I love the first panel of this Wallace the Brave (AMS) and I love Amelia because we didn’t have enough girls like her when I was a kid, though we voted one of them prom queen senior year which indicates that the appreciation of such women was present.
The Angels sang “My boyfriend’s back and there’s gonna be trouble,” but if you messed with the Shangri-Las, they’d kick your ass themselves. Amelia would have fit in just fine with the Shangri-Las.
But this particular strip hit on a memory sparked by the fact that I’ve quit watching football. The more research emerges on brain damage in the sport, the harder it is to justify watching people inflict it on each other and themselves. And you don’t need a long NFL career to experience it, but, then again, that’s sure a good way to bring it about.
I was a few years older than Wallace when I got into a pickup game of tackle, no equipment, and caught my best friend’s knee in the head. I spent 24 hours in the hospital for observation, but he wound up having to have his knee repaired some years later, so I guess I won but we won’t know until I manage to die with my faculties intact.
All of which made me wonder what in the world we were thinking of when we were so pleased to see women punching each other in the head during the Olympics. The fact that we were concerned one of them might be capable of hitting the other girls too hard seemed pretty stupid to me.
Anyway, I love Amelia but maybe she should rethink her position on tackle vs touch. As long as she doesn’t ever change in any other way.
But while bashing each other’s skulls may be a bad idea, I still welcome bright, active, risk-taking girls, and Red of Red and Rover (AMS) has developed a crush on a girl named Ruby, who demonstrates her joie de vivre in this strip.
A lot of old-school playground equipment is disappearing because it just might cause someone to get a boo-boo, so I was pleased to read a report that praises monkey bars as a chance for kids to learn to take a risk once in a while.
We’ve always had helicopter parents. I remember having to avoid certain really fun games near Keith’s house because his mother would come out and stop us.
But at least we had monkey bars, and I hope kids don’t lose all the chances to let their reach literally exceed their grasp, or what’s a playground for?
Juxtaposition of the Day
I moved into the city several years ago, and I miss being able to see the stars at night and not hearing motorcycles, trucks and sirens at all hours. Then again, as I get older, I don’t mind being in reach of services, and to me, moving into “the city” meant to a place that real city folks would still consider the sticks.
There’s a groundhog living under the garage here, and a friend on the next block has trouble with bears raiding her bird feeders, so it’s not exactly midtown Manhattan.
But I was amused to have these two views of life pop up on the screen the same day. My sympathies, of course, are with the witch.
Another lifestyle-change gag, this from Alex. We were talking about this just the other day because we had a new dog at the park, and her owners are a pair of young remote workers, which adds to a growing presence there.
I worked remotely the last decade before retirement, but most of the dog park people then were either retired or worked at the hospital, where shifts are strange and free time comes at varying intervals. But in the past several years we’ve seen a growing number of remote workers who come to the park the way people in offices take coffee breaks.
To which I would add that, when I was doing it, I found taking an hour to go play with the dog and her friends made me more productive than people in an office who are continually refilling their coffee cups, going outside for a smoke and discussing last night’s episode of whatever TV show is hot at the moment.
Paul Nesja gets profound on us, with a gag about the side of ourselves we display to others.
Yes, I’m good. Of course. See how good I am?
Keith Knight posted this portrait of Gordon Parks at Daily Kos as part of an appeal to get some Patreon or subscription support from readers, which I’m all in favor of. (His Patreon is listed on our “Support Your Local Cartoonist” page.)
Gordon Parks was an absolute giant in several creative industries, as well as a bad shutyourmouth I’m talking about Gordon Parks wecandigit.
Movies aside, back when I was writing an oral histories feature for kids, I discovered that he’d been part of the WPA project back in the 30s and 40s, photographing regular people to preserve regular history.
Here’s a bunch of those photos, including that young man of excellent reading habits.
Here’s something else I discovered back then: There were a lot of interviews with former slaves and other elderly African-Americans in the WPA Writers Project, but most of them suffered from polite older Black folks talking nicely to idealistic young white folks. However, Ralph Ellison collected some of those oral histories and they were a whole lot more up-front with him.
Juxtaposition du jour
I’ve been preparing for The AAEC and ACC convention in Montreal next month.
I’ll need some Canadian cash to tip the valet and housekeepers, which is easier than tipping a maitre d’ because you don’t have to play that game of being subtle enough that your date doesn’t see you do it but not so subtle that she thinks you stiffed the guy.
Meanwhile, I’ve been brushing up my French. I don’t speak it well enough to have an actual conversation, but everyone under 80 in Montreal is bilingual and it’s considered polite to sprinkle a little of each language into things, lest you be taken for a Westmount Rhodesian.
Rather than getting philosophical about personality façades, the first thing I checked when I saw those Rubik’s cubes was whether the color arrangements were at least plausible. The answer is no, they are not: assuming the two cubes were of identical manufacture, the top right cubelet on the right cube (blue/orange) is a logical impossibility.
I actually thought about taking the time and effort to be sure the color squares were right, but decided I liked the idea of leaving it to chance, that we all have our flaws, perfection is not possible, but that we should still try to get our shit together anyways.
It’s pretty accurate…what we hide from others rarely is logical or makes any sense.
You’re correct about the color layout for mute cubes, but he has the correct pattern for sentient, talking cubes.
“All of which made me wonder what in the world we were thinking of when we were so pleased to see women punching each other in the head during the Olympics.”
As I understand it, several of those doing the punching were adjudged male by the International Boxing Association. There’ll be no boxing at all in the 2028 Olympics, of course.
No, there was a lot of false information going around, but it is an issue sports groups have dealt with for decades. The IBA made a decision that science does not agree with, and the IOC accepts the science, rejecting the IBA for “flawed and illegitimate” gender testing as well as dubious finances. The boxers in question were, like the East German teams of the 1970s, women with a genetic abnormality.
https://tinyurl.com/323txz92
The parks in my city have renovated pretty much all their playgrounds, and they’re actually quite nice.
What I do like are the playgrounds where instead of sand or wood chips, they have that thick bouncy rubber that are basically glorified gym mats. They’re fun to mess around on.
I understand taking out the teeter-totters and the merry-go-rounds and perhaps the jungle gyms, since you can fall down through those like a Pachinko ball, but swings on canvas slings are an abomination and monkey bars, as the article says, are good things.
It is fun to have wooden ships and suchlike for fantasy games, but a little real exercise is good, too.