CSotD: Hump Day Morning Coming Down
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I’m going to assume that National Mall Walking Day began in the early 80s, since it requires the kind of enclosed shopping mall that was around in those days, but was somewhat rare before and is all but extinct today. And I’d quibble that these people aren’t mall walking, because they have packages, which suggests they were shopping. Quite a different thing.
I suppose my GF and I weren’t mall walking in 1986, either, since we weren’t huffing and puffing and throwing out our elbows dramatically. We were mall strolling.
She was my first post-divorce romance, and a pretty girl who was built like a model to such an extent that, when I saw her ability to chow down, I worried that she was bulimic. But no, she just burned it all off.
On the days my boys were at their mother’s, I’d have dinner at her place, which began with a bourbon or two and invariably included a baked potato with butter and sour cream and often lamb chops (multiple). Then we’d go to the mall for waffle cones and a stroll.
By the end of our two years together, she was delighted to have gone up to 110 pounds so she could donate blood, but I was less delighted because I hadn’t been built like a model to begin with and apparently you can’t stroll off a nightly potato-with-sour-cream.
The mall is still there and appears to be flourishing, but in most communities, people are finding other enclosed walking spaces. I understand hospitals are popular, but I’ll bet they don’t have waffle cones.
On a related point, I wanted some quick take-out the other night and decided to go to the Subway shop that would likely be less crowded. It sure was, though it’s not big enough for a Spirit temporary store to take over the space.
The small strip mall it had been in is now down to two empty spaces and a vape shop, right there on the boulevard of broken dreams.
To dip back into the late ’60s, Wiley reproduces my freshman year in college, where the required math course was calc. This put me at a disadvantage, since I hadn’t taken trig, and it took me three semesters to get through two semesters, the final one being a gift. I scored a D in summer school from the prof, who was also the baseball coach and was known as “99 Klein” for his generous grading.
My friends were astonished that he’d only given me a D, but I had earned it by showing up for class every day and never learning a damn thing. I shoulda gone to Wharton.
Betty is in the midst of an arc about participation trophies, which I gather are a thing, though I never saw one and not only did my boys play youth soccer for a dozen years or more but I was coaching them. I did get a letter in high school for being a member of the wrestling team, but given my few starts and abysmal record, I’d have gotten the horse laugh if I’d worn it.
However, even the guys who’d been stars didn’t wear their letters. That Archie Andrews stuff just wasn’t a thing in our town. Junior isn’t a teen yet but he seems to be catching on.
I was on a jury that met for three days on an assault-with-a-deadly weapon charge that was poorly presented by the prosecution and expertly defended by a public defender. When we went into deliberation, we’d have acquitted on the first straw ballot, but our foreman wanted to see all the evidence again.
But what further slowed things down was that they brought us a platter of sandwiches. Justice wasn’t denied, but it was delayed for another 15 minutes.
Which I’d feel guilty about, but if I’d been foreman, we’d have been out before lunch arrived.
Anyway, our defendant got off a lot easier than Winslow is in this week’s arc. It’s interesting that Prickly City was introduced as a less foaming-at-the-mouth conservative strip than Mallard Fillmore, because Scott Stantis has remained conservative, rather than oppositional, and he hasn’t minded tossing a few brickbats at Dear Leader.
Still, this is a strong arc that takes Trump to task for more than just being an obnoxious blowhard. Obviously, the True Believers won’t criticize their master, but the True Conservatives seem to be stepping up.
Complaint Dept #1
I hope some editor insisted on adding “James” to the first panel, because it totally torpedoes the gag. Garfield the cat doesn’t have a first name, unless his name is “Garfield Arbuckle,” and once you’ve said “James,” there’s no confusion over who you mean.
I’d rather blame an editor than Rubino or Markstein.
Complaint Dept #2
I wouldn’t have gone there. I think only a woman has standing to make that joke and I don’t think a woman would, though we’ve seen women in comics complain about hot flashes. But, whether drawn by a woman or a man, the character needs to be established and the complaint has to fall within her character.
Any menopause joke is going out on thin ice, but particularly here, since a well-established issue in TV news is that men are permitted to get old while women tend to disappear at about the age when they might be having hot flashes.
Interesting trivia: In Britain, the people who sit in front of the camera and read the news are known as “news readers.”
Which is quite neutral, compared to calling them “the talent,” as Dave Barry once explained:
In the TV business, “talent” means “not the camera, lighting, or sound people, all of whom will do exactly what they’re supposed to do every single time, but the bonehead with the pancake makeup who will make us all stay in the studio for two extra hours because he cannot remember that he is supposed to say ‘See you next time’ instead of ‘See you next week.’”
Not a complaint, just an observation
They’re right: Butch had all the best lines, but Sundance didn’t need’em.
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