CSotD: Start the Week Kvetching
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As I recall, Tempest had a button you could push that would clear the screen and let you start over, but real life isn’t like Tempest, is it?
As he suggests, we may have let things go too long, but we need to at least try. My solution is to try to wring a few laughs out of things before it’s too late.
And since we started in Nostalgialand, I’ll add that I got an extra laugh over this Lola.
My son, at the ripe old age of 8, was excited to see The Empire Strikes Back, so when a friend who had seen it said he wanted to tell him something about it, he told him not to.
But the kid assured him it was just one thing and it wouldn’t ruin the movie, so my son reluctantly agreed, and that was how he walked into the movie the next day already knowing the secret of Luke’s parentage.
I don’t think he ever forgave the kid. Nor should he have.
I’m not sure how mysterious this second language is. My father threw out Yiddishisms all the time, which I think was the result of growing up in the ’30s with Borscht Belt comedians dominating radio. And yesterday someone at the dog park, younger than either my father or me, brushed off his dog, saying he thought he’d seen a tick but it was only some schmutz.
You don’t have to be Jewish to speak a little Yiddish, either, and I don’t know a better word for it than schmutz.
Just being old enough to remember “Laverne and Shirley” would make you familiar with schlemiel, who, Leo Rosten would remind us, is who spills soup on the schlimazal. And here’s a midrash on the matter, in which the rabbi notes that
George Constanza, played by Jason Alexander, was the classic schlimazal and Jerry Seinfeld was the classic schlemiel.
As for kvetching at the dog park, Davis mocks the phenomenon of absent-minded people who scoop their dog and put the bag aside, meaning to pick it up on their return trip.
To hear the kvetchers, it’s an intentional act specifically aimed at offending them personally, when usually it just means the person circled back by another route or was involved in conversation and walked past it.
One problem with poop, bagged or neglected, is its semi-permanence. The jackass who roars past with his glass pack muffler and his music blasting is gone in half a minute, but dog poop is there long after the offending pooch has left.
But, please, take it personally! We have meetings about how to torture you, and we pass around your picture and a copy of your schedule.
Here’s your revenge: Get in front of me at a light and then sit for awhile after it changes. You can spend the time texting or reading War and Peace or folding laundry. It doesn’t matter. And when you are finally stirred to action, don’t be hasty: Make sure you leave at least six car-lengths between you and the car ahead of you.
Best practice is to wait until the light goes from green to yellow. That’s your signal!
Is this still a thing? I haven’t separated whites and colors in half a century, though I’d admit to having learned it the hard way back in, I think, 1972. But that was a red object that probably should have been washed by hand anyway, though I suppose eco-friendly clothes may preserve the tradition of colors running.
I used to wash white socks separately, because otherwise they bestowed little white flecks on all my dark clothes. This was back when I went to work and so cared about such things.
I got over both going to work and separating laundry.
Juxtaposition of Outdated Technology
I’ve still got a shoebox of photos, though I’ve scanned the ones that matter and I quit shooting film about 30 years ago. The shoebox I will pass on to my children, who will probably go through them all and find half a dozen that matter to them.
But I wonder if the digital files will ever be pared down, because it’s so easy to just add them to your existing files. Parenthetically, I’d note that digital photos also make divorce easier, because you can download everything onto a thumb drive without sorting who gets what.
As for uncut volumes, I’ve read enough 19th century literature and collected enough old books to know that the pages were once joined, and one kind thing to do for a friend would be to cut the pages in a book so they could read without a pen knife at hand.
Not that digital cleanup is less of a chore, if you’d prefer it to be a chore, as Arlo did in this April, 2000 strip:
“Defragging.” Yikes. That’s a lot like cutting pages.
Speaking of computers and upgrades and such, here’s a bit of good news from the courts: John Deere is being required to address complaints about its “right to repair” barriers that keep farmers from being able to fix their own equipment.
You may not have a tractor or a bailer, but a friendly outcome for consumers could be extended into all sorts of technology out of which businesses are locking their customers.
I could be That Guy and point out that, in most societies, men hunted and women gathered and that women had begun agriculture way back at the dawn of time.
But the reference seems to be a commentary on how Artificial Intelligence threatens entry-level jobs, since AI can perform the tasks whereby young graduates got a foot in the door and converted their theoretical training into actual work skills.
And we’ve long since passed the point where understanding the job was as important as having ticked off the right boxes on your resume. You’ve got to get past the HR goalies before you get an interview with anyone who knows what you’d actually be doing.
It’s a good time to be old.
We began with Andertoons and we’ll end with this earworm:
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