CSotD: Funny Stuff and Meandering Thoughts

How better to welcome everyone back from Labor Day than with this Tom Toro panel?

I drove 275 miles each way Saturday to visit my mother for her 100th, though her birthday was actually Sunday. As it happened, the 550-mile round-trip wasn’t so bad and I assume most drivers had left on Friday and returned yesterday, because just driving down the Interstate to the dog park yesterday was more like Toro’s illustration.

I did see someone on Saturday whose pickup apparently wasn’t up to towing the trailer they had behind it. I’m not an automotive specialist, but when I see a vehicle stopped on the side of the road billowing flames and black smoke, I suspect something is wrong.

And probably something that blowing your horn won’t fix.

Specific to Toro’s cartoon, I have a theory that car horns should operate on a sort of bladder that is only good for a dozen honks and then has to be refilled for $50. Or maybe $150.

Or perhaps on the 13th honk, the car should begin billowing flames and black smoke.

More seasonal humor, this from Graeme Keyes. I think cartoonists are required to draw at least one cartoon every three autumns in which parents are thrilled to have their kids going back to school.

For my part, being the at-home parent through most of my kids’ younger years, I had a blast with them over the summer and was sorry when it ended, but I suppose for working couples it’s good to have daycare handled for most of the day.

But after school was when we really raised hell in my youth, and that hasn’t ended. One of my boys’ friends had a mother who would mark the level on her liquor bottles with a grease pen, which would have been a better idea if she didn’t leave the pen where her son could find it.

Though I suppose he could have done that all summer as well, and probably did.

Asher Perlman offers a realistic view of back-to-school and he’s got parenting so well nailed that I have nothing to add except that perhaps this explains the special bond between grandparents and grandkids.

Though it can also be explained by the theory that most grandparents have learned to embrace futility.

In the birth classes before our eldest was born, the doctor told us to be relaxed, because our kids would develop despite, not because of, our best efforts. We waved it off as the sort of wisdom people give you that you don’t have to believe, but it did sink in, about 25 years later.

There are, of course, times parents and teachers and doctors should pay attention and step in, and Crabgrass (AMS) has a story arc about one of those times. Story arcs in this strip tend to be quite extended, and I hope this one goes that way, too, because it’s not a topic to be handled and dismissed in six or a dozen episodes.

At one paper, my boss’s young daughter was dyslexic, but fortunately was able to resolve it mostly with a translucent colored plastic piece put over the page, though that wasn’t all it took. But most of what it took was someone realizing that she needed the help.

And as an editor, I had a reporter who was dyslexic. She knew it and I knew it and she was a helluva fine storyteller, so it worked out, except that I had to learn to edit visually, because sometimes she’d type, say, the word “ladder” and I had to think not of its meaning but its shape and change it to “better.”

To tell you the truth, it made editing her copy a lot of fun.

Andertoons (AMS) brings up one of my sore points, but in a way that made me laugh.

A few years ago, some Madison Avenue genius began dividing people into Boomers and Millennials and whatever, and I’ll concede that there are societal influences that work on various age groups.

On the other hand, gimme a break. Boomers stretch from Big Bill Broonzy to Elvis to Frankie Avalon to the Beatles and my older brother and I had little in common except a last name.

But as the shrink here says, people are eager to explain themselves by these marketing groups, and there’s very little difference between calling yourself a member of Gen X and a Sagittarian, except that when you identify as Gen X, you’re admitting that Madison Avenue has a grip on your soul.

I mean, I loved Davy Crockett, but I didn’t think I was Davy Crockett, nor was I shaped by the fact that I loved Bosco and that that was the drink for me.

Mort Drucker and Nick Megliola were a lot hipper than Faith Popcorn ever was. They were the true “Mad Men:”

And speaking of ways you shouldn’t be led into foolishness, Brewster Rockit (AMS) touches on the tendency to chase rational explanations down irrational paths.

There are all sorts of things we don’t understand, but, then again, there are things we didn’t used to understand but that we now sort of kind of do.

For a long time, we thought the Trojan War was a fairy tale, and then Heinrich Schliemann found the ruins and since then other evidence has been uncovered, none of which means the Greek gods took an active part in the combat.

Still, it did happen.

And we no longer believe alchemists can turn lead into gold, but, on the other hand, look at where they sit on the periodic table, to which the alchemists didn’t have access.

They weren’t entirely delusional.

I don’t know how the pyramids were built, in Egypt or Central America, or how Stonehenge was assembled.

But I’m pretty sure there’s an explanation that doesn’t involve little green men.

Similarly, I’m not hung up on finding rational reasons to live a good life, and this excerpt from a Sufi comic is a good example. It’s not necessary to believe in God or Allah or whoever in order to behave decently.

I don’t accept Sufi cosmology but I appreciate their values, just as I find comfort in Buddhism, Confucianism and Stoicism, none of which involve deities.

Or aliens, which are just atheist gods.