CSotD: Humpday Humor

Loose Parts (AMS) hits at a good moment. I tried a hole-in-the-wall pizza place yesterday, and when I paid, got one of those screens. I don’t believe in tipping counterhelp and you’re not supposed to tip the owner, so I hit “No tip.” Again. Again. Again. Finally.

“I’ll bet the 25% one goes right through,” I said, and he laughed.

He’s Greek, not God, and I realize conservatives can’t tell one from the other, but I’ve had God’s pizza before. It’s way too small and it doesn’t come with toppings. This pizza was absolutely Dionysian.

Another personal reflection, this one sparked by Off the Mark (AMS). I had a house with two picture windows facing the street and not a very long setback, so I put in a cedar hedge, which I kept trimmed to six feet, so that I didn’t provide an evening floorshow and so I wouldn’t have to sit there during the day watching everybody drive past.

When I sold the house, the first thing the new owners did was tear out the hedge. I guess some of us are born to show business.

BTW, Mark Parisi gets points for a turtle joke that isn’t based on them rattling around inside their shells.

My friend Howard thanks you.

Speaking of shells, F Minus (AMS) offers a shell-based joke which I insist is based on confirmation bias despite the paranoid conspiracy theories — mostly surrounding Alexa and Siri — about electronic devices listening in on your conversations.

It probably helps if you’ve gone through a pregnancy, because, whether you are the impregnator or the impregnattee, from the moment of conception, you start seeing pregnant women everywhere.

It is entirely an illusion, no different than if you talk about clown-made shell art or anything else. Well, okay, there can be exceptions. I finally saw my first Tesla rolling garbage can yesterday, and we’ve been talking about those for months. There just aren’t very many of them out there for you to take notice of.

I don’t know if living alone makes it easier or harder to disprove the idea that Alexa is spying on me, because I don’t say much that isn’t directed towards the dog. Best I can tell you is that I don’t get a lot of advertisements for walks and car rides.

Of course, I do look things up online, at which point I’m baring my soul to the marketing world. Even using DuckDuckGo, which means I have to sign in at Amazon, they know before I do that I was recently looking at cameras.

If you want privacy, you’ll have to go off the grid entirely. At which point your friends will all start seeing ads for weirdos.

But, although Will Santino did make me laugh, weirdness is a topic we’re not going to address until we do political cartoons.

However, Rhymes With Orange (KFS) dropped a deeply political cartoon yesterday.

Having spent several years covering real estate development, I can tell you that wheeler-dealers — especially in the commercial sector — do everything on the golf course except drag along a desk. The office is for signing paperwork; the deals themselves are consummated out on the course.

In fact, one of the few facts that emerged from Whitewater — most of what emerged from that colossal partisan nothingburger being non-factual — was that Bill Clinton dropped by somebody’s office while he was out jogging. It was portrayed as scandalous because he was in shorts and a T-shirt instead of suit-and-tie.

If you buy a new home, it’s governed by all sorts of rules. But when they made the deal for the land on which that home and 300 others would be built, it was done by handshakes on the seventh hole. Commercial development is a full-contact sport with no rules: “The art of the deal.”

Back when I was writing for a residential real estate insider magazine, my publisher asked me to explore the potential for a commercial publication that would list available office buildings, rent per square foot and so forth.

When I brought it up with a commercial contact, he burst into laughter, because commercial development is the wild, wild west. They can’t list prices and conditions because there aren’t any.

A major point being that, at least back in the ’80s, women were not allowed to be members of the country clubs where these deals were made, nor were very many minorities offered membership.

They could play golf as guests, but give me a break if you think that allowed them to play the game that was really being played.

I liked the cartoon, but I didn’t laugh.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Jonesy

Wilbur Dawbarn

If you didn’t read what I said about that Rhymes With Orange, you won’t be able to figure out why I considered these two a matched pair, but of course they are.

Incidentally, the term “housing estate” is fairly fluid in the UK, where Jonesy and Dawbarn are from. It can mean what it sounds like to an American, a posh suburban development, and that was what I thought a couple from Belfast were telling me they’d lived in.

But it can also mean government subsidized housing, the kind that, if it’s in a Catholic ghetto, Orange mobs might decide to firebomb, which is how you’d end up emigrating to the US and talking to a guitarslinger in what you’d have called a pub back home.

No worries. No matter how meek the residents, the developers will make a tidy profit.

Good thing I’m not doing politics today, innit?

Going back to golf — which we never really left — Daddy’s Home (Creators) struck a responsive chord because, while I don’t play golf, it falls into a category along with tennis and billiards of sports whose televising puzzles me.

I’m not much of a tennis player, but I was once a decent pool player, so I can appreciate tennis and billiards on TV.

Still, I’d much rather be playing those sports than watching someone else play them.

We shouldn’t identify with Rat too often in Pearls Before Swine (AMS), but going to weddings is a lot like watching tennis on television.

I’ll still watch, but there’s a 1,000-mile limit on any wedding in which I won’t be one of the two principal players.