Comic Strip of the Day Comic strips

CSotD: What’s This Here Sauce?

Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground, and I’m kind of surprised that anybody had time to respond, given that Dear Leader pulled the plug at two in the afternoon, so we’ll give some other cartoonists a chance to catch up.

And speaking of catch-up, we’re in good hands, because our Secretary of Education reports that schools are now teaching children about steak sauce.

It wasn’t that long ago that Godfrey Cambridge asked “What’s this here sauce?” and now it’s in the classrooms! What a world!

Okay, it’s more sad than funny that we can look back on the Covid years nostalgically, but then again, we could have looked back on them as a clue and we didn’t, or at least half of us didn’t, which is all it took. But enough politics, and that’s not the only thing that’s changed.

We keep finding new ways to make ourselves miserable. I remember going to a Lyme disease grand-rounds at a hospital back in my reporting days when it hadn’t quite reached as far north as I was living, but it arrived shortly thereafter.

Speaking of rounds reminds me that when I had my cancer surgery, I woke out of my drug-induced torpor to find that I was included in teaching rounds and a group of six or eight medical students were gathered around my bed.

Given the current demographics of med school, they were all 20-something women in white lab coats and for a minute I thought I’d been transferred to Castle Anthrax, but no such luck.

However, in retrospect, it occurs to me that we’ve seen several med students come and go at the dog park over the past several years and none of them have been guys. Any men who are shy about having women look at their bodies had better get over it, because we’re gonna run out of male doctors in a little while.

Though as Mike Baldwin suggests, perhaps it won’t matter. And he gets a Good Timing Award because this ran in the golden moment between the time Dear Leader announced a tariff on pharmaceuticals and the time he called it off, and it’s hard to hit a moving target.

At the other end of the timing factor is today’s Baby Blues, since we’re about two months away from the end of school here and I think in most places. Maybe Wanda has better eyesight that I have, because even as a kid I didn’t start seeing the end of the school year until at least the middle of May.

Though it’s pleasant to see kids in a comic strip excited about vacation, since that’s traditionally seen as only slightly more pleasant than a death sentence by most comic kids, for reasons I’ve never understood.

I think Eckstein must have once used Turbotax, because they are as persistent as an alumni association in finding you and asking for money. They’ve also about doubled their price since I used them, so I wasn’t planning to use them again, but hitting “unsubscribe” on their emails was pointless because they just kept coming.

I’m hoping it stops after April 15, but, after six tries, I’ve finally got them going into my spam file, which I would point out is not the same as being “unsubscribed.”

My spam file is a tribute to persistence. At least a decade ago, I looked up an article on either Ha’aretz or the Jerusalem Post and my spam file continues to fill with emails about Jewish singles sites and various kosher food sources.

I also regularly get job offers for another Peterson who seems to have typed my email address on her on-line resume, and I can’t unsubscribe to or killfile those because they come from a variety of dubious employment agencies. The latest one suggests I might be right for a job selling cars, or possibly as a scheduling coordinator or perhaps as a home health aide.

I’d love to see this woman’s resume, because there’s absolutely no pattern to the careers other people think she’d be perfect for, as long as they got part of her first few paychecks in return for the referral.

It’s comforting to know that this fellow also goes to lectures in the UK. I was afraid he was totally an American phenomenon.

The solution is to have people in the audience write their questions on cards, which allows the panel to choose the ones they want to address and limits the amount of argumentative logorrhea as well.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Sort of an asked-and-answered pairing here. I like Eddie’s question, because it’s the sort of thing a little kid might ponder for awhile before bringing it up for discussion.

I have no idea what things Paul Noth ponders, but I’m glad he gets some funny ones down on paper. This example takes the shine off the phrase “busy as a bee,” and they probably sit around on break talking about the good old days when they used to go out, gather pollen and dance.

But at least they get to work from home, which is something.

As for the chain of thought that got Dave Coverly to this spot, I don’t think I want to know, but he sure got a laugh from me. And the thing is, this wouldn’t be funny if it weren’t happening in a universe of dogs. If a human were scattering the ashes, it would just be appalling, but this is hilarious. Or possibly tasteless. Not that it can’t be both.

Example: When Woody Guthrie died, the family decided to scatter his ashes in the river, but, when they got there and unwrapped the package, they realized it was a sealed can and they didn’t have a can opener. But someone had a jack-knife, so they punched holes in it, only the ashes were too coarse to pour through, so they threw the whole can in the river.

And it floated, so they had to chuck rocks at it until, between tilting and being splashed, it took on enough water to sink.

That’s how I want to go.

Or maybe like this:

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Comments 21

  1. It’s so reassuring to know that the whole motivation behind this tariff thing is good, old-fashioned, greed.

    1. No, no, no! The real reason is to pass off enough people so the protests result in riots, the riots justify police reaction, the riots are then add police overreaction to their grievances, ultimately the national guard is mobilized, some one gets killed, Trump declares martial law, and himself president for life.

