CSotD: Humpday Humor
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Very strange Speed Bump (Creators) this past Sunday. The dog in the space suit seemed the focal point, and it was only after I read the caption and agreed with it that I noticed both men were looking up and got the intended point.
I hate people who go all technical on a cartoon, but I think Dave Coverly was asking for it on this one, because my initial thought was that of course you wouldn’t need a bag because it would necessarily be self-contained, which to some extent reflects how, as a young lad in the days of the Mercury Program I was quite curious about how all that worked.
And as we learned in The Right Stuff, it was something NASA was not sufficiently curious about until Alan Shepard had to deal with the question. And whatever else they had to work out, the issue continued to be a developing situation in Gemini and Apollo missions.
As reported in that latter link, it would indeed float if you were in orbit, but it wouldn’t sail away if you were on the Moon. It would just kind of hang there and slowly go to the ground, though perhaps more quickly because of being expelled.
A more disturbing thought is what would happen to the dog if that portion of his anatomy were not encased in the suit. People who know about such things have said that the climax — if I may use that word in this context — of Goldfinger, in which the villain is sucked out of the plane through a broken airplane window, would not happen, and we’ve had a few cases of whole doors blowing off without passengers going with them.
Still, even if you didn’t wind up with an inside-out dog, the poor thing would certainly end up with some dynamic hemorrhoids. He could do for the marketing of Preparation H what his human colleagues did for Tang.
And a special hello today to all those who read this blog over breakfast.
As a corrective, we’ll turn to this Dean Patterson piece, which I think we can all agree is impossible to overthink.
The bonus is that, while I remember a fad of jokes based on improbable combinations of book titles and authors, it came about when I was around 12 and none of the examples I remember are printable, unprintable humor being the hallmark of 12-year-old boys.
But I guess you never outgrow your love of silly, because I laughed at this.
There’s somewhat more intellectual humor in today’s Barney & Clyde (Counterpoint), which makes me suspect that somebody on the writing team is watching too much daytime television.
Back when I worked a normal schedule, I never had the TV on until dinnertime, but now that my workday ends at about 8 am, I get to enjoy seeing the depressing swill that fills the daytime shift.
And, yes, indeed it is a parade of ads targeting gullible people who can’t survive a credit check, are overwhelmed with debt and have all sorts of conditions exploitable by purveyors of patent medicine. And if they drank water at Camp Lejeune or were in an accident or perhaps worked with asbestos, there’s someone running behind the ambulance with a free booklet to show them how to cash in.
Then, after they get their payment, there’s another commercial from somebody who will convert their structured settlement into a handful of magic beans, while, if they don’t get a payment, they can hand the equity in their home over to Tom Selleck.
To slip into politics for a moment, the gang at Barney’s pharmaceutical company should hope RFK Jr doesn’t get confirmed, because one of the things he wants to do is take prescription drug ads off television.
Only the US and New Zealand allow prescription drugs to be advertised on TV, and a lot of health experts would love to see those ads disappear, but, then again, the Hollywood Reporter notes, a lot of TV executives would really hate to lose the revenue.
My heart weeps for them, but mostly because when they can’t sell a spot, they fill it with pity porn from either the ASPCA or St. Jude’s, which, though this essay on the topic doesn’t say so, seems to equate maltreated animals and children with cancer, both of which can be helped if you will just send money and get this adowable bwanket.
As that essay notes, we shouldn’t have to be crowd-sourcing healthcare in the first place.
More marketing humor, this from Ben (MWAM), and a chance for me to wonder aloud if people still use the TV book that comes in their Sunday paper, or at least that used to. The explosions of cable and streaming have made these books impossible to compile in any coherent format, but that’s no reason to stop trying.
Back when newspapers were healthy and TV contained, I was in marketing at a paper where the amount of inserts in our Sunday paper outstripped the number of machines we had for the purpose. So we decided to move the TV book to Saturday, since that was our poorest single-copy day and we thought it might boost sales.
Readers were outraged, our Sunday single-copy sales plunged and it didn’t do squat for Saturday. So we put the TV book back in Sunday and shifted the rotogravure magazine — I forget if it was Parade or USA Weekend — to Saturday.
Our Sundays went back to normal, Saturdays remained moribund and nobody complained.
It happened that our contract on the magazine was coming up for renewal, so my boss decided to let it go, since it cost real money and, obviously, none of our readers cared about it.
Then we got a memo from Corporate that a vice-president had renewed all the contracts across the chain, sticking us with the bill but certainly not at all I’m sure getting any kind of kickback himself from the magazine’s publisher.
We also got a memo from Corporate ordering us to cut overhead.
The day I gave my two-weeks notice, my boss shook my hand and congratulated me on my escape.
Madam & Eve wonder what kind of example we’re setting for our kids? And how dumb would they have to be to miss the message?
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