CSotD: Laughter for the Day Aughter
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Wallace the Brave (AMS)‘s Mom decides that a snow day should be a snow day. I feel that education is very valuable, and I suspect she does, too, but snow days are also important and, besides, between the digital divide and power outages, you wouldn’t achieve perfect attendance and the day would be a waste of everyone’s time.
It didn’t snow here yesterday, but I kept the TV off and didn’t watch January 6. Instead, despite single-digit temps, the dog and I went to the park. So Congress didn’t get perfect attendance, either.
Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight.
The artist in this Speed Bump (Creators) has declared comments off. It’s just that kind of day, though I’m not declaring them off because we seem to get good dialogue around here.
Still, I’m not feeling critical and hope not to say anything that gets your dander up, either.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Forget your troubles, come on, get happy. We’ve somehow got two explosions of laughter, and I gave Nate the lead-off position because his is part of a story arc on the topic. I remember have a laughing fit in fifth grade, which was a good time to have it because Mrs. Hazelton was a woman of great patience and making me stand out in the hall was more a chance to regroup than a punishment.
And I’d crack a joke about infectious laughter being the one pandemic a certain nominated head of national health won’t be propagating, but, as said, we’re not discussing current politics today.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Instead, let me tie these two cartoons into what’s been going on around here. My apartment is the back end of a 19th century house, with the landlords living in the front and overhead in the second story.
About a month ago, the fire alarms began going off briefly at random times, all over the building. So they called in an alarm guy, who replaced most of the units. But it kept happening, so they called the fire department, which came in and ran tests and found nothing to set off the system.
Finally, the landlord pulled out the last three units that hadn’t been replaced, and about an hour later, one of them went off, only now it was sitting all alone on the coffee table, which was kinda like the time Gilbert and Beaver agreed they’d make faces in the class picture but only Beaver did it.
Betty (AMS) has insisted that the family put away their electronics and play a board game together. When our family would get together, Monopoly was a favorite, because we’re intensely competitive for which the appeal of Monopoly is that instead of ending when somebody wins, it ends when everybody else has lost.
You could tell how long any of us had been married, because the new in-laws would join the game, while those who had been around for awhile would drift away when the board came out or, like Junior, purposely tap out as soon as possible to avoid the bloodshed that followed.
People point out that, when Monopoly was invented, its point was to show what horrible people greedy capitalists are, but, instead — and “instead” is where they lose me, because I think it still does that, plus it shows how close to the surface those appalling traits are in your dearest friends.
When board games began to be adapted for home computers, Monopoly worked well, because nobody had to be banker and you could play against other people or alone, against the machine.
Then they improved it, having each of the tokens act like a horse, a race car, a dog, etc., making horse, race car, dog noises and galloping, racing or loping instead of just moving to the next destination. It was like playing with the most annoying person in the world, but there was no “Knock it off or you’re out of the game” option to select.
Which brings us to this:
There are things that, as an old technophobic boomer like Alex, I really hate about AI, which is most of it.
I run my computer the way I drive my car: I know how it works, I can troubleshoot the easy stuff, I’ve found some work-arounds, but I’ve never done a tune-up.
But just as there’s no need to understand carburetors anymore, Alex is right that there soon won’t be much point in having coding skills. OTOH, I still have, and want, a manual transmission, and I’d still like to have a similar sense of touch in working with a computer.
Which is to say that I don’t mind asking Alexa what time it is, and GPS can be handy as long as you don’t trust it completely, but AI is ruining Google and if Zuckerberg really starts adding AI personalities to Facebook, he’s a bigger nitwit than the muskrat and will do to his platform what that jackass did to Twitter.
Combining cars and computers, I don’t care how much they improve self-driving cars. I like to drive, and I’d no more want a self-driving car than I’d want to quit cooking and buy a freezer full of TV dinners.
Dagnabbit.
Sometimes Genius Just Happens
As noted before, I’ve been reading James Thurber’s The Years With Ross, about the early years of the New Yorker.
One afternoon in the winter of 1928, when I was sharing an office with (E.B.) White, (he) interrupted my typing to ask my opinion of a caption he had just worked out for a drawing. He was a little solemn about it, and clearly uncertain that he had hit on the right idea. I looked at the drawing and the caption and said, “Yeh, it seems okay to me,” but neither of us cracked a smile. This drawing, by Carl Rose, appeared in the issue of December 8, 1928, and it carried one of the most famous and laughed-at captions in the history of the magazine, the one in which the mother says, “It’s broccoli, dear,” and the little child replies, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” The youngster’s expression of distaste was to become a part of the American language.
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