CSotD: Some Timely Levity
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One of those cases where the timing is fortuitous but accurate. A few more editorial cartoonists have stepped up with commentary on the Oval Office Ambush and we’ll get to them, but they’ll keep and, as Royston’s announcer says, things are depressing enough that we’ll go right to the weather (which has been good here) and as I say, we’ll go for some time-dependent humor.
And if I needed another cosmic message on the topic, GoComics has yet again failed to include the black plate on this Sunday’s Barney & Clyde. It’s kind of like Bob Woodward moving his flower pot with its red flag to the edge of the balcony, telling Deep Throat he needs a meeting.
Whenever they want me to skip politics and run some humor instead, they just leave the black plate off Barney & Clyde. It’s a good system because anyone else seeing it would assume it was simply one of those unfortunate “You had one job” situations.
Okay, we’ll have a little bit of politics, as Ellen Leibenthal explains how to cheat on the boycott we were all supposed to do Thursday. It takes some scuzzy ethics, mind you.
I’ll confess that I sort of kind of broke the boycott, but not really. I realized that I had chicken enchiladas planned for that night and had forgotten to get sour cream, but instead of going to a chain supermarket, I went to our local coop. Shopping local was a permitted activity, so I spent a buck and a quarter locally, and I even rounded up to send my change to the local food bank.
What I noticed was that the place was virtually empty, because the people most likely to participate in the boycott were also the people most likely to shop locally anyway.
Purity is tough. Even Apostles have been known to strip a few grains of wheat from the stalks as they walk through on the Sabbath.
But then I forgot to put the sour cream on my enchiladas. Instant karma!
I’ll be boycotting the Oscars tonight, not out of any political motivation but because, like the folks in Bramhall’s cartoon, I haven’t seen any of the films and am not likely to.
I could give all sorts of reasons, starting with how hard it is for someone with ADD to sit in a theater and focus on the film with people whispering and unwrapping candy and moving around, but it’s more about my putting it off until the movie has left town.
On the other hand, Stephen Collins assures me that I won’t be missing anything I haven’t seen before. He’s a bit more cynical than I am, but not much. It’s not that I don’t like movies, but I treat them like fine wine, which means I’ve got a few dozen I’ve recorded from Turner Classic Movies and only a couple of them have deep, meaningful messages. Each has mellowed with time.
Several decades ago, when television was beginning to compete, the movie industry came up with the slogan “Movies Are Your Best Entertainment.” I’m told they quietly dropped it when people began to point out the resulting acronym.
I’m not a complete hermit, and today’s Pearls reminds me of when my boys were little and we used to go watch the Denver Bears play. They were the farm team of the Montreal Expos and had a lineup that included Andre Dawson, Ellis Valentine, Andres Gallaraga, etc. etc. We’d get seats on the first base line just to watch Tim Raines take second.
Granted, this was minor league ball, but I can identify with Pig’s uncle George, because the biggest expense of our outings was the 140-mile round trip from Colorado Springs to Denver. However, when we moved back East, we took a shorter trip to see the Expos and it still didn’t break the bank.
Not sure if that shows how expensive things have become or how old we’ve become, but I’m talking about nearly 40 years ago, so probably both.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Cynthia’s cunning plan to avoid failures has already been tried. I mentioned the other day that a lot of countries do well in testing because the only kids they test are the ones who go to school rather than spending their days sewing shirts in sweatshops.
Americans have universal education, so we test everyone. Sort of. A major city’s schools got caught a few years ago holding kids back for a year so they wouldn’t show up in the graduation rates because they wouldn’t be seniors and would, hopefully, drop out without ever reaching Grade 12, while at least two major city schools got caught changing student answers on tests to raise overall scores.
I got out of the education business before AI became an issue, but the kids in Alex bring up the topic of portfolios, which, as they say, are supposed to be a better assessment of learning than test scores.
Well, maybe. But they’re also a good assessment of organizational capacity, perhaps OCD, which has little to do with geology or American history.
When I was in college, the centerpiece of my major was a seminar in which we read and discussed classics. The final at the end was an oral in which you appeared before three professors who asked you questions about the various pieces of history, philosophy and literature you’d covered that year.
It was a portfolio of the mind. It terrified some of my classmates but seemed custom-made for someone with ADD, given our ability to pull odd facts out of random drawers.
One of the most important things I learned in school was that nobody assigns a book to see if you’ll notice that it’s crap, a lesson I learned in high school, when I described Ethan Frome as “maudlin, Victorian melodrama,” which was not true.
It was Edwardian.
It was also one of my English teacher’s favorite stories, else why would she have shoved it down our innocent throats?
If you learn nothing else, that lesson will get you through more than school.
Well, plus this, a lesson I didn’t learn until college:
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