CSotD: Funny But Not Necessarily Silly
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This Carpe Diem (KFS) wouldn’t be funny if everybody lined up their cars properly in parking lots, and so the idea that aliens would visit and start things off by being annoying gets a laugh, though perhaps the nitwits who park across the lines won’t get it.
And then there are the overthinkers like me, for whom the punchline raises the issue of how old you have to be to know that “scumbag” has a vulgar etymology, mentioned but not elaborated on at Wikipedia and apparently unknown to the good and well-behaved people at Merriam-Webster and Cambridge, though I note that Merriam-Webster lists “schmuck” among its synonyms and that’s not a very nice word, either.
Well, we’ve seen fart jokes and suchlike in the funny pages for quite a while now, and I about fell out of my chair when Potsie Weber told someone to sit on it, and when Bob and Doug McKenzie spoke of hosers right there on the television.
It reminds me of a clipping my father sent me when I was in college, an essay in which someone asked, if you say “#&%@$” in casual conversation, what does it leave for you to say to a flat tire on the George Washington Bridge at rush hour?
If you knew me back in those days, you wouldn’t think I’d be so easily shocked today, but at least now you know why I avoid driving over the George Washington Bridge: I’ve run out of things to say there.
Meanwhile, today’s Frazz (AMS) also brings me back to college, because this is the time of year when we were tempted to have Class in the Grass, which everyone but me seemed to enjoy a great deal. For my part, I marvel at the fact that it was another 25 years or so before I realized that there was such a thing as Adult ADD and that I had it.
I should have guessed back then, because I had enough trouble maintaining focus within four walls. Take me outside amid the birds and flowers and airplanes and people walking past and I was hopeless.
Okay, one more college story, this one sparked by Candorville (KFS). I had a professor emeritus who was one of the most popular people on campus, in part because he had a vast store of wisdom compiled over a very long life.
He told us of a friend — this would have been in the 1920s or 30s — who took a job teaching on a Hopi reserve. Darrin Bell jokes about this, but the fellow sent a half dozen kids to the blackboard, instructing them to solve a math problem, then turn around and raise their hands to see who was first.
But while this was a routine activity in the outside world, it was deeply against Hopi culture, so the kids watched each other out of the corners of their eyes, waiting for the slowest one to finish the problem, whereupon they each drew a final digit, then spun as one and all raised their hands simultaneously.
Thus the teacher became the student.
Dr. Nutting always insisted that he was just there to learn from us.
Shifting up a very few years, this Barney & Clyde (Counterpoint) reminded me of my brief career selling the Kirby Classic. I came aboard too late to qualify for the big incentive, a trip to Las Vegas, but it was a brilliant move by management, because all their top sales people went and had a great time and then came home desperately needing to sell more vacuum cleaners.
One of the fellows got lucky the first night and made a four-figure score at the tables, then wisely spent the rest of the weekend in his hotel room eating room service and watching TV.
But as they were checking out, he decided to have one more wander over to the bright lights, just in time to come home desperately needing to sell more vacuum cleaners.
BTW, our modus operandi was the “free demonstration” and a set of steak knives, and we’d get a laff when a wife would agree, saying “My husband is a salesman, so you won’t have much luck.”
We knew we were in like Flynn, because salesmen are the biggest suckers on the planet.
Wotthehell, we were all sufficient proof of that.
Speaking of those who hornswoggle themselves, here’s an update on the saga of mining baroness Gina Rinehart, who demanded that an unflattering portrait — satirized here by John Shakespeare — be removed from Australia’s National Gallery.
She may be among the world’s richest women, but she certainly isn’t among the smartest. As Shakespeare indicates and common sense would predict, the uproar she launched was vain in both senses of the word, and has drawn crowds to view Vincent Namatjira‘s exhibition.
Another follow-up, this about Joe Heller’s piece, which follows my remarks two days ago about summer and kids and parents.
We were lucky in the late 70s/early 80s, because we had a three-bedroom house with a market value of about $70,000, and then-wife was a professional who earned enough that I could stay home with the kids and write.
We were adjacent to a neighborhood largely made up of professors and attorneys, so there were plenty of at-home parents and therefore plenty of at-home kids to play with throughout the summer.
Our boys spent the summer goofing around with their friends, playing with the dogs and making their own fun. They’d do a two-week crafts or sports camp, but for variety, not as daycare.
It was privileged then. It is impossible now. According to Zillow, that cute little bungalow is currently worth $548,200.
Today, even if a parent can afford to take a few years off to be home, there aren’t enough other kids hanging around to get up a game of tag, never mind baseball.
Yes, they’re overscheduled. So are their parents.
If you aren’t raising youngsters with a $548,200 mortgage hanging over you, you don’t get it.
This Bliss (Tribune) brought all sorts of sea chanties to mind. I settled on this one: When a homeward-bound crew had rowed through the horse latitudes and picked up the trade winds, the sailors would say that the women had hold of the towline and were hauling them home.
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