CSotD: Pairing up with Chunky Monkey
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When I saw Harry Bliss's cartoon this morning, I thought, "How nice! I can just riff on reefer snobs and avoid all the heavy topics!"
We've got medical marijuana here in the Granite State, though there was a gap between making the shops legal and letting them actually open up and I'm not sure if it's been resolved.
But I've also been out to Colorado since they threw the gates wide open and legalized getting stoned without a prescription.
Which, by the way, reminds me of a small peeve: People who say "I experimented with drugs in the Sixties."
Sure you did.
Jonas Salk experimented with drugs. We just got stoned.
Though we were admittedly scrupulous about replicating our results.
Anyway, back when we were getting stoned and talking about how much sense it would make to legalize the stuff, and spreading false rumors about Marlboro trademarking names like "Acapulco Gold," we kind of pictured buying a pack of joints that would look like a pack of Marlboros, presumably without the filters.
Little did we know that, when it happened, it would empower those insufferable snobs who went on and on and on about the distinctions between Panama Red and Michoacan and far more exotic strains that nobody gave a damn about so long as they got you off.
But those little shops are filled with various forms of fabulous whatever and there are even columnists writing reviews as if, as Harry suggests, they were wine snobs.
Maybe I'm just old. I joke about having majored in Applied Pharmacology, but I did, as it happens, get off that bus shortly after I got my diploma, mostly because I had kids and needed to be present for them.
However, it was eased by the fact that buying grass became like getting a meal at the rescue mission: You were required to sit through a sermon, and I wasn't that hungry.
So I've walked by those places in Denver and looked inside and thought that, if I ever went back to practicing Applied Pharmacology, I'd want to buy my dope from some guy who just took the damn money and handed me a baggie.
Maybe a drive-thru at Reefer King or McStoner's.
And, speaking of having kids and needing to be responsible, Pajama Diaries cracked me up this morning because she's not only right but she left out the part that comes before, that roughly year-long period when you realize you have a kid who is about to become a driver sitting next to you in the car and you have to knock off all the shortcuts and behave yourself and set a good example.
But, yeah, the expert lectures do come fast and furious later, and so I laft.
However, to get serious for a moment and also to combine the topics of teen drivers and getting high, this encouraging note: Not only do most kids instinctively use seatbelts, but, when I was a reporter and a father of teenaged drivers in Northern New York, I heard from border officials that, when the kids would pop up to Quebec to take advantage of the lower drinking age, they really did have designated drivers and it was not unusual, on a Saturday night, to have a car come through with five kids barfing out the windows and one totally sober behind the wheel.
This was before 9/11 and I don't know how they handle it these days, but I'm betting that, when five out of six people in the group are projectile vomiting, there's not a lot of motivation to invite them inside for a secondary screening.
So anyway …
So anyway, I was gonna just write about silly stuff like that, but some other things happened:
First of all, Ann Telnaes dropped a link recommending this depressingly hilarious column by Alexandra Petri about how the illiterates in the White House were recommending a column they clearly, clearly hadn't read.
Not sure which column is funnier: The one they were touting or the one she wrote about it, but she links to the former, so you can enjoy them both.
And her confirmation that our nation is being led by a gang of totally unqualified nitwits brings us to today's Bottomliners:
I wasn't sure who had inspired the gag but I certainly have a theory and so I invited a commentary from Dr. Joanne Worley of the Beautiful Downtown Burbank Institute of Internal Laughter.
And I am pondering whether it would be safe to drive around with a bumpersticker that says, "Fire The Temp."
However, on a more serious note, I've been pondering the plight of intelligent conservatives, and, specifically, watching Scott Stantis work his way through this crisis, both in Prickly City, his daily politics-based strip, and in his editorial cartoons.
Stantis addresses the issue in this Chicago Reader interview, to which Tom Spurgeon provided a link.
It's absolutely worth the read and, while I knew Stantis was among the more thoughtful conservatives, I had not realized he had replaced the late Jeff MacNelly in Birmingham.
MacNelly for years was the answer to the question of whether there were any conservative cartoonists with a sense of humor, though I'd say a sense of humor isn't what is needed today nearly so much as a sense of perspective and, at long last, a sense of decency.
Plus this:
Over at Cartoon Movement, Ukranian cartoonist Zhenya Oliinyk offers this commentary on the Dutch elections wherein the party of race-baiter Geert Wilders was soundly defeated.
As noted in another international cartoon the other day, Wilders was being compared to Trump, which is part of how the Netherlands managed an 80% turnout for the vote.
It was truly embarrassing to hear the BBC coverage in which a Dutch voter said they didn't want to be like the Americans.
Makes me wonder if the Chunky Monkey that guy in Bliss wanted to smoke up over was the ice cream or the temp.
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