CSotD: Taking Humor Seriously
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This Arctic Circle came the day after we were remarking that the geese seem as off-schedule as everything else this year. We’re in an extreme drought, so the foliage has been disappointing and whether it’s lousy weather or climate change, a lot has not happened on time.
But suddenly we’re getting skeins of geese, and if you’re not outside to see them, you’ll hear them from inside. They’re a welcome sign of the season.
However, I’ll disagree with Alex’s visual in the final panel because, as anyone who has been on a golf course or college campus knows, they leave turds, not whitewash, of which Petrarch (or possibly Wordsworth) wrote:
Birdie, birdie, in the sky
Dropping whitewash in my eye!
I’m no baby; I don’t cry,
But I’m sure glad that cows can’t fly.
My older sister got whitewashed by a pigeon during a game at Connie Mack when we were kids. I don’t remember who the Phillies were playing, but I sure remember that pigeon.
Juxtaposition of the Day #1
Thursday was apparently Whine-About-Airline-Seats Day, as two strips picked up on the greatest threat to modern civilization, which is the reclining seat. I contend this is a sign of how many people spring for first-class tickets, because back among the peasantry, the seats barely recline enough to take the weight off your spine, and not enough to really inconvenience anyone.
Or perhaps like those obsessed with stepping on Legos, it’s a popular thing to complain about even though it barely registers on any objective scale. It’s not even the worst thing that happens on airplanes, at least to us plain folks, as this classic TV ad reminds us:
Jonesy, on the other hand, captures our zeitgeist.
This morning’s Crabgrass got a laugh, but there’s a lot to dig into here. Kevin’s mom is a single parent, which delegates the job of goofing with Kody to big brother Kyle, but whether it’s a dad or a big brother, that kind of rough play is part of development.
Teaching tiny kids that risk can be fun helps them learn to push their own limits even beyond obvious scary things like roller coasters and into more internal and substantive forms of courageous undertaking.
Meanwhile, “dad jokes” teach a simple form of logical/illogical thinking that expands a small brain.
I’ve certainly known single moms fully capable of those interactions with their kids, but that’s how the traditional gender roles in parenting generally break. Single parents need to take on both roles of nurturing and challenging their kids.
In quite a few American Indian cultures, kids grew up in their mother’s family, but the little boys were mentored by their fathers and paternal uncles. Divorce or even a father’s death wouldn’t break those ties. It took a village to raise a child.
I was working on a fictional story set in the War of 1812 and asked a Mohawk historian if it was true that native people never spanked their children. She responded that by then, they’d had about 200 years of exposure to Europeans, but that whacking your kids around remained undesirable, although it was no longer unknown.
Speaking of whom …
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
I’m not that crazy about Indigenous Peoples’ Day, because I don’t think it should be timed to mark the point at which everything fell apart for them.
Arlo drastically soft-pedals Columbus’s faults, and this isn’t a case in which we look back 500 years and rethink things: Columbus was condemned and even imprisoned at the time for his outrageous brutality. Ferdinand pardoned him, but, come on: Ferdinand himself had launched a program against Jews and Muslims and instituted the Inquisition, so gaining his pardon was hardly an exoneration.
Let’s drop Columbus Day entirely and make Leif Eriksson Day (Oct 9) into Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The Norse were a few hundred years before the Spanish, so didn’t have the technical advantage of gunpowder. When they established settlements here, the skraelings harassed them to the point of driving them away.
Columbus, however, wasn’t responsible for the devastating diseases that wiped out vast numbers of native people, but that’s another weird story, because, at least according to Jared Diamond, those European diseases evolved out of the fact that we often lived with our livestock, if not in the same room, at least in the same building.
Breathing the same air led to exchanges of germs and viruses that evolved into problematic variants.
North American natives kept a few dogs, and those in the South kept llamas, but they didn’t sleep with them, so they weren’t swapping germs across species and building immunities to the diseases borne by those who did.
It was inevitable that the two cultures would eventually meet, and the resulting deaths by disease would have happened even if they’d become the fabulous friends portrayed in the Thanksgiving myth which we aren’t gonna deal with today.
Speaking of alien encounters, the Buckets was neatly timed to coincide with the New York Comicon, which I didn’t go to, but, had it seemed to be about comics, I might have.
Elder Son was telling me about visiting the Spam Museum, and how bizarre it was because the Hormel family takes it all very, very seriously.
He said it would be nice to open a campy version, but you’d likely be run out of town, so I told him about the two Lucy museums in Jamestown, NY, which are now a single attraction, connected such that the only way you know you’ve gone from one to the other is that it suddenly switches from cloying fandom into a fun, respectable tribute.
The latter of which includes an exhibit about her defense of Star Trek when others at Desilu wanted to shut it down, which is the immediate relevance here.
Anyway, Greg Cravens got some good laughs out of the con, and I didn’t even have to deal with Manhattan parking.
Though, if you want to really encounter “taking yourself too seriously,” ask a fan why jumping to light speed doesn’t quickly end like this, because they will explain it.
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