CSotD: Welcome to the World of Amusement
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(Thank you, Clifford Berryman)
Pearls Before Swine (AMS) makes an excellent point, though there’s more to it. If you go back half a century, the evening network news was half an hour, but so was the local news and there was another half hour before bedtime, for a total of 90 minutes.
Drop back a century and broadcasting in general was just getting under way, but newspapers were thicker and more full of news, so people were still well inundated.
However, news was far less immediate, both in the sense of being at least 24 hours old and in the sense of providing few realistic images, aside from newsreels at the movies.
In discussing the assassination and prolonged death watch of James Garfield in 1881, I would remind kids that, for most people, keeping up with it might mean checking the blackboard outside the newspaper office, but with nearly 3/4 of the population living in rural areas, that might only happen once or twice a week.
OTOH, those folks lived in a world in which a sniffle on Monday could lead to a funeral on Thursday.
They didn’t require trigger warnings to avoid freaking out over what news did get through to them.
Speaking of my editorial cartooning lectures, Big Nate (AMS) has been writing food reviews for his school cafeteria, which reminds me of an odd moment.
I would talk about insightful humor versus stereotypical jokes, and would say that anybody could make jokes about cafeteria food, but the kids themselves could make much better jokes about things at their school that nobody over 17 even knew was going on.
Kid in the front row says, “Actually, our cafeteria food is pretty good.”
Shut up, kid.
But he was right. I usually ate in the cafeteria when I visited schools, and most of them were pretty good, though I remember one place where lunch was rice with a thin Velveeta gruel dribbled over it. I asked the kids at my table if it was typical and they sighed and said yes.
About the time I was ending my years doing that, budgets began getting cut, school kitchens were being shut down and the kids started getting airplane food: Bland, nasty stuff extruded in a centralized kitchen at district HQ and rewarmed for their dining pleasure.
Some humor never goes out of style.
Speaking of perennial humor, Reality Check (AMS) picks up on a complaint that I not only don’t share but feel is silly, given all the self-service innovations of the past few decades.
I remember, for instance, Vance Packard, an oft-cited expert on marketing, saying that self-serve gas pumps wouldn’t catch on, because women would find the process entirely too phallic.
I think the problem with self-check is that while there may be three prices of gas at each pump, and while ATMs have to be able to count deposits, the number of things they need to be able to deal with are quite limited, while self-checks have many things (A) to identify and (B) which have to be programmed in, mostly at local stores.
Meanwhile, (A) unemployment is at 3.9% and stores constantly advertise for workers, so they’re not laying off anyone who can breathe and show up, and (B) the self-checks at most grocery stores are more popular than standing in line for a live clerk.
My favorite grocery has one person watching a dozen self-checks and things run quite smoothly, while the lines of Luddites at the tended registers don’t appear to move much at all. (Maybe it’s because of all the price-checks the clerks have to call for.)
I suspect there is a Yelp! factor at work, by which I mean that — as with the on-line review site — people who hate self-check make far more noise than people who prefer it.
For another modern gag, Non Sequitur (AMS) suggests we might be better off getting rid of crypto specialists, the main joke being that pretend money undermines the real economy and seems like a pyramid scheme, with the extra factor of advancing climate change by overworking computers.
The unspoken joke being that it continues the tradition of sacrificing virgins.
Maybe that’s just my take.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I remember running around the neighborhood, including in and out of the forest, at eight years old.
Some families had specific ways of calling us for supper: Stuart’s dad would honk the car horn, though my family had older siblings to send looking for me. And when my kids were little, I’d give a piercing whistle like a boatswain’s pipe that carried for blocks.
I don’t think life is more dangerous today, although (see Pearls strip above) we’re more aware of potential danger and accordingly either more cautious or more paranoid.
As it happens, Carolyn Hax had a wonderful, frightening letter the other day from a woman who used apps to track her kids and her husband, but when the oldest kid went to college, she disabled his app and just tracked him with air tags.
I’m using one of my WashPo gift articles for the month so you can marvel over it yourself, because it’s delightfully disturbing, not so much because she does it but because only youngest child bothered to object.
As did Carolyn, which is why she makes the big bucks. (We’ll get into what’s going on at the Washington Post some time when we’re talking politics. It’s also pretty horrifying.)
Zits (KFS) seemed to be opening up a new term the other day, but the payoff in the story arc was that Mom is always right and Jeremy never listens.
Well, okay, whatever. Still, I think it was worth observing that a tendency to dispatch unwanted, unnecessary advice does not require a Y-chromosome.
Maybe the Zits Guys made a good point: The remedy is not to get all bent out of shape but to simply ignore it.
Guys have done that for years.
I suspect that this bear in Speed Bump (Creators) needs a biology lesson, since AFAIK nearly all cubs are born in winter, though blackies doze rather than truly hibernating.
But it gives me an opening to plug our local bear rehab center, whose Facebook page is a never-ending parade of cuteness.
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