with a light touch, particularly in Lemont and Susan’s conversations.

Medicare doesn’t cover dental work, either, and the add-ons that do are tough on a limited budget. I’m fortunate to have diabetes to an extent that I don’t have to do anything about it except eat sensibly, the fortunate part being that Medicare therefore covers vision, given the likelihood of related problems.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a disease that will add dental to my benefits, nor did I ever have them on any company insurance. That’s too bad, because a lot of systemic infections and other health problems begin in the mouth, but, then, if the GOP gets control of the gummint next fall, we’ll likely lose even more coverage, so why carp over the current shortcomings?

Are you laughing yet?

The Good Timing Award goes to today’s Lockhorns (KFS), given that the Jets got smacked down 32-6 by the Buffalo Bills yesterday.

There are several other reasons to view the game as a disaster for Jets fans, but there is one positive note: It drops their season into the Dumpster to an extent that Leroy probably won’t get too het up over the rest of their games.

Juxtaposition of the Day

The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee — KFS

Frazz — AMS

One of the things I like about Edison Lee is that John Hambrock understands scansion. There are any number of cartoonists who try poetry and song parodies but can’t get them to flow properly, and competence in that shouldn’t stand out, but it does.

However, both Edison Lee and Frazz assumed normal November weather and, at least here in the Northeast, there hasn’t been any. We’ve had a couple of hard frosts and one snowfall that dumped an inch, and that’s pretty much been it.

Does this look like November 19 to you?

There are predictions of lousy weather for Wednesday and Thursday, but I’d be surprised if it produced the white-knuckle driving Frazz references. Just rotten enough to cancel the backyard football games.

Thanksgiving here tends to be a wild card, with some years buried under snow and some years not, but we had 60 degrees the other day and that’s just wrong. Having lived through The Ice Storm of 1998, I get nervous when it’s warm and shouldn’t be.

I’ll let They Can Talk stand in for all the cartoons about Thanksgiving turkeys, because I don’t want to pick on anyone in particular, but it’s been quite a few decades since very many people bought a live turkey and ate it, but cartoonists — most of whom surely think real turkeys come plucked, gutted and frozen in plastic — continue to depict the live birds facing death.

I’m also featuring They Can Talk because, until now, I thought snoods were a net that girls bundled their hair into and wore on the backs of their heads, but I doublechecked and, yes, it’s also the hangy-down thing on the turkey’s beak. The part underneath is the wattle.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

BC (AMS) is set in an indefinite anachronistic and distant past, so it’s fair to show him pursuing an elusive brown wild turkey rather than rounding up a rather stupid and passive white domestic bird.

But I question substituting lamb, because that’s where you really separate the old school farmers from the suburban dabblers. Most of the people I know with a small flock of backyard chickens keep them only for eggs, not meat, which is a good thing, because they name them.

Chickens aren’t even cute, at least as compared to lambs, and there is a rule that you do not name your food.

Don’t blame me; it’s been around at least since 1871:

I like Bub’s observation in today’s Betty (AMS), because I do think it’s like ordering out, except that, when you order out, the person who makes it knows what they’re doing. So it’s like ordering out, except you get to screw it up and you can’t send it back if you do.

And if you do know what you’re doing, then you’d probably want to select your own ingredients. The only benefit I can see is that, if you buy the box, you don’t end up with a bunch of expensive spices that you’ll never use before they lose their freshness.

Which is why I don’t try to make Indian food, but I wouldn’t know how to do it right anyway, even if I had all the ingredients.

My younger son once lived in a building with a lot of Indian families, and, when I’d walk down the hall to his apartment, the smell of their cooking was one cloud after another making me think to hell with him, I wanted to go visit them.

I hope their kids are hanging around the kitchen and paying attention, because, when they grow up and are out on their own, a bunch of ingredients aren’t going to assemble themselves.

Speaking of inherited expertise, Rhymes with Orange (KFS) taps into some vanishing knowledge, though perhaps the growth of Voc-Tec programs will save us from a world in which nobody knows how to fix anything.

My father-in-law was a tool-and-die maker whose basement was a workshop full of Various Things He Might Need Some Day. I’ll grant he had enough odd pieces of wood down there to build a second house, but the fact is, when something broke, he could not only fix it properly but often without a trip to the hardware store.

Fortunately, my kids hung around his basement a lot, because I couldn’t have taught them a tenth of what he did.