Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Worth it for the zen alone

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Mike Peterson Published: April 24, 2017 1 minute 2 comments

Dave Coverly is very old.

He's sooo old that he remembers toy surprises in cereal, as seen in today's Speed Bump.

Though he's not so old that the toy surprise in the bird feeder looks semi worth having, which makes it seem he's only my kids' age and not mine. 

At the risk of being an old man, in my day the toys in cereal were toys. They were things you might actually hang onto for weeks or months or at least until you got caught playing with them in class, because they were small and would fit in your pocket.

I particularly remember some toy dinosaurs that were some kind of semi-flexible plastic — you could tweak the horns of the triceratops — and fully three-dimensional, not flat. The colors were far from authentic, but the dinos were pretty well made and there would be some inducement to "collect the whole series" in a house where you were the only kid.

There were seven of us, not all at the toy surprise collecting age at once, but enough that turns were taken in who got the toy, the compensating factor being that the sugared cereals went faster than they would have in a house where you were the only child, so I suppose it evened out. 

My mother not only tracked whose turn it was but had a rule that we didn't open a new box until the old box was gone, so we had one sugared cereal and one non-sugared cereal going at any time and you can guess which box had a toy surprise and which didn't, though I suppose it would have made more sense to put the toy surprise in the All-Bran, because we'd have eaten the Apple Jax anyway.

Elder son got to the ripe old age of two or three without knowing any of this because we lived in Denver and there were entire aisles of the grocery store that we didn't go down. Then we moved to Colorado Springs, where Grandma lived, and it was Katy-bar-the-door.

The witch in Hansel and Gretel could have taken lessons from the way things ran at Grandma's house.

But by then the toy surprises had degraded to the point where the "surprise" was if the thing was worth digging out of the box at all, and it was a bigger surprise if it even made it away from the breakfast table. I think the cereal companies had started sending away for the "100 Civil War Soldiers" on the back of the comic books and packaging them separately.

And don't get me started on Cracker Jack.

Though perhaps there's hope, since the 11-year-old critic I sent to a Disney-on-Ice show loved the show itself but observed that the prices on concessions and souvenirs were seriously jacked up.

As James Thurber noted, "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be."

Juxtaposition of the Day (Part One)

(Soup to Nutz)

(Rubes)

No particular comment on this one except that one good reason to go on a fat-free diet is that salsa will probably wash out but ice cream will leave a grease mark, at least if it was worth it in the first place.

As will burger juice, mayonnaise, salad dressing and all sorts of good things. If we'd evolved with our mouths in the back of our heads, it wouldn't be so bad, because you could throw on a jacket and nobody'd know your shirt had permanent grease stains.

Then again, I guess having your eyes on one side of your head and your mouth on the other would only intensify the problem.

Never mind, God.

Juxtaposition of the Day (Part Two)

(Pearls Before Swine)

(Bliss)

Note that neither of these cartoons is about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, just its near-cousins.

One of the women at the dog park is for-real OCD, which is okay because she's quite open about it and even went off for six weeks once to OCD Camp and came back much improved.

So it's not funny but, at least in its lighter cases, it does have its moments. Her dog got skunked two weeks ago and it wasn't enough to just bathe it, but it also got shaved, which might be okay if it were a 'doodle or other hairy beast but it's a lab and just looks silly.

But, as said, she's aware of the issue and we can (gently) tell her when we think she's stepping over the edge. Others are hardly so lucky.

On the other hand, I'd rather be around most of them than around the guy in Pearls, and, by the way, here's a rule I'll impose when I become Emperor: If you want to buy a car larger than, say, a Toyota Corolla, you have to pass a driver's test that involves both cones and parking.

And to buy a pickup truck with a crew cab and an extended everything, you also need a commercial license and proof that you work in construction, logging or a similar occupation.

And stay the hell out of parking garages entirely.

The guy in Bliss I have no messages for except "How's it goin', brother?"

Honorable mention to Brewster Rockit, who got a matching word in, but not the concept.

Well, maybe he did. I've had managers who gave the same speech endlessly.

And, finally

Medium Large touches on the best time in history for slang. 

I wrote a series set in the '20s and included a glossary in the Teaching Guide, though I didn't lard the text with too much slang.

Here's my source, since that link won't work in its JPEG form.

And here, though a decade later, is the Grand All-Time Example of hipster slang. The exact lyrics depended on mood and taste and such.

Slim Gaillard had a pair of hands that would make a piano or music teacher weep and could make everyone else just say "Wow."

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.