CSotD: Happy Fifth Day
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This Edison Lee (KFS) ran on Third Day, but I’m borrowing it on Fifth Day because I think a fifth would be lovely gift today, though I realize liquor stores are closed in a lot of places. But I have some other observations:
One is that the gifts in the song are additive, so all the feature stories about what it would cost to be so generous must take into consideration that, by Twelfth Night, she’s got 12 partridges, 22 turtledoves and so forth.
The other is that the Feast of the Circumcision is on the Eighth Day of Christmas and it’s clear from the Bible that the family was back in Nazareth by then, which means that, when the Magi showed up on Twelfth Night, they visited a carpenter’s house, not a manger.
Please adjust the Star of Bethlehem accordingly.
As it happens, I spent Christmas with Elder Son watching cricket, a sport he’d learned from his British stepdad, but unlike Jess Harwood, I wasn’t bored because it was the first chance I’d had to watch with someone who understands the game telling me what was going on. Also because it was pre-recorded and he was fast-forwarding through the boring parts.
It was also more fun than usual because it was a match between West Indies and India, which was like a football game between your local high school and the Green Bay Packers, so the Indian women were having an infectiously good time, laughing and high-fiving and so forth. The mood of the West Indians wasn’t nearly so infectious, but they put on brave faces.
However, on a serious note, my son pointed out that it’s the second most popular game in the world after soccer/futbol, which reminded me that we were coming up on the 20th anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the connection being that there was a fundraising cricket tournament afterwards which was televised in 122 countries and raised $17 million (Australian) for relief efforts, and there were additional games afterwards to add to the aid.
As Harwood points out, the game’s international popularity is a tribute to colonization, since the nations involved were all once under the control of Mother England, but it’s better than the more prevalent lesson nations learn from having been colonies, which, as a Bermuda official once explained to me, is that “Whoever is in charge gets to take whatever they want.”
I prefer culture transmitted through wickets than through wickedness.
Another apparent spin-off in the former Commonwealth is that newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand sure have a lot more respect for political cartoons than our lot do. Here’s a 60-page booklet of Peter Brookes cartoons at the Times of London. Alas, it’s all behind a paywall, but that’s understandable: A reward for subscribers.
DD Degg ran some of the year’s-best collections here and here, and here’s a double-truck round-up of Rod Emmerson‘s year at the New Zealand Herald, and it’s not only large but it’s in full color.
Some of what DD has collected comes from American papers, but the notion of giving subscribers something they enjoy appears unnecessary to too many American papers. They should take a look at the Guardian’s lineup for a hint of why that paper is doing fairly well.
Yes, it costs money. How much has it cost you so far to not give people things they enjoy?
American newspapers weren’t always so parsimonious and short-sighted. Here’s a New Year’s cartoon by Edgar Schilder from 1916 and Paul Berge has a fine selection of 1924 wrap-ups at his site.
Every paper here of any size had a cartoonist on staff, back when we had papers here of any size.
Andertoons (AMS) offers a vision of last year’s management style, but a few months ago, control freaks began a process of forcing their work-from-home free-range employees back into their crowded cages.
They say it’s to maintain a sense of teamwork, but we’ve got email and Zoom and other ways to keep in frequent touch. One of the women at the dog park commands a staff the size of which I don’t know but I do know she does individual online meetings with them and so we never see her dog on Wednesdays.
During the 10 years I worked remotely, we sent things out via a well-named company called “Constant Contact.” Plus email and something called a “telephone.”
What the return to offices is really about is to restore an atmosphere in which managers can drop by people’s desks and remind them to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon.
Kyle Bravo offers a pair of Emily Dickinson cartoons, each of which demands that you know both something about Dickinson and something of her most famous poems. Whether or not you know that she used a meter similar to the meter of the theme to “Gilligan’s Island” is optional, but I daresay the overlap of knowledge is likely considerable.
Julie Harris won a Tony for a one-person show on Broadway called “The Belle of Amherst” in which she played Dickinson.
I’ve always thought the best staging would be to have the curtain open on a sitting room with a staircase at the back.
A pair of feet and the hem of a long skirt would start down the staircase and then stop as the person bent over, peeked out and saw the crowd, then turned around, went back up the stairs and a man came out and thanked everyone for coming.
I’m working on a script for a similar one-man show based on “Treasure Island,” exploring the character of Ben Gunn. I come out in ragged clothes, sit on the edge of the stage and ask people for cheese. Preferably toasted.
Today’s Bizarro (KFS) reminds me of when I lived near Montreal, where they had signs explaining rules that changed depending on the hour and day. I would run lundi-mardi-mercredi on my fingers, convert to the 12-hour clock and still screw it up and get ticketed.
Finally, I stopped someone on the street and asked where to go to pay them.
He asked me, “Why?”
How I miss that Continental culture!
On this date in 1907 …
… Cab turned five days old. As if I needed an excuse:
Stay groovy.
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