Comic Strip of the Day Comic strips

CSotD: More Humpday Humor

As usual, I can’t separate politics from humor, and Private Eye doesn’t often try. Here’s the cover of their latest issue, and I was already sick of the memes based on that photo, so their playing with it amuses me.

There’s also an AI animation of the scene, in which Zelenskyy stands up and flattens Trump. It’s so well done that I suppose it’s Russian, since they do the best fake videos, but I was sorry to have seen it posted by a cartoonist.

I’m against artists cutting their own throats by circulating AI, but I’m also against posting fakery because there’s enough deliberate lying and propaganda out there without increasing the volume.

Yesterday’s rumor was that Amazon would start including tariff amounts on orders. Everybody went nuts, wondering that Bezos was turning against his master, and the White House reacted with fury and then Amazon spokescritters explained that it was a proposal in one sector of his empire and it wasn’t happening anyway.

Which is too bad, given that Trump brags about how much he’s raised with tariffs, and it would undermine his insistence that other countries are paying them.

I haven’t had a chance to see last night’s interview, but I’ve seen enough clips that I expect to have some thoughts soon about interviewing a fabulist.

Onward.

This could just be a play on the empty speculation around any illness, the silliest example of which is people tracing their food poisoning back to a restaurant, no matter how long ago they ate there, rather than place the blame on their own not-so-spotless kitchen.

But with a Secretary of Health and Human Services who hasn’t got enough training to even qualify as a quack, we naturally think of the current measles outbreak, which is a triumph of a couple of decades of paranoid conspiracy theories, not just his three months in power.

His elevation to the office is, however, a parallel outcome of that arrogant foolishness.

At the moment, we’ve got three times the measles cases we had in all of last year, so it’s all coming into focus at the same time, and the thinking that brought Brainworm Bobby to the big time is the same thinking that gave misguided parents motivation to place infectious children in classrooms.

As that linked article says, Canada and Mexico are also having measles outbreaks, so it’s not an entirely US phenomenon, but I’m always embarrassed when I realize how much of our garish low-brow culture is popping up in other countries.

In Malaysia, they had to explain that Laverne and Shirley were insane or the TV show wouldn’t make sense to audiences there. The problem is that it made sense to audiences here.

If our thinking on measles makes sense to anyone else, there’s your international outbreak.

I’m glad to see Coverly include blood in this, because there are places that will serve a Shirley Temple (or “Roy Rogers”) without the splash of grenadine and a maraschino cherry, which is just ginger ale and shouldn’t delight anyone.

There are places that even put the cherry on a little plastic sword, which makes the drink that much better and would be particularly appropriate in a “Blood of Shirley Temple’s Enemies.”

Juxtaposition of the Day

I’m dubious about Simonelli saying the schools teach on-line stuff instead of reading, but David Finkle is an active teacher and his complaints roughly align with what I’ve heard, including college instructors saying that they’re seeing freshmen who, having been taught with passages, have never read a book.

My own experience is skewed by having worked with kids who wanted to be journalists and so were a self-selected group of avid readers, but a few years ago, the editorial cartoonist convention happened to coincide with an appearance by Dav Pilkey, author/cartoonist of the Captain Underpants series of books, and here’s the crowd he attracted.

You can argue that Captain Underpants isn’t Great Expectations, but then again how many eight- and nine-year-olds were plowing through Dickens a generation ago, or even several generations ago?

Finkle is right that the quest for test scores has seriously damaged the concept of reading for pleasure. I know a teacher who was ordered — not instructed but ordered — to abandon her free-reading sessions so her students could do practice tests instead.

The call for relevant reading materials widens the gulf between the books that teachers and librarians recommend and assign and the books that kids actually want to read, not just Captain Underpants but Hunger Games and Harry Potter.

When my son was teaching fifth grade, he had his kids recommend books for him to read. It greatly broadened his background, and I’d suggest not only that other teachers should do this, but maybe also the admissions staffs of colleges that enroll illiterate applicants.

