CSotD: Just Another Merry Monday
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We’ll start off easy with a familiar rant: There was a study, IIRC in Sweden, some years ago that showed kids who grew up on farms had fewer allergies than kids who grew up in cities because they were constantly exposed not just to animal dander but to dust that contained feces and other nasty-sounding but perfectly natural contaminants.
I grew up country, but not on a farm, and so have hay fever and dog allergies. But I think parents in general are overly concerned about sterility, and then-wife and I used to laugh and say “Boil the baby!” when one of our little ones got into something appalling.
Certainly living with four dogs gave their immune systems plenty of dander and dust, while I think living with parents who expected them to occasionally get into appalling things seems, in retrospect, to have been positive. Or at least fun.
Speaking of rants you’ve read here before, the Other Coast provides a chance for me to once more bemoan people who miss the world because they’re tuned in to themselves instead of their surroundings.
Most of what I see is not ear buds but those large, reality-cancelling headphones and we are at a point in the year when birds are reappearing and seeking mates, though the mockers haven’t made an appearance yet.
But for a true perspective, I grew up in an era when transistor radios were just making their first appearances, and they had a range of about 50 feet. Perhaps more, but where we lived, even with a for-real radio, about all you could get during the day was the WPDM Farm Report.
It got better at night and we had a good selection of stations from Boston, NYC and Chicago, but only if you strung a wire to pull them in.
As for Walkmen and such, we had tape recorders, but they were reel-to-reel, weighed a ton and most of them needed to be plugged in.
So I can’t say what I’d have done if I’d had more portable technology available. My grandkids are digital natives, but I wasn’t even an audio native.
Frazz and Caulfield discussed another modern matter recently, and this one isn’t just for kids. I’m frankly surprised that magazines still exist, and particularly news magazines, since, as Caulfield notes, by the time they arrive, nothing in them is news anymore.
My little brother was a baseball freak and had a subscription to the Sporting News, which went fully digital a dozen years ago. But in his time, it was a weekly and yet was his source for current batting averages and so forth, “current” being relative.
Obviously, that couldn’t survive the digital revolution, but even in-depth magazines like Mother Jones that feature long-form, well-documented analysis seem out of date by the time they arrive, even when they aren’t competing with themselves on-line.
And the New Yorker, about to celebrate its centennial, is but a pamphlet of its former self, though I just finished reading James Thurber’s The Years with Ross and recommend it highly.
And I read it in print, of all things.
But having praised Frazz, I’ll give him a kick for today’s episode, in large part because he’s not the only person I’ve heard get snarky about this piece of advice.
I not only think it’s excellent advice, but I’ve preached it to kids for years, pointing out, for instance, that you probably can’t make a living fishing for trout, but you could make a living running a sporting goods store with a reputation for quality fishing equipment and expert advice.
My grandfather served in WWI with a fellow who got all the way through law school, passed the bar and hung out his shingle before he realized he didn’t want to be a lawyer, and joined the army as an escape. Which probably wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life, either, but that’s what happens when you listen to your parents and your teachers instead of thinking for yourself.
For my part, everyone told me journalism was for failed novelists, but after a dozen years of failing as a novelist, I found out that journalism was so much fun that I’d have done it for free.
Which was a good thing, since that’s pretty much what journalism pays.
And I think Captain Hindsight is doing what he loves, too.
Another rant. I ran into my first tipping screen at a chowder house in Northampton, a decade or so ago, when I went up to carry our food back to the table, and the fellow swung the screen around so I could tip him for taking the bowls from the pass-through and putting them on the counter.
I’ve worked as a cook, and never got tipped. I’ve waited tables and never got tipped enough. But at least when I was working the grill, I was getting real minimum wage and not “tipped wage,” which is a rip-off of both staff and customers.
I get it: The more people you put on tipped-wages, the less you have to raise prices to cover your costs. But you could tear out the counter and add a card-scanner and you wouldn’t need to have a cashier at all, much less one that I was expected to pay on your behalf.
Which is more or less what’s happening in Coverly’s cartoon. (I suspect he’s been eating in airports.)
It is Lent and observant Catholics are temporarily having Meatless Fridays, which were part of my life as a youngster. The gag here is that hot dogs are all filler, but I recall arguments when Bac-O’s first appeared, because they weren’t meat but my theology was based on taste and texture, not chemistry, which IMHO made them verboten.
Now we’ve got a whole industry churning out pretend meat.
This illustration is from Matthew 4:1-11, where Satan says “If you are the Son of God, command that these soybeans become tasty hamburgers and sausages.”
And the Lord answered unto him, “It is written: I like bread and butter. I like toast and jam.” *
* No, that’s not sacrilege. Sacrilege is when you seek sophistic loopholes to appear observant.
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