CSotD: I Believe We Could Use Some Laughs
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This is as political as I plan to get today. I’m awash in political cartoons with sarcastic responses to Musk’s demand that people tell five things they accomplished last week, mostly showing Trump filling out the form and varying from okay to more than okay but only a couple reaching brilliant.
Ali Solomon, however, frames it as one of those idiotic chain letters, which explains why there are so many copies flying around.
Well, that and not wanting to get fired, but that reminds me of when I was searching for a new job and would tell people why I was being picky: “I’m not looking for a job that sucks. I’ve already got a job that sucks.”
It also occurs to me that, while in the real world people come to power after years in development, there are a lot of stories about ordinary people becoming monarchs or presidents or whathaveyou, like The Short Reign of Pippin IV and The Prisoner of Zenda and Dave.
In each of them, the ordinary person knows he’s in over his head but has the advantage of a wise counselor who’s in on the deal and can advise him.
Unfortunately for us, that’s not the situation here, which is more like a Laurel & Hardy or Three Stooges movie, in which nobody in charge has any experience or any idea of what they’re supposed to be doing, so they’re just making it up as they go along, with the people who should understand things dutifully fulfilling orders that make no sense.
Like, y’know, filling out forms explaining what they did last week.
The consolation being that in none of those fantasies does the imposter remain in power for very long.
One can hope.
Here’s a more pleasant variation on the subject: In the current Crabgrass story, Kevin swung over the bar, crashed into a bush and woke up in a parallel universe. As you see, he’s found that one person who explains things to him.
The story arc began here and it’s worth going back and catching up, because not only are Crabgrass stories worth reading but the arcs are quite long and there’s little chance of it ending just as you get into it.
Besides, if you’re like Horace, you’ve got nothing on your to-do list, and you know it. Why not get into a long, well-crafted comic strip story arc?
Though my recollection is that however much you wanted to swing over the bar, when you got to a certain angle in the arc, you hit a zero-gravity point where the swing threatened to drop out from under your feet and send you down the chains for a solid crash and a pair of ripped up hands.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, mind you. Nothing is, I’ve been told, and, in fact, I studied the topic in high school.
Here’s how worldly I’ve become: When I read the first panel of this Buckets, my immediate response was that the third kid had some Japanese snack food. But then I realized that Japanese snack foods have little dried fish in them, not little dried insects. And some of the dried fish aren’t all that little, either.
I’ve only had them as gifts, from a college friend who moved there and when my son came back from being stationed there in the Navy, but once you get over the surprise, they’re pretty good.
And, of course, people in all sorts of other places eat fried crickets and other insects. I suspect, however, that they wouldn’t hold up very well in a bag of crackers.
Americans are such dietary cowards. We didn’t even buy Crispy Critters, despite watching the TV show.
Speaking of appalling things, Pickles reminded me of a True Life Adventure from college. A friend came stumbling out of a hallway into a reception room, gagging and laughing simultaneously. She had just passed three guys in that hallway, one wearing Jade East, one wearing Canoe and one wearing English Leather.
I believe she used the word “stench.” And in case you thought Axe was some kind of new thing, this was in 1970, so those guys could be the grandfathers of today’s incels, though I can’t imagine how.
We’ve had a bit of a temporary thaw this week after a stretch of single-digit temperatures, but I’m saluting the Barn not for good timing but for not mangling the meter.
Cartoonists — strip or political — should employ musicians to screen their parodies, because it’s rare that they manage to avoid the fate of that famous fellow in the Limerick:
There was a young chap named McCann
Whose poems would never quite scan.
When told it was so
He said “Yes, I know,
“But I always try to fit as many words into the last line as I possibly can.”
I have little to add to this Moderately Confused except that it cracked me up.
I learned at the AAEC Convention in Montreal this past fall that paying the hotel to store my car was easier than finding places to park the damn thing, though I knew from having lived near there 25 years ago that everybody gets tickets and nobody bothers to pay them.
I don’t believe that’s true in the English-speaking regions of Canada.
Speaking of beliefs, here’s a cartoon about antifundamentalism, a looking-glass religion in which people firmly, absolutely disbelieve in something despite the fact that they haven’t any objective proof to justify their lack of faith.
Belief and disbelief are equally irrational.
If astronomers were atheists, Neptune wouldn’t have existed until 1846, when, on September 23, it went *plink* into being because somebody on Earth spotted it.
The Washington Post had a headline yesterday, “Pope shows ‘slight improvement’ amid special prayers at St. Peter’s” which suggested a causal connection.
I wish they’d published a count of how many prayed “Let him recover” and how many prayed, “Thy will be done.” There are, after all, several sects in which it is presumptuous to tell the Almighty how to run the universe.
For my part, I’m a fundamentalist agnostic. I can’t quite believe I’m falling in love, but who knows?
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