I’m assuming that one of the Mastroiannis saw some good Samaritan changing a tire for somebody, but it happens all the time and pretty much always has, at least out here in the sticks.

A few years ago, I stopped for someone on the Interstate with a smoking car that turned into a fire, and by the time I had them out of the car and safe on the shoulder, there were half a dozen people — mostly volunteer firefighters — taking control of the scene, and my mother had a similar experience when she slid into a ditch in a snowstorm.

Apparently Lincoln never said “If you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will,” but it’s true anyway, and it’s also true that if you look for the good, you’ll find that, too.

Though, according to Matthew, Jesus did say “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

Seek the good, and try to be the good, but keep your head on a swivel.

I said that.

First Dog joins in the celebration of Valerie the Dachsund’s rescue and also wonders how much of a favor anybody was doing her.

He’s not a hit-and-run commentator, either, and had already alerted us to Valerie’s plight, if that’s what it was.

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Comments 11

  1. Mike-

    I think the point of the Dogs of C-Kennel panel was that the conservative (man, big truck, American Flag baseball cap) was helping a liberal (woman, electric vehicle, fashionable dress and hat) so that in one-on-one situations, people are still kind to each other.

    1. Could be, but I see it all the time, which is why I said I assume it was a response to something they’d seen. A reminder more than a revelation.

  2. PRIVATE EYE has been around for over 2/3rds of a century and has outlasted pretty much every humor magazine that ever existed. I know that PUNCH was published from 1841 to 2002, but it’s gone, and PI isn’t. There have been many, many imitations, but they’re all gone, too.

    Also, the technique used on the PI cover is called “Fumetti.” Fumetti is an Italian word (literally “little puffs of smoke”, in reference to the word balloons), and was a feature of a lot of political humor magazines in the 1960s and ’70s.

  3. Since Canada is the 51st state, let’s elect Mark Carney to the presidency.

  4. I thought this was supposed to be humor? That Mr. Fitz comic is downright depressing.

    And yes, the ongoing goal of the past 25 years has been to make children into mindless little drones who just shut up and do what they’re told. The Trump Admin isn’t even shy about wanting to get rid of the Department of Education, and that’s not even getting into those who gladly ban and burn every book they can get their mitts on.

    Growing up in the 90s, we very much were encouraged to read as much as possible, even in our free time. We even had the “Book It!” program where you could earn personal-pan pizzas.

    Sadly, I don’t read as much as I used to. Well, unless you count internet articles (which I don’t).
    One of the changes I plan to make as the year progresses is to get back into libraries and book stores (of which there aren’t very many left, mind you.)

  5. It’s a (big) shame that Mr. Fitz didn’t have that ounce more courage to call out the Republican politicians who have been responsible for dumbing down public education for the past 25 to 30 years under the guise of standardized tests and creating the false criteria of those scored to judge how a school – and the teacher(s) is doing.
    I taught in public schools in NJ and CT from 1966 to 2001 and then (after a break) subbed in the local high school for ten years until the pandemic hit and the system shout down for a while. I watched this happen the entire time I taught and saw first hand how it was Republican politicians who pushed for the testing. It seems to me that the issue of the Republican Party becoming authoritarian is not something we can blame on Trump as it’s been going on since Nixon or before.

    1. Tell me you never read Mr Fitz without telling me you never read Mr Fitz

      He did more than a quarter century of daily strips commenting and criticizing education and wrote several books to help teachers do their job more efficiently. He may not have directly lobbied politicians but he provided a great deal of comfort to teachers who struggled with rules and regulations that undermined their efforts. He’s an educational hero.

      1. Thanks! You made my day. Teaching has only gotten more challenging this year – partially because I’m getting older. I needed a boost tody!

  6. re: tariffs and Amazon: today on NPR I heard a reporter refer to “import taxes.” This is encouraging – developing a more accurate description of what actually is a form of federal sales tax.

  7. My last principal noted in my evaluation that there were books in my fifth grade classroom library that were above grade level. He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

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