CSotD: Monday Comedy Break
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We’ll start the week with a dose of politics and the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us.
Depending on how you feel about our chocolate, there’s not much here that seems outlandish or surprising. The humor, rather, is in listing it without choking in horror, as if it were all perfectly normal.
Let’s hope it doesn’t all become perfectly normal. But this sure seems like a good time to avoid the place.
Still waiting for the Washington Post to come out against the tariffs, since Bezos has ordered them to only write columns about the glories of the free market. But since I dropped my subscription, I’ll have to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’ve all been going berserk over it. Except for Eugene Robinson, the latest Pulitzer winner to walk away from the place.
As far as Wiley’s scenario, I haven’t seen men in dark suits performing puppet shows on TV, but there was a TV in a deli section of a supermarket here, and somebody had it tuned to Fox until somebody complained and then it was tuned to the Food Channel and now it seems to have disappeared.
Which may have also been happening in airports, which used to have TVs on in every waiting area with the sound cranked up. Now if they’re even there, they tend to be turned down or totally muted with the closed-captioning on for those with nothing better to read.
I don’t often laugh at cartoons about people staring at their phones, the topic having been adequately covered for quite a while, but I did get a chuckle out of this. And he’s right, perhaps for the wrong reason, that our spate of abductions appears to be over.
When I lived out West, we had frequent reports not of abductions but of aliens coming down to kill our cattle and steal their rectums, which cost ranchers a lot more money than when the aliens simply stomped patterns into the hayfield.
Or it would have, if it were possible to divide by zero.
Another thing I haven’t seen lately: When phones and cheap video were both new, there were frequent videos online of people walking into telephone poles or falling into fountains while staring at their phones. My question is, did we just get tired of making the videos, or have people become more adept at walking without looking up? Are we growing chameleon eyes?
Which segues neatly into the question raised here, because seeing random people tumble into fountains used to be how complete idiocy was verified. Now we have to seek more subtle clues, though, as the bird says, it’s not really a mystery to anyone else.
Which leads into that old joke about one person in three, so if it’s not the person on your right and it’s not the person on your left, it’s you.
Or the fact that one person in five speaks Chinese, and it isn’t me.
I remember having a moment of clarity over this topic. I was in my late 40s and working a booth at a large social gathering of the Senior Council members. I noticed that male/female ratio in the crowd and said to myself, “The odds sure get good when you reach 70.”
Then stopped and realized I meant “if.”
Arlo has been reflecting my anxieties for a very long time, and about two years after I had that moment of clarity, he echoed it.
BTW, in case you haven’t noticed, Janis has recently let her hair go gray, which is a nice milestone as the two of them contemplate downsizing their housing and moving to the coast. Father Time is undefeated, so there’s no point in trying to stop him. The tree that bends in the wind survives the storm.
I have a solution to the problem of leaf-blower noise, and it’s much less expensive than requiring owners of these things to hand out noise-canceling headphones to all their neighbors.
My solution is to outfit the blowers with a device that shuts them down after 30 minutes and prevents them from being started again for 24 hours. You probably can’t completely sweep your lawn in that time, but you can gather the leaves and grass clippings together and then finish the job with a rake after your blower cuts out.
Or explodes. I’m still tinkering with the final design.
Self-check-phobia seems to be fading, and Gary McCoy’s shlemazel is making a reasonable blunder.
Fortunately, all our self-checks have someone there to override errors, my most common being to double-scan something and need it deleted. Maybe twice a month.
New stores can be confusing, but you should be familiar with your grocery store. It’s where you can buy a bag of different things, and I’m seeing a lot more young men doing real grocery shopping.
When I say “doing real grocery shopping,” I’m distinguishing them from the poor hapless souls going from aisle to aisle precisely following a list and using their phone to ask if crushed tomatoes and diced tomatoes are the same thing.
Anyway, the people who are regular shoppers include a lot who not only know how to use the self-check but prefer it, which is good because nearly all the stores have help-wanted signs and are lucky to be able to staff a quarter of their registers.
The self-check people also card you for alcohol:
Which brings us to this bar, but reminds me of my senior trip in high school when “my” ID showed me as 6’2″ rather than 5’9″ and had my eye color wrong, too. (It didn’t work.) I also lived in Colorado back when you only had to be 18 but they only served you 3.2 beer.
And, yes, watered-down Coors does seem redundant.
Finally, Alex has ended, due to the Telegraph not renewing the contract on a 38-year old staple of their financial coverage. The team hints at a possible rebirth, and I’ll certainly provide an update if it happens, but meanwhile, there’s a big hole in this ex-business-writer’s morning comics.
Here’s to you, mate:
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