CSotD: A Simple, Desultory Stabbing Paean
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Sherman's Lagoon sets the mood for today.
Or, rather, explains the mood, because I think that swordfish would be happier on Facebook, where his antisocial instincts would be appreciated.
I need a break from Facebook.
It's like the kid who keeps hitting himself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when he stops. Unless you overthink that joke and realize that he would still have incredible pain, swelling and probably some ETC or ECT or whatever the hell it is.
I'll be there again tomorrow morning, but I've created a Friends List of cartoonists which I'll simply scan for cartoons that haven't hit their sites yet.
Going to Facebook for business purposes makes it more like the old joke about the fellow at the circus who sweeps up after the elephants because he wants to be in show business.
And, as for show business, On the Fastrack has it right.
The problem being that, while Dethany seems to enjoy all that, I find it tiring and bothersome and upsetting and tedious.
Though, come to think of it, my enjoyment of actual circuses once I was an adult depended in very large part on having a small child with me who would enjoy them, such that what I was actually enjoying was his enjoyment.
And much of what I didn't enjoy was the utter pomposity and bombast and tackiness of the hoopla, plus the sense that, while I admired people's dexterity and so forth, there was little novelty in it.
Plus they spent an inordinate amount of energy trying to get my kid to beg for some ridiculously overpriced geegaw that would cease to function before we got to the car.
And an anole or a turtle or some other poor little critter who would probably make it to the car but be dead by the end of the week.
It's illegal to sell those little turtles, and for good reason, but when did that stop a carny from trying to turn a buck?
However, I'm not pleased that all this has shifted to the virtual world. It just means that your kid is in the center ring with the tigers instead of sitting watching.
Don't bring up circuses.
I might have to stab you.
Rubes ties in my pity for critters, because I'm not a huge fan of catch-and-release.
My cat used to play that game with mice, terrorizing them because it gave him a thrill, but at least he killed and ate them in the end.
Circle of life is a serious contract, and proving you can overcome some animal, tearing up its lip with a hook and forcing it into some fearful frenzy of escape instinct should end with death and consumption or what was the point?
Death may not be the most pleasant thing, but it's not sadistic.
Incidentally, the loons in Maine have caught on to "catch and release" and follow fishermen's boats, knowing a fat, exhausted trout will soon become available.
One loon feeds another, y'might say. A-yuh.
I had been primed for this line of thought by the fact that I've been rereading Osa Johnson's "I Married Adventure," about her travels with her husband, Martin, filming pre-contact natives and wild animals in Africa and the South Seas.
Last night I came across these passages about their first trip to Nairobi in 1921:
1921!
Two pages later, Percival is telling them they need to sharpen their gun skills, because, aside from the possibility of animals attacking them (given their need to get close for filming), they also needed to feed themselves and their party while in the bush.
Circle of life.
And I remember stories of little country boys being caught by their parents killing birds or chipmunks and being ordered to cook and eat their quarry, to press home the lesson that you only kill for food, not for fun.
Or, as Blaney Percival put it, not "to fatten their egos with trophies."
Which also brings to mind this Real Life Adventures from 2001, which greatly amused a friend who had been shot through the throat while seeking meat for his family by some armed city tourist who thought anything that moved in the woods was a potential trophy.
And, while we've got the guns out, Lockhorns startled me with a joke that relies on a literary principle well-known in academic circles but unexpected in the domestic comedy area.
While the preponderance of Geek Culture on-line suggests a re-write of Paul Simon's line: "He's so unhip, when you say 'Chekhov,' he thinks you're talkin' about Anton Chekhov, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture."
Finally, today's Bizarro touches a responsive chord, because the old question of a tree falling in the forest has always bothered me.
There may be no people around, but there are all sorts of critters in a forest. Even in the desert, where some people place the question, there are horned toads and scorpions and suchlike.
Fact is, you couldn't have trees in a place where they were the only lifeform.
I like the idea of trees that can talk but can't hear, partially for the picture of evolutionary futility it paints, but also because it's closer to that metaphysical puzzler you can use on little kids, which is that, when you aren't looking, trees lie down to sleep. Which they deny and then you ask them to prove you wrong.
I am pretty sure that one began in a Peanuts strip years ago. As Stephen Dedalus would say, "I am almosting it."
Yes, I know you're not supposed to overthink this riddle, that the point is to focus on the concept "What is sound?" rather than the notion that there could be a place with trees but no animals.
But, on the other hand, the problem itself relies on overthinking the concept of sound.
Don't tell me what to overthink.
I might have to stab you.
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