CSotD: Frivolity Break
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I’ve had enough reality lately, but it’s best to ease your way out of it gently to avoid getting the bends, and Sharon Murdoch’s reality-based take on an old Irish blessing is just what I needed.
I hung around with Irish ex-pats for several years and never ran into this blessing except in gift shops. It’s a lovely thought but sure and there’s enough Barry Fitzgerald/Bing Crosby top-o-the-morning schmaltz in it to send your blood sugar into the stratosphere.
“Murdoch” is an Irish name via Scotland with Viking origins, while Sharon Murdoch is a Kiwi, a combination that gives her permission to re-interpret and pull noses all she’d like. The best night my Irish pub band ever had was when a Kiwi rugby team wandered into the bar where we were playing. We’d sing an Irish song, then they’d sing the New Zealand version of it and buy another round. Then they’d sing a Kiwi song and we’d play the Irish version of that and they’d buy another round.
Rather than have the road rise up to meet me, I slept it off in the car for a few hours before heading home.
Speaking of bands, Tommy Siegel makes a cogent statement that reminds me of an exchange with my boys when they were of junior high age and liked a band in which the lead guitar played loud and fast but kept hitting his fingers on the frets instead of between them, which completely blunted and muddied the sound and, as Siegel suggests, meant he wasn’t playing actual notes.
Younger son is preparing for his first gig as we speak and I hope he cinches things up and plays well, but he’s a grown-up and 1400 miles away, so any advice I had has long since been given and both boys are better guitar players than I ever was.
That’s how it ought to work.
According to the rule in Barney and Clyde (Counterpoint), I’m younger than either of my kids, since both my hips are artificial, which shaves a total of 40 years off my age. Two more such procedures and I’d disappear entirely.
An unfortunate outcome of all the fraught politics lately has been that I missed pointing out a good Sherman’s Lagoon (AMS) story arc about smoothies, but you can go back and catch the first episode here.
At one paper, I shared office space with three young women in their mid-20s, and they made smoothies on a regular basis. I like smoothies, but the above comic is correct because, while you shouldn’t pay $12 for one, all that fresh fruit is expensive.
And smoothies sure don’t come out of the carpet very well. I don’t know what they do for brain function but at that price they ought to enhance your hand-eye coordination.
You might expect a writer to like journals, but I’m with Hammie on this Baby Blues (AMS), in part because I’ve never kept a diary or journal, but mostly because journaling is being made part of the curriculum in a lot of elementary and middle schools and that bothers me on a couple of levels.
First of all, there’s a kind of Elf-on-a-Shelf surveillance vibe I find disturbing. I guess it’s good for teachers to keep track of their students, but maybe not by preparing them to disclose to authority figures on a mandatory basis. I knew an elementary principal who used to have lunch with small groups of kids every day and that seems healthier.
My second objection is that we know one-size-fits-all curricula are bad education and since I was ADHD and scattered most of the time, I’d have flunked Mandatory Journaling. It wouldn’t have taught me to focus any more than tying up a left-handed kids’ arm teaches him to be right-handed.
There was a piece on NPR the other day about mainstreaming special ed kids, putting them back in regular classrooms. It reported on the need for teachers to be taught to deal with learning disabilities, but it reminded me of a conversation with teachers in a school where kids were mainstreamed but with aides who were trained in special ed.
The teachers loved it because the kid in question rarely needed full-time help and so the aide would circulate and help other kids who just needed a boost from someone who understood why they weren’t getting it.
But giving kids what they need takes money and, y’know, it’s more cost-effective to have one teacher try to do everything than to set up a system that might actually work.
Speaking of little kids and teachers, a shout-out to Big Nate (AMS) creator Lincoln Peirce, who has been a schoolteacher and had the nerve, bless his heart, to feature a little kid who doesn’t have a speech impediment. Her size and lack of front teeth signals that she’s younger than Nate and his buddies. No need to change her s’s to th’s and her r’s to w’s.
Similar props to Jimmy Johnson for showing that Arlo and Janis (AMS) can exchange zingers without being hostile about it. Couples who love each other are fully capable of joking around, and not every marriage has to be modeled on the Bickersons.
I also suspect that, unlike most cartoon wives, Janis is a good driver and could balance a checkbook, if balancing your checkbook were still a thing.
I don’t balance my checkbook because of my two artificial hips, which make me so youthful. Not that it would be hard: I write one check a month for my rent, and everything else is done through the magic of electronics.
Dean Patterson’s cartoon is one of an array of choices in the Professional Cartoonists Organisation’s SPLAT contest and voting ends tomorrow several hours earlier than you might have thought because it’s in Britain. Or a day earlier or right on time, depending on where you’re reading this. But January 6, so do it now.
It’s an opportunity to see a large collection of very funny cartoons in more categories than you might have expected.
Mike Stokoe offers this piece, which threatens to return us to reality after our frivolity break, but provides an excuse for a Kinks song.
The video’s kind of chewed up, but the Mod fashion retrospective is worth it.
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