CSotD: Your Comic Weekly Man Strikes Again
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Not sure if anyone who’s been divorced is gonna laugh at this one. From that point of view, it’s a situation where they’re in counseling because they agree it’s gone half empty, but while Leroy wants to try to fill it back up, Loretta is no longer interested.
Pretty sure that wasn’t the intention.
Another funny/not funny, this one intentional. Trudeau doesn’t have to exaggerate to capture what’s going on. Just contract the process slightly and invent some dialogue.
We had a long discussion of this issue at the dog park yesterday. Actually, we had a long discussion that began with Dostoevsky, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, went into Derf, Ella Baron and Joe Sacco which led us to Howard Zinn and James Lowen and Ken Burns’ upcoming series on the Revolution, and included teaching American History as what I call “The Virus That Spread From Plymouth Rock,” a theory meaning we don’t teach kids about anything that happened before the white folks showed up.
That includes the fact that the Spanish had colonized much of the land a century or so before the English, but that things like the Spanish mission system — which involves both the serfdom of the vaqueros and the Pueblo Revolt — aren’t on the curriculum except as local history in those places.
It’s easy to scoop our dogs’ poop at the dog park, but, unfortunately, we don’t have as much control over the more wretched crap that is spread around, and less control now that “The Virus That Spread From Plymouth Rock” has become government policy.
And before we got into all that, we talked about the fact that you can’t buy dogfood on SNAP but it’s a good item to include in food bank donations, because there’s not much left for Rover once you’re scraped the budget to feed your kids.
And, to riff on the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, a dog will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no unquestioning devotion.
Then this morning Paul Gilligan illustrated one my theories which is that, being able to detect smells at one part per trillion, and obviously making every effort to do so, a dog’s life must be like one continuous acid trip.
I covered a middle-school that devotes a week each year to studying the brain, with experts from Dartmouth and Dartmouth/Hitchcock Medical Center coming in to do classes. In one session, kids were shown models of brains from different animals, and asked to pick them out. The dog brain was easy because the part that processes scent was huge compared to the other sections.
I hope that, by contrast, hippos have relatively few odor receptors or they’d find it very hard to live with themselves. Though I guess familiarity brings with it a sense of comfort.
But going back to the acid-trip part, I ain’t buying this story arc from Zits. I’d believe it from the parents in Wallace the Brave, and I might believe it from Betty and Bub, but Walt and Connie? Not a freakin’ chance. The strip is largely built around their ordinariness, and going to Burning Man at all, much less three times, demonstrates an immersion in the counterculture that’s implausible.
Woodstock I’d believe, because it took place on the edge of suburbia and attracted a lot of relatively mainstream kids at a time when it was easy to be hip without being committed to the lifestyle. But that would make them Jeremy’s grandparents.
Betty is settled but not staid. She’s got an ear to the ground and I like the way she and Bub work together, with her acting as a tail on his kite. I’d certainly accept them as one-time hipsters because being hip — or even hep — doesn’t wear off. It just mellows.
Juxtaposition of Boy Am I Old
I know QR Codes exist, but they’re still on the list of things I don’t have to figure out. I get kind of angry when some company insists I use one of these and doesn’t provide an alternative, which can certainly also be electronic but shouldn’t require using my phone. Technology is cool but should be offered, not shoved down our throats.
Which brings us to trying a silly one, a practice I am convinced stems from the conversion from film to digital photography.
It’s not so much that, with film, each shot cost money. It’s that you had to wait a week to see the pictures, unless you had a Polaroid camera, in which case it was that each shot cost money. But the silly one where everybody makes a face is funny for about 15 minutes.
The benefit of digital photos is that you know right away if they came out. I used to tell my young reporters to take a few shots before the event they were covering started, so they could check the lighting and generally make sure their camera was working.
A lesson hard-learned when I shot a series of fabulous candids of John and Yoko in the exhibits at the opening of one of her art shows, only to find that my film had torn and I had nothing. I reloaded, but the moment had passed and I ended up with yawners from the press conference.
It didn’t occur to me to ask them to do a silly one.
This was how I played games with my boys when they were little. They used to go over to their great-grandmother’s to play checkers with her, and they always won, but the fix was in. If she hadn’t been planning to tank the games, she wouldn’t have laid in such a stock of Oreos.
When they played against Dad, they had to engage, which I felt — and still feel — was good for their brains. But I certainly didn’t go full-throttle, and I broke up with a woman because she stomped on them when we played board games.
Not the whole reason, but the final straw. I didn’t expect the kids to be mature, but I was willing to make that demand of her.
Giving a damn is a full-time job.
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