CSotD: A Tranche of Stochastic Humpday Humor
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I suppose if you’re going to mock the word “stochastic,” you shouldn’t use a relevant cartoon to open the discussion. I finally looked it up because everyone has been writing about stochastic terrorism and stochastic this or that. It just means random, which is awfully close to not meaning anything, or at least, it’s close to not adding anything. It also assumes you believe things are random, but let’s put that issue off.
Anyway, there’s been quite a tranche of words nobody used before but are all over the place now, leaping out of Overton Windows in a highly stochastic something or other, and this is the time of year when people start compiling lists of “Words of the Year” and “Stories of the Year” and “Lazy Things I Write So I Can Take A Few Days Off.”
Frazz lives the good life: Everything is potentially interesting in his world, though he missed a chance to bring up a very old joke about the Mexican weather report: “Chili today and hot tamale,” which has the advantage of being ethnic without being racist.
This was considered quite funny 70 years ago, though I think that might have less to do with the era and more to do with my age at the time. We also chuckled over what spooks eat for breakfast: “Ghost Toasties and evaporated milk,” which not only relied on the audience being six years old but on Post Toasties existing, which they no longer do.
They still make canned tamales, however, doing for Mexican food what Ettore Boiardi did for Italian cuisine.
When I think of it, I realize that our parents fed us a tranche of stochastic food.
I don’t know that dogs today eat better than we did, but I think there’s a major dietary bond separating kids and dogs, because while some people cook for their dogs, a lot of people just give them the same kibble each day.
Gary Larsen once got a good laugh out of this, but there are kids who live on a similarly steady diet of chicken strips, the only variation being the shapes into which they are extruded. The chicken strips, that is. The kids are all kind of round.
The dogs, as seen in the Other Coast cartoon, remain extremely adventurous in what they’re willing to try, but somehow being raised on chicken strips doesn’t seem to spark the same swashbuckling spirit in humans.
It tempts one to take Auntie Mame more literally than she intended: Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Which is not nearly as sad as the starvation she meant: Can you even imagine Mike Johnson squeezing into that Ferrari along with Ferris, Cameron and Sloane?
When it comes to taking the family act on the road, Bravo cites sports bars, which I guess are all tuned to the local team when it plays but otherwise have random things playing on two dozen TVs, often with the sound and closed captions both off so it’s just lights and motion.
It’s as if we’re afraid of doing nothing, of being alone and quiet, and while that story about Newton and the apple is nonsense, a lot of interesting thoughts have occurred to people while they were doing nothing.
Ruben Bolling shows his age by asking this question. There was a time I got four papers a day: The Rocky Mountain News and Colorado Springs Sun in the morning, and the Denver Post and the Gazette-Telegraph in the afternoon.
First everyone switched to the morning, which killed the practice of sitting around reading the paper after dinner. Then the Sun and the Rocky went out of business. I haven’t seen the GT in a few years, but I watched the Post go from a doorstop to a pamphlet, without enough pages to divide between two people.
It’s not about print, however. It’s about audiences. It’s about knowing the public and caring what they want.
There are people willing to expand their minds and learn things, but the takeover of media by vulture capitalists has not only reduced the number of people producing material but homogenized what they write into one-size-fits-all humdrum clickbait. That’s true of the content and it’s true of management philosophy.
If Lowe’s were run by a newspaper company, the manager of the Miami store would get a memo from Corporate pointing out that the store in Minneapolis sold 200 snow blowers last January and so the manager in Miami is expected to double that mark or lose his job, since Miami has twice the population of Minneapolis.
I’m not sure about this Deflocked. I get the gag, that younger people are used to quick-shot information.
And I’ve heard grumbling about college freshmen who have never read a book, but if you’ve never read to your kids, why would they start reading on their own? If they’ve never seen you absorbed in a book, what would make them want to try one?
There are kids who live on Tik Tok to the point where you’d despair of them ever knowing anything of value. However, if they have also been taken to a lot of museums and concerts and to a variety of ethnic restaurants, they will have picked up the curiosity it takes to absorb an astonishing amount of information.
But, at the risk of making two Ferris Bueller references in one day, you have to meet the kids halfway, and droning on about Smoot-Hawley isn’t gonna grab their attention. However, you’ll note that Ferris worked harder, and learned more, on his day off than he ever would have if he’d gone to class.
Play to that energy, which involves a lot of what Obama calls “leading from behind.” Find out where people want to be and help them get there.
That might mean creating an ongoing series of eight-minute videos about the Revolution, rather than six 120-minute lectures. Or turning Alexander Hamilton into a musical in hopes of inspiring interest in the real man.
Make life more than just chicken strips at every meal.
Then relax, unclench and rejoice in whatever you’ve managed to create.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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