CSotD: And another thing …

Good timing award to Tommy Siegel for dropping this cartoon just before Taylormania went from fascination to exploitation.

The fascination was just kind of silly. As I’ve pointed out before, Taylor Swift has been a very big deal among a very big fanbase for a very long time. The original Swifties are well out of college and may have little swooning pre-adolescent daughters of their own.

Which makes having discovered her in the past year a sign of your own unhip detachment from what’s going on.

So anyway, when I did my usual Google News check as part of my morning briefing I saw two iterations of the same story, headlined “Taylor Swift’s Whole Dress Comes Off In Eras Tour Wardrobe Malfunction.”

Which I knew couldn’t possibly be true, but it did make me wonder what on earth was behind such an obvious clickbait lie. Turns out her microphone got hung up in her dress, so instead of ducking off-stage for a costume change, she doffed it, revealing …. the outfit she was wearing under it.

So now you don’t have to give the bloodsucking gossips a click.

Elsewhere in the world of adults thinking about young people, we have this

Juxtaposition of the Day

Free Range — Creators

First Dog on the Moon

I’m certainly in agreement that kids are too addicted to their phones at too young an age, though the devices are one symptom, not the disease.

If parents and schools can’t figure out a way to limit phones, it ought to make you wonder how much else has slipped out of their control.

For instance, how often did those parents encourage their kid to shut off the TV, put down the phone and go outside before his tech-addiction became an issue? Did they ever go along with him? Did they eat dinner at a big table and have what are called “conversations” during dinner, or did everyone eat in their laps, engaged with media instead of each other.

I used to see bumperstickers that said, “Don’t just do something. Stand there!” and it was good advice. I worry less about specifics like phones and ear buds and more about a growing inability to be alone and just daydream without some activity as a crutch.

Meanwhile, not only do I agree with First Dog and thank him for the laugh, but I join in his horror that News Corp — Rupert Murdoch’s empire — should be publicly worrying about how children develop.

As he suggests, they haven’t shown a whole lot of concern for anyone’s mental health in anything else they’ve done.

Wallace the Brave (AMS) brings back memories of doing homework on the bus, which I guess puts me more in Amelia’s camp than Spud’s, because not having my homework done was a pretty regular feature of my education.

I didn’t copy from others because I was aware that identical errors — or identical spunk — would be a dead giveaway. But I did help mastermind a bit of a system that one might almost perhaps believe was less than forthright.

Sophomore year, we had an English teacher none of us liked, and so none of us performed well for. She became angry at how few people were doing the reading and began giving us 10-question multiple choice quizzes each day on the previous night’s reading.

So we took turns having one of us read the assigned story and then the next day that person would sit towards the front of the room and touch his forehead for (A) and his ear for (B), etc.

It worked really well until Randy forgot it was his turn. We all flunked the day’s test and decided to abandon our cunning plan.

Fortunately, as with most programs of reform, she also lost interest in the project and the quizzes ended.

Speaking of things you learn the hard way, xkcd brings back my first auto accident, or, at least, the first one that was my fault. And it was only my fault, the cop explained, because I trusted the guy who waved me to go, whereupon I T-boned a car in the far lane.

Nobody was hurt, but it taught me that, as xkcd says, polite people are trying to kill you.

It was 52 years ago, but I’ve thought of it a lot recently, because now I drive a normal-sized car and everybody else seems to drive Bulbousmobiles that you can’t see around.

Though I’ve noticed a lot of what I’d call Morris Minors lately, though I guess Morris doesn’t make them anymore. But their advantage is that, if you’re in one of those, I think you can probably see under the Bulbousmobiles.

A college friend had a Triumph TR3, which was really sharp-looking. TR3s never got in accidents because they would only run about four days a year.

Today’s Lola (AMS) pings a particular cartooning gripe: She forgot to tell him that the string needs to be taut.

I blame the comics publishers. There was a time when comic books had filler pages that explained how to make tin-can telephones and how to play cat’s cradle and how to loop a piece of thread through a button and make it whir and buzz between your hands.

When they weren’t ripping you off with crappy little Civil War soldiers that were barely three-dimensional.

I like Andertoons (AMS) and I’ve recently gone on record as knowing that neither Timmy nor Jeff ever fell in the well, so we’ll just accept the popular delusion and move on.

But speculation against fact requires that the caption read “If Lassie were a cat.” Otherwise, it’s past tense.

Even meme-makers know this.

At least the meaning is clear, even if the grammar is garbled.

So it bothers me, but not half so much as editors — editors, ferchrissake — who don’t know “might have” from “may have,” an error, for instance, that completely changes the meaning of an accident report:

“His seat belt might have saved him.” The fatally injured man wasn’t wearing it.

“His seat belt may have saved him.” He was wearing it and lived, though nobody knows if that’s why.

And I hate those signs that say “Drive like your kids live here” because I agree with the request, but it’s “Drive as if your kids lived here.”