CSotD: A mostly funny Friday
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Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having burned out on the politics of the day, and finding nothing in particular amusing me anymore, I thought I would flail about a little and devote Fridays to the funny parts of the comics.
I know that’s the wrong movie, but we don’t apologize in this business. We just explain, and it’s been awhile since I kept to my rule of not doing politics on Friday, but today I’m not in a political mood.
And yet Jonesy made me laugh and this cartoon certainly has a soupçon of politics about it, though not enough to make it exactly a political cartoon.
Soupçon was always pronounced “soup can” in my family, because my parents had come across a recipe in the Lebanon Daily News that called for “a soup can of lemon juice” in something, which proves that having a fully-staffed copy desk doesn’t solve every problem.
Anyway, this will be a Funnies Friday with a soup can of politics.
But we’ll start with an explanation that is not an apology, because yesterday I featured this Paul Berge cartoon in discussing Tuesday’s primary here in a different Lebanon, and this morning on his blog, I see that it was from 1988.
To which I would add that it’s a damn shame when a political cartoon is still so apt so many years later that someone can pop it up on the Intertubes and have it mistaken for new.
Less a case of “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” than of “Though you grind a fool like grain with mortar and a pestle, yet his folly will not depart from him.”
While on a similar note, Tom the Dancing Bug‘s riff on the Davos Fat Cat Seminar made me smile, with a funny take on a political topic.
But it also reminded me of …
… this David Horsey cartoon, whose date I can’t make out but which is obviously from W’s time in office.
As they say in the Lebanon where I was born rather than the one where I live now, “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” And perhaps not the latter at all.
Juxtaposition of the Somewhat Political
Sexual politics often fall somewhere between political politics and dark gallows humor, and here are two related takes on the fact that the two women most obviously involved in a movie about sexual politics were left out of the Oscar nominations.
You can choose whichever you prefer, but I’m more inclined towards Murphy’s dismissive response than Slyngstad’s burning anger.
I don’t think much of awards, but I consider Oscars particularly pointless.
My favorite example is 1996, when Braveheart walked away with nearly everything, beating out Apollo XIII, Babe, Il Postino and Sense and Sensibility, a tribute to what happens when you employ 10 billion extras, including many who have voting rights in the Academy.
Braveheart made an absolute dog’s breakfast of history, with a fellow in Roman era blue makeup and a tartan that wouldn’t exist for three more centuries, in love with a woman who would have been three years old, and here’s a lovely rant about a wretched film.
My own rant at the time was that they went for filth-as-authenticity. Gibson looked like a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who’d been given a loaded cigar, and I wondered why he didn’t take the razor he used to remain clean-shaven and cut through some of the tangles in his big hair.
My conclusion was that Babe would have won Best Picture if they hadn’t washed the pig.
But let’s ease back from overtly political comics with this combination of humor and wisdom from Alex. Not only is he bang-on about stocktrading, but he’s right about AI being a sign of the consensus.
That applies not simply to stocktrading, where the point is to stay ahead of the mob, but applies as well to art and everything else in which “consensus” and “mediocrity” are roughly equivalent, like “average” and “median.”
And after a long day of watching Law and Order reruns, what you need is Brewster Rockit (AMS)‘s take on good-cop-bad-cop. Although on Law and Order, that’s often what they mean by bad cop.
I’m waiting for the episode where the case falls apart because it turns out that Lenny Briscoe and Abbie Carmichael vacationed together on a Royal Caribbean Cruise using his credit card.
Tony Carrillo hits a tender spot with this F-Minus (AMS). It was easier to help your kids with homework when they learned arithmetic and the curriculum focused on memorizing multiplication tables and plowing through rows of mind-numbing addition and subtraction problems.
My kids were lucky and had a math teacher in high school who focused on how it all worked instead of just making them memorize and regurgitate proofs. If they got the right answer through the wrong means, he’d compliment them but then explain how that approach would fall apart when they hit the next level, and show them — and explain — a way that wouldn’t.
Having forgotten what little I’d been badly taught, I had no idea what they were doing. If they’d opened their math book and doves had flown out, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least.
Okay, this is a meme, not a cartoon, but Wendy Liebman is the genius who said that men living alone are like bears with furniture and she’s on target with this one, too.
I’ve still got half a roll of stamps from before I retired and I use maybe five in a busy year. Meanwhile, there are people selling Forever Stamps at a discount on the Internet, which I understand is a scam.
But it’s one I’ll never fall for!
Bliss (Tribune) on dog-dressing. My dog has four coats for bad weather, three of which she can wriggle out of in under 90 seconds. The fourth only goes on in single digit weather, because people ask why she isn’t wearing one.
She and I know, but it’s not worth arguing over with them.
So long, sweet lady
I often feature Phil Ochs songs, and here’s Melanie Safka doing one in a cover he particularly liked. It seems fitting now that they’re both gone.
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