CSotD: Wednesday Short Takes
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The whole world was watching, but French cartoonist Anne Derenne captured it best.
I'll come back to this after things settle in a little and a few more cartoons have appeared, but, in the meantime, she's worked past the nonsensical rhetoric and seized upon the kernel of what that speech was about.
We can parse the specifics, but I think, for now, the important thing is to stop comparing Kim and Trump on any level except that they both throw around tough talk for the benefit of their fanbase and not because they expect to have to live up to any of it.
Unless you're beating the drum for a war someone else's kids will die in, the way you did when Saddam was making blowhard speeches for his people.
Oh, and, if this is just how General Kelly listens intently, he's gonna have to knock it off, because it sure looks like "Oh Sweet Jesus!" to the onlookers.
And we know you didn't put "Rocket Man" in the text, so, when you do this, it makes us wonder what else is being said that you didn't approve.
Meanwhile, I think Derenne has it right and that what the rest of the world saw was one more example of the United States declaring itself both the center of, and the default for, the world and possibly the universe.
Which is I guess what people who talk like tough little 12-year-old boys think MAGA should mean.
We'll get back to this.
Let's explore some funny now instead.
Modernity in the living room
I missed the Emmies because I didn't want to watch them because I don't watch enough TV to recognize most of whoever they were going to honor.
This, I hasten to add, does not make me special, which I point out because there are people who brag about not knowing what's going on in the world as if it were a badge of intelligence.
I admit my ignorance of pop culture; I don't embrace it.
In any case, today's Barn cracked me up mostly because flat screen TVs are a reality that not every cartoonist has begun to deal with.
Make My Bumper Great Again
Not to move away from Dear Leader and his entourage entirely, here's Sheldon's view of bumperstickers, which is aligned with my dictum that more than three is a cry for help.
Dave Kellett has pretty much abandoned the original strip in favor of other things — primarily Drive — but he uses the website to post interesting bits of this and that, occasionally featuring Sheldon, and so, though I miss the strip itself, it's still well worth keeping on my list of stopovers.
In this case, there's a guy on a corner near my apartment who has an accountant office in his building, but has a van in the driveway that proclaims a church on the sides and a desperate need for antipsychotics on the back.
He's got stickers for every (in)conceivable right-fringe screwball lunatic obsession covered back there, from getting rid of healthcare to getting out of the United Nations, and I actually take the dog on a slightly different route to the Rail Trail to avoid walking past his office and seeing this homage to insanity.
Though I'm tempted to sneak in one more bumpersticker and see how long it would last before he saw it.
Something like "I (heart) Nancy Pelosi" or "Immigrants built this country."
But I don't want to walk by and see the paramedics parked out there.
E Pluribus Nihil
I got a laugh by proxy from Dustin today, because I had the great good luck to finish college before assigning group projects became a thing.
I have heard plenty of horror stories, however, and I gather that I just got out in time, because my little sister did a "group project" in her MBA program, by which I mean she did the project and the others pretty much handled it as depicted here. And I've heard it over and over again since, from students in high school on up.
I like the idea that sharing information is not cheating, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that goofing off and taking the grade for someone else's effort is, indeed, cheating.
All of which suggests that, if you rely on an MBA to handle something important for you, there's only a one-in-four chance that you picked the Megan and a much better chance that your help comes from one of the other duly-accredited three.
The only group project I was ever assigned to came in an art class, when we were divided into pairs and told to select a part of the soon-to-be-torn-down fieldhouse and therein create a conceptual installment.
My partner and I chose a bathroom.
Then I went up to the Michigan Dunes to record waves lapping at the shore and had my wife read the begats from the Book of Matthew over it, along with an acoustic guitar playing the chords to "Atlantis."
We put a coffin on the door of the stall, then draped the interior in plastic spray-painted uterine pink, and placed a telephone omphalos inside.
This was based on a section of Ulysses, which we'd read in another class, but most of the people who came through in the Grand Unveiling of Projects didn't know that, and were somewhat perplexed by sitting on a toilet and picking up a phone and hearing a woman reciting geneologies of ancient Jews with Donovan and waves as accompaniment.
We were not particularly dismayed by the number of people who didn't get it — What good is a piece of conceptual art if everyone gets it? — but we were surprised at the number of people who were totally flummoxed by the notion of sitting on a toilet without dropping their pants.
Thus the performers became the performed upon!
Here. Let the waters flow through your mortal soul …
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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