CSotD: Best Practices
Skip to comments
Edison Lee reminds me of my responsibilities and makes me feel guilty over my failure to live up to them.
The other day, I noted that Yellowstone National Park is one of the few places that truly lives up to its billing, but I failed to provide a warning for parents: It's made of dirt, and even the parts that are made of water are contaminated with fish and frog urine.
Not to mention fish and frogs themselves, though that wouldn't be so bad if the Park Service would diaper them and wash them with antibiotic soap. But they won't, because they don't care about the health of America's children.
Fish and frogs should come individually wrapped.
I should have seen this coming. I did see this coming, and you can look back in the archives for the story, but here it is again: Back in the summer of 1968, I walked through the Lincoln Park Zoo with a friend and we came across a cow.
Not a yak or an eland or a water buffalo or some other exotic sort of cow. A Holstein.
Just as we were chuckling over it, however, a pre-school group came by and it was suddenly clear that several of these inner-city kids had never seen such a thing in their lives, nor had anyone told them where milk came from. It was also clear that some of them were having second thoughts about ever drinking milk again.
Heh. They should have seen one that hadn't been gussied up for display.
But, of course, years ago they would have and it's pretty widely accepted now that failure to expose kids to natural pathogens plays a role in the rise of allergies and asthma.
Still, you can't be too careful, which is why I saw a sign at a beach saying that small children were not allowed to go into the water unless they were wearing diapers.
Into the water, that is, of the Pacific Freaking Ocean.
Apparently, there is some massive toxic reaction when a few cc's of baby urine is mixed in with the poop, urine, sperm, afterbirth, slobber and other random by-products of sea lions, whales, gulls, flounders, crabs and other denizons of the ocean.
And I know what kinds of grown-ups these well-protected kids become because I was in the liquor store the other day when someone asked about their organic wines, which they do indeed stock.
I was polite enough to wait until he was out of earshot before suggesting that the alcohol would kill him long before the effects of the bug spray kicked in.
I've also seen organic hemp rolling papers for sale, which makes perfectly good sense.
I mean, you wouldn't want to accidentally give yourself the wrong kind of cancer, would you?
Elon's a-comin' and you better hide
Monty is starting a new story arc, and I always love storylines featuring young Sedgewick.
Though mostly I wanted to use that sub-hed, and I would hasten to point out that I mean the original Laura Nyro version, not the Three Dog Night cover.
Bad enough to expose your kid to one dog, let alone three. Fleas! Dander! Lyme Disease! Rabies!
Besides, while I'm pretty sure Laura's version is not organic, it's surely a whole lot more artisanal.
Report to the Readership
Willie 'n Ethel made me laff this morning, because I filed my income taxes over the weekend, as part of which I input my Amazon income from this blog.
I made more than a dollar a year here.
In fact, I almost made a dollar an hour!
I figured the time it takes to do a post, multiplied by 365, then figured out that I make nearly 77 cents an hour. I'm not sure that qualifies as "almost," but it's somewhat close to almost.
Which reminds me of back when I was first freelancing and was married. My wife did the taxes each year and, at some point, I justified buying something because it was tax-deductible, to which she responded that first you have to have income from which to deduct it.
Ha! I've sure shown her!
Facing out
This won't have any impact on visitors here, but I'm taking a break from Facebook for at least the rest of the month and maybe permanently.
I don't think it ever drove much traffic this direction, and I'll still tell Twitter followers that, yes, I've updated again, which isn't news. And I'll check, and link to, cartoonists whose Facebook pages are the most up-to-date record of their work.
But several months ago, I made it a practice not to visit Facebook until after I wrote the blog, because it soured my attitude. It now occurs to me to wonder why I would file the blog and then go sour my attitude for the rest of the day.
Facebook increasingly reminds me of the fading days of usenet, in which lively conversations gave way to aggravating, pointless, foolish confrontations. I was a frequent flyer there until we got into an asinine argument in which a persistent poster insisted that dairy cows are never kept in places that have hills, though that wasn't the actual breaking point.
The breaking point was an aggressive poster who kept explaining how an industry that she had never worked in functioned, correcting in harsh, self-assured terms the uninformed opinions of those who actually had.
Sounds a lot like Facebook, doesn't it?
So I'm dropping out for the rest of April, unless I read that Trump has, at the last possible moment, pulled a small child from the path of a drunk driver, in which case I'll check back to see how many people condemn him for it based on his budgetary proposals, and how many insist that the kid wouldn't have been crossing the street in the first place if Vince Foster hadn't been murdered by You-Know-Who.
Meanwhile, I'll still be right here every morning by nine Eastern.
Mahalo.
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.
Comments 5
Comments are closed.