CSotD: Very Short-Take Thursday
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Greg Cravens provides the best analysis of the Batman v Superman dust-up in today's Buckets.
I have nothing to add except that sometimes "I don't get it" is an insightful response, and, in this case, we grandpas need to stick together on accounta we're right.
I'll also add that today was full of comics that I really liked but to which I have nothing in particular to add.
Pooch Cafe, for example: It's not that the gag itself put me on the floor, but the set-up is absolute genius and the punch-line totally unexpected and yet, in retrospect, unforced.
As a result, while the gag would have been good-not-great, the strip itself knocked me out of my chair.
Save this one for the How-To seminars.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Cornered)
For all the ink being expended on the Apple/FBI case, much of it is yawn-worthy. Here are two that broke through the malaise.
Mike Baldwin wasn't even addressing that specific issue, but elevates the "kids do tech for clueless parents" into a funny-cause-it's-true commentary on the futility of in-house security.
Meanwhile, Bruce Plante puts what we're all thinking into a well-paced political gag. Sure, he plays on the "kids understand tech better" cliche, but it's not a cliche if you do it well.
And here's the bottom line: All the sturm-und-drang over the person-privacy implications and the security blah blah blah and goverment intrusion yada yada boils down to these ancient words to live by:
There ain't a hoss that can't be rode; there ain't a cowboy
that can't be throwed.
Speaking of elevating the over-stated
Steve Sack gets the most out of the Bernie Bird as well as the Trump-destroys-the-GOP topic, and he's certainly not the first or only cartoonist to try it with contrasting birds.
Here's what puts him in front of the pack: A lot of people have used vultures and emphasized the threat of a Trumpian Reich, and that's a perfectly acceptable thing to remind people of.
But this isn't the venue.
Bernie is having a lot of fun with the bird moment, even launching a quick fundraiser selling "Birdie" stickers, but it's just that: A funny moment to be enjoyed. Turning it into some grave warning of imminent doom is simply out of tone.
Sack plays with the moment, not only portraying Trump as an albatross around the neck of the GOP but doing it in an absolutely ridiculous style, with a fat, pouting seabird sitting surrounded by shed feathers and looking very much like a burden rather than a threat.
Though I suppose the GOP could turn it into a fundraising thing, too.
Homer Nods
This isn't quite a violation of the Prime Directive, because I'm not being snarky. But Randall Munro is generally so spot-on with his observations, that this came as a shock.
Springs, man. Mountain springs.
Nothing wrong with the poem, only with countless fools who illustrate it with a well.
Maybe I'm being unfair: When I lived in a place at 140 feet above sea level where the tap water reeked of sulfur, I filled our water jugs weekly from a spring at about 1600 feet above sea level.
I realize not everyone has had that experience, though, of course, people fetched water from springs regularly when the poem was written.
Plus, while the headline for this segment references a poem by Alexander Pope, I was thinking of this one, which I learned as a small child:
The beer born high (born high!) in the Adirondacks,
Cool and refreshing as a mountain spring!
So light! So bright!
For modern living:
U.C., U.C., Utica Club!
Here's another thing I learned about as a kid
Longest commentary of the day is over Curtis, in which Curtis and his friend Chutney have been suspended for two weeks for fighting not each other but a pair of bullies. It was clearly self-defense, but rules are rules, after all.
Curtis is an oddity, more apt to bring a smile than a laugh as it navigates nostalgically through being a kid and being a parent, and this story arc stirs memories of three school suspensions:
The first was a son suspended for three days for "fighting" after a playful scuffle with a friend. The administration reasoned that fighting is fighting and that trying to differentiate between actual combat and this sort of giggling shoving match, why, that would undermine something or other very important, which reminds me of this classic Boondocks:
It also reminds me of a classic Spiderman episode on Electric Company, in which umpire Morgan Freeman repeatedly cites the rulebook, declaring "I can be pretty stupid when I want to be!"
Other son also was suspended for fighting, and I had to go to the junior high for a sit down with the assistant principal, who explained that, while my son was working in the cafeteria at lunch, a kid had purposely spilled something on the floor for him to clean up and instead my son spilled the perpetrator on the floor, which called for a mandatory suspension.
And then he confided that there were certainly no tears being shed in the faculty lounge over the beatdown of this particular victim, but I agreed that there was a necessary life-lesson in self-restraint involved, despite our wink and nod over the specifics.
Even more clear cut was the case in my own three-day suspension: The teacher could hardly have turned a blind eye after walking in on the son of the elementary principal and the son of the school board president smoking in the boys' room.
Like Curtis's mother, my own mom made me keep classroom hours, during which I finished "Ulysses" and wrote my senior paper on Joyce.
You can get a lot accomplished when you have nobody to talk to, fight with or sneak off for a cigarette with.
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