  2. LinkedIn thought I’d be perfect for a position of fry cook in Arizona. I’m a medical librarian in DC. I’m not sure what algorithm they use, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in it.

  3. I’ll bet Mom always liked you best, Mike. And pumas, too.

  4. Thanks, Mike, for including me in this latest installment…it touched a few cords, including the tariffs which directly affect my livelihood as I have a postcard set and board game being printed in China (using a process that no US printer does. The full-color books printed in China are more or less exempted from tariffs), cancer was has hit my family at the moment hard, even even including an old friend, Michael Palin, in the movie still you used.

    Well back to watching MSNBC and CNN simultaneously while reading the Times. Wish I was joking.

  5. My veterinarian friend tells me that most young vets these days are women. My archaeologist daughter says the same about archaeologists (Indiana Jones notwithstanding), and Google tells me that 55% of law school grads are women. I don’t know why men are taking themselves out of all the cool jobs, except my suspicion that as their baked-in cultural advantages fade, they just can’t compete. A lot’s been written about angry young men who feel that opportunities they think they deserve have passed them by, so they turn to trolling online and voting for bullies. I suggest they pull themselves up by their bootstraps and try to keep up.

    I’ve been to many public meetings and sat on a few convention panels, and there’s always one audience member whose “question” makes it clear they think they should have been at the front of the room, preferably solo. A good moderator shuts it down fast. A bad one lets them take up the entire Q&A without actually getting around to a Q or A. A good cartoon is funny because it’s true.

    Hadn’t heard the Woody story. Fantastic! I have seen ash-spreading go awry more than once, usually due to not checking which way the wind is blowing.

    Love the Smothers Brothers; played ping pong with Tommy once. Lost.

    That is all.

    1. I gotta admit, that Woody story sounds like something Arlo would make up. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true, just that it sounds like one of his concert ramblings.

      1. It’s from Joe Klein’s biography of Woody, which Arlo approved in general.

    2. Women comprise the majority of students who pursue and graduate in the fields of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and veterinary science. Women aren’t just nurses anymore.

      Two of my three sons are medical doctors.
      In my oldest son’s medical school class of 97, only 29 were male.
      My other son’s medical school class wasn’t much different. Out of 88, 23 were male.
      My daughter is a PharmD. Out of 107, only 14 were male.
      Only my youngest son’s occupation seems to be male-dominated: software engineering

      Some countries practically have an affirmative action program in place for seats in many universities because women make such high placement scores that most men can’t compete.

      1. One of my sons is a nurse, the other teaches elementary school. My stepdaughter is a priest.

        It’s a changing world and the best advice is to jump in and hang on.

  6. “BAD! NAUGHTY ZOOT!!!”

    Anyway, humor aside algorithms and spam are the #1 and #2 reasons why I don’t click on search for anything these days, even out of morbid curiosity.

    If I don’t like something, or else simply don’t care, I’ll still be inundated with it for years to come…

  7. some years ago during a lunchtime conversation, it became clear that my doctor was a woman. an older colleague asked why I would chose a woman doctor, and an appropriate answer came to mind: small fingers.

  8. Did anybody notice that the esteemed Secretary of Education was not talking about A1 Steak Sauce? She was talking (in theory) about AI (artificial intelligence), and didn’t realize the capital I was not the number 1. She is exactly the right person to head the Trump un-Education Department!

    Or maybe she is right and A1 Steak Sauce will count as a healthy vegetable in her school lunch programs.

    1. I’m pretty sure she meant steak sauce. After all, she’s not an idiot. Our president would never appoint idiots to his cabinet. Definitely steak sauce.

      I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in El Salvador.

      1. That jail cell in El Salvador looks mighty uncomfortable, so I insist there are no deranged, ignorant, unqualified idiots in the Cabinet and that she definitely meant steak sauce.

    2. We can expect a nationwide ban on sans serif fonts any day now.

  9. It took me literally YEARS to stop getting the Linkedin emails and to this day I still do not know how I finally did it.

  10. I hesitate taking anything away from the talented speedy work of Matt Davies getting the cartoon done in record time showing Trump in that broken plane, but I would bet some money that Matt knows the subject’s track record well and had the cartoon prepped days ago. So kudos for his preparation and foresight.

  11. If they know the rich are getting the drug and the poor the placebo, it’s not really a double-blind test. In a double-blind study neither the subjects nor those giving the drug know who is getting what.

  12. If the unsubscribe feature does not work, then use the “change my email address” feature, and give it a temporary email address like 10MinuteMail or whatever. That’s what finally stopped Upromise from sending me endless spam, their unsubscribe feature simply did not work, and they covered it up by saying over and over “oh, you just have to give it a few weeks” which of course didn’t change anything either.

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