CSotD: They’re funny ’cause they’re true!
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I got a chuckle out of John Auchter’s cartoon, though he’s being a bit of an Upper Peninsula snob, if such a thing could exist. (Be glad I didn’t run this at the end and pair it with The Second Week of Deer Camp.)
He’s right that those who live near the Canadian border, as I did in Northern New York for a quarter of a century, see the Northern Lights with some frequency. OTOH, younger son, who was with me in Plattsburgh for about a decade and is now in Minnesota, was blown away by the latest display despite having seen it several times before.
What Auchter’s cartoon also brought to mind was that my grandfather was a Yooper who worked the mines when he was 16, along with a number of Cousin Jacks, Cornishmen who came from the mining country there.
One night they were waiting to go below and one of the Cousin Jacks observed the full moon and said how big and bright it seemed, not like at home.
“That’s because we’re so much farther north,” another said, and my grandfather said, “No, you’re not. Cornwall is farther north than we are.”
They argued back and forth until the captain promised to settle it. The next night he came back and said, “The lad is right.”
A year or two later, the mine superintendent and school superintendent put their heads together and found “the lad” a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin to study mining engineering, so as not to lose another promising kid down the shaft.
This Pardon My Planet (KFS) brought to mind a time, eight years ago, when I was preparing my family for my cancer treatment.
After describing what was going to happen and adding a little Stoic philosophy, I told them that, if it all went south, I did not want my obit to contain a cliche about my “courageous fight” but, rather, to report that I had gone down whining and complaining all the way.
Damn surgeon robbed the world of what I promise would have been a highly amusing obit, given how many I had to write in my newsroom days.
Though once papers started charging for obituaries, it was out of my hands. That was a good thing, because then families could say whatever they wanted and we’d take the money and print what the funeral home sent us.
We had one that said angels had flown down and carried the fellow off to heaven. I told the funeral director that, if it happened again, I wanted him to get a photo.
But we printed it. Whining and complaining all the way.
Elsewhere on the medical beat, Barry Deutsch offers this accurate critique of what happens to large people when they go to the doctor, regardless of what brought them there.
I lost a bunch of weight eight years ago. First they took out my cancerous bladder and resected a portion of my intestines to create a substitute plumbing system. Then I came back a few weeks later and they took out my gall bladder.
It was a pretty good weight loss system, but I still needed to lose more and, having lost my appendix earlier, I was running out of optional organs.
Tonsils and spleens don’t weigh enough to be worth removing.
Matt Davies reminds us that whatever happens when you go to the doctor assumes you actually get to do so in the first place.
The same thing seems to be happening to medicine that is happening to everything else: Hospitals are being bought up by venture capitalists, who insist on timing doctors to make sure they don’t waste time finding out what’s really wrong with their patients, and — having instituted conveyor belt medicine — that hospitals don’t employ enough people to keep things rolling along.
If you disagree, I’m willing to discuss it. I’m currently booking arguments for November.
Pooch Cafe (AMS) brings up another change in the world: I’m surprised magazines still exist at all.
I have a PO box which I visit three or four times a week so I can clear out the junk mail. I used to get checks there, but now everyone pays by direct deposit, so, unless I’ve ordered something by mail, having the box is both futile and increasingly expensive.
I get a few magazines as a bonus for subscribing to their on-line editions. I take them home because they’re magazines and one should, but I’ve already seen anything in them I wanted to read.
I’m not sure “bonus” is the word I was looking for.
I’m not against print, but the last two papers I worked for were printed elsewhere, and part of the fun of editing had been watching issues cascade off the press with your words and photos in them.
Speaking of dubious bonuses, I subscribe to a number of Substacks and tip sheets, and when I saw that Ruth Marcus was launching one, I hit the button to subscribe and then came upon this:
Love ya, Ruth, but tell your marketing department I said to bring their shine box over here and I’ll personalize their experience.
Clearing junk out of my inbox is no more fun than cleaning out my PO box, and I particularly hate garbage text messages that ping just like the ones that matter.
Tank McNamara (AMS) points out how technology has ruined sports. Instant replay and other technical advances have revealed the fact that referees are not God, and that real life, even in a stadium, is subject to all sorts of glitches and mishaps.
Technology has convinced fans that refs and umps are part of some massive conspiracy, perhaps concocted in the basement of a pizza parlor built on a slab.
When instant replay challenges were first proposed, legendary NFL ref Tommy Bell said he’d go along with it if he could look at the tape and then call all the holding he found.
Good man, Tommy Bell.
Lola (AMS) reminded me of summer love, but also of the pretentious, sophomoric faux-eloquence I once mistook for good writing:
Fitzgerald kept notebooks of clever lines to randomly drop into his stories. Hemingway did not. End of discussion.
Besides, I remember summer romance. If it wasn’t true love, that was hardly the point.
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