CSotD: A Pause in the Despair

Harry Bliss (Tribune) arrives in the nick of time and we’re gonna take a break from the apocalyptically insane political goings. I need the comic relief and I also need to catch up with what’s on the funny pages.

Though Ben (MWAM) is closer to the mark than Bliss, because all the leaves are brown and the sky is gray and I’m in the process of adapting to cold weather, a process that often takes up most of November.

Lest you accuse me of judging them unfairly, note that I live 18 miles north of Harry Bliss and about 200 miles south of Dan Shelton (interviewed here), so we share much of the same weather. And climate. Whichever.

But I’ll give Bliss a break because we’re somehow just starting to get winter weather, and it’s been very pleasant up until this week, which is unsettling.

The apple harvest was excellent this year, but I’d be a little worried if I had a sugar bush, because we do need real winters if we’re going to have good maple syrup in the years to come.

Though, of course, climate change will officially end January 20, but let’s not get into that today.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Non Sequitur — AMS

Mr. Boffo

The good thing about being retired is that I only work about 42 hours a week, leaving me plenty of time to walk the dog and contemplate the results of having worked at small papers instead of striking out for the Big Time.

When I did Career Fairs, kids would ask how much you earn at a newspaper, and I’d start by reminding them that there are a lot of jobs at a paper, including ad sales, accounting, pre-press, printing and, oh yeah, reporting.

Then I’d say that being a reporter is the lowest paying career that requires a college degree because while social workers make less, that’s part of psychology and psychologists do well. And so do reporters at major media outlets, but not enough to skew the overall stats.

However, it’s so much fun that I’d do it for free if my food and housing were covered, which, judging by my concept of a retirement plan, I seem to have accomplished.

I’d also tell students that my only regret is that I wasn’t making enough to be able to travel, but, then again, if it mattered that much to me, I would have become a travel writer.

In Jules and Jim, Jim explains it nicely:

Prof Albert Sorel taught me the little I know. He said ‘You want to be what?’
A diplomat
‘Are you rich?’
No
‘Can you legitimately add a famous name to your own surname?’
No
‘Then forget diplomacy’
But what’ll I become?
‘Curious’
That’s not a profession
‘Not yet. Travel, write, translate. Learn to live everywhere. Begin at once. The future belongs to the curious. The French have stayed behind their borders too long. Newspapers’ll pay for your escapades’

So I didn’t travel much, but I had a lot of fun satisfying my curiosity, and newspapers paid for my escapades.

You could sure do worse, and a lot of people do. To quote another fictional character, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

If you aren’t having fun, start now. You never know when the game will end.

Juxtaposition of Things

Arlo and Janis — AMS

Pearls Before Swine — AMS

Excellent timing on this pair, because I’ve been on a decluttering binge, and not only do I have a very deep desk drawer full of random cords but a banker’s box in the closet full of more, including not just a billion duplicate power cords of various kinds but some with dedicated connectors to objects I no longer own and even a coil of coaxial cable, though both my phone and TV have been wireless for years.

I intend to go through and whittle them down to a few necessary objects, but not until we’ve solved the important issue of whether they are “thingees” or “thingies.”

Juxtaposition of Life and Death

Willie ‘n Ethel

Frazz — AMS

The Other Coast — Creators

Willie is right about cartoons, though we should also note that cartoon carnivores can get blown up by dynamite or flattened by anvils and emerge unscathed a moment later.

The Disney wildlife films were also pretty rough on predators, who never seemed to catch anything, but then the Disney wildlife films were pretty rough on facts, and cartoonists can thank them for establishing the myth about lemmings committing mass suicide, but the rest of us who grew up on that nonsense should not be so grateful.

One of the breakthroughs in wildlife films came when predators began to be shown having success, which eventually led back to Disney offering a song about the circle of life, but also solved the mystery of how carnivores stayed alive since we’d never seen them catch anything.

The Frazz sequence surprised me, because I’m still in touch with people from back home and deer hunting continues to be part of their lives, as it was among my neighbors when I was in western Maine.

And we just had a conversation at the dog park the other day about how game wardens and troopers donate game confiscated from poachers (and fresh road kill) to food banks.

Still, if Jef Mallett is noting a drop off in slob hunters who motor up from the city to have a few beers and shoot what we hope turns out to have been a deer, that’s not so bad.

This 2001 Real Life Adventures got a laugh from a newsroom colleague who sported a quarter-sized scar on his throat, a souvenir of a slob hunter who shot before looking. Yes, he was very, very lucky to have survived, but he’d have been even luckier if the guy had stayed home.

But there’s this: We’ve got a whole lot more deer than we used to, and if they don’t die quickly, they’ll die slowly and miserably. Predation — human or animal — is part of their circle of life.

Anyway, if you’re an omnivore, the fact that your meat comes in little plastic trays doesn’t change anything.

Speaking of my roots, and winter, here’s a Canadian TV show I used to watch: