CSotD: Seasons Change and So Should You
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Just a quick reminder from Madam & Eve that not everyone is starting to anticipate winter. We’ve just hit apple-picking season up here and winter can’t be far behind, but for those on the opposite side of the Equator, it’s nearly spring.
I’ll be pleased when the pollen ends up here, and, oddly enough, happy if the snow flies, since it increasingly doesn’t anymore.
However, assuming it will, I’d appreciate it if my friends in South Africa and Australia and such places would refrain from posting idyllic pictures of sun-soaked Table Bay and the Gold Coast.
Not that I wouldn’t wish First Dog on the Moon a happy spring and summer. They’ve had some truly wretched weather down in Tasmania this winter.
And he’s right about meteorologists freaking out, because they’re doing it up here, too. The apples are abundant but the monarch butterflies are not and we’re hoping our odd weather has simply put them off schedule and they’ll soon start popping up in larger numbers.
Tommy Siegel’s frog suggests we should just relax and not blame it on anybody.
On a somewhat more realistic level, however, Speed Bump (Creators) reminds us to make sure we stop and smell the roses.
In fact, stop and smell everything.
In this Mr. Boffo cartoon about never ever giving up, Joe Martin appears to be giving up on appealing to young readers.
I got a chuckle out of it, but I was 10 years old when The Millionaire went off the air in 1960, and I doubt I’d remember the name “John Beresford Tipton” if I’d been any younger.
And even if a slightly younger person recognized the name, people 65 and older make up about nine percent of the world’s population. If I were a cartoonist, I might try to cast a wider net.
Then again, I’m sure people 65+ make up a lot more than nine percent of newspaper readers. Sigh.
Age aside, I am all in favor of cartoonists making a few demands on readers, and I’m fine with the Argyle Sweater (AMS) riffing on Romulus and Remus, because people ought to know who they were and that they were suckled, if not entirely raised, by a wolf. And that Rome was not built in a day.
Two more points:
One is that educated people should also recognize Anansi and the Monkey King and Coyote as folkloric characters from other than European culture.
The other is that I assume, since Romulus and Remus were folkloric and their story is not historically accurate, that atheists would conclude that the city of Rome doesn’t exist, nor was there ever anything called “the Roman Empire.”
But I digress. On purpose.
Cultural literacy, however, should not prevent you from laughing at this Jonesy cartoon. No, ostriches don’t really hide their heads in the sand. But that’s okay, because Mr. Prendergast’s secretary is lying.
And, yes, ostriches do have secretaries. Not all of them, obviously.
Just the really important ones.
The Buckets (AMS) explores the depths of what is clearly fiction and what you are required to believe, and I particularly like the father’s explanation at the end.
Speaking of things you have to be old to remember, about 60 years ago, Merle Miller wrote a book that was indeed based on a true story which he called “Only you, Dick Daring! or, How to write one television script and make $50,000,000, a true-life adventure” that was an insider view of all the things that can happen to an idea as it goes from authorial inspiration to final production.
The book is out of print, but this wonderfully readable 1964 review from Time sums it up: “Miller’s book is a vivid and often hilarious account of how TV’s butchers can change any script into hamburger.”
I heard a similar story from a TV writer in 1970, which was shortly before Joseph Heller said of plans to film Catch-22:
I don’t believe that, by the way, but, as it turns out, Mike Nichols made a very good adaptation, and it was fiction in the first place anyway.
Based on adaptations I’ve seen of real events of which I had knowledge, I’d suggest that by the time it escapes into the public — as TV, movie or whatever — your best bet is to either assume it’s been fictionalized or do what journalists are supposed to do and find a second source.
As the editors’ rule goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
I never had a midlife crisis. Instead, I got divorced at 34, which is much the same thing except that it doesn’t allow you to sit around wondering if things are going the way they should. It’s more a matter of reality grabbing you by the lapels and slapping you in the face screaming “Snap out of it!”
But I had a long conversation with my dad when he was 49 and miserable because the company he’d pinned his life to was being taken over by a vulture capitalist intent on wringing out the money and destroying the people. He took it for another year and then threw in the towel, changed careers and became happy again.
So I disagree with Adam’s wife, Laura: It’s never too late. And I’m agreeing with Clyde. If you’ve gotta ask the question, you already know the answer.
As for Katy, it’s too early for her to have a crisis, but if she starts wondering now, she may be able to avoid it entirely.
As it happens, I was just remembering one place I worked to which this Reply All (Counterpoint) applied.
Almost as soon as I got there, I knew it had been a horrible mistake, but I had to stick around until they fired me so I could collect unemployment while I looked for a better job.
The things I said in the department head meetings weren’t stupid, but saying them probably was. Being there definitely was.
I was out of work for nearly a year, but the next gig was a blast and lasted a decade.
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