CSotD: Thursday Short Takes
Skip to comments
First, an observation: If "Law & Order" had been on TV in 1944, instead of beginning each episode with a bit of Lennie Briscoe's mordant wit, they'd each start with someone staring once and then fainting.
The best humor on the comics page is unintentional, and Mandrake has the right mix of absurdity and straight-out storytelling. Any sillier and it wouldn't be readable, any more serious and Lee Falk would have to beef up his plots. Good bubble gum for the brain.
And I was going to ask if people really faint that immediately, rather than a bit later as the shock sets in, but Falk didn't tell us how long it takes to stare once. Maybe she stood there for 10 minutes.
Or maybe the maid was coming from a wine-tasting, though not likely the one in today's Tina's Groove, unless she's a time-traveler.
I don't know if they even had these things in 1944, and I guess people would have to pin letters to their lapels to indicate their ration status and how much they were entitled to. "The Germans wore gray; you drank a bright rosé."
I've been to a for-real, up-town wine-tasting, despite my status as an all-but-starving writer, because my then-wife worked for a travel magazine and we went to all sorts of events for people who mattered more than we did.
I still can't grasp all the talk of undercurrents of raspberry or chocolate or whatever, but I learned to sniff the cork and swirl the glass and contemplate the sheeting and the legs and all that.
And I learned that people only really do all that if they're thinking of buying a case or two of the stuff, not at the table in a restaurant, unless they are, as Tina suggests, pretentious twits.
We had a kid on scholarship at a private elementary school and one of the fundraisers was wine-tastings more along the line of the above event, though, while there were some well-heeled parents in the crowd, there weren't a lot of $125 a bottle wines on the tables, given that the school was keeping overhead down.
They placed plastic garbage cans full of water between each table, and I discovered that it was so you could dip-and-rinse your glass between samples to get a fresh impression, and, boy, I'm glad I asked.
I thought you were supposed to bend over and swirl your head in it, for the same reason.
Juxtaposition of the Day, sort of
Today's Duplex fits nicely with a Mike Lynch posting from earlier this week, one of his odd flea market finds, and this would be an actual Juxtaposition of the Day except that we've started having hard frosts in New England and so Mike is less active in his garden and more active on his blog, so he has newer entries.
It raises the issue of "Does anyone fix TVs today?" because I remember back in 1957 when that booklet on fixing your own TV came out, when of course we fixed the TV if it stopped working, though given how far out in the country we were, it was sometimes a little hard to tell when something was wrong with the set versus vagaries of reception.
There were times we got nothing except the station from 60 miles away, which functioned as the test to see if we needed to call Sue Trombley's dad, who had a repair shop but was just as likely to come to the house.
Like Mike, I admire the draftsmanship of Frank Irwin's illustrations for this book, though the idea of repairing your own set gives me the collywobbles, since those things, at least the old cathode-ray type, do that thing of storing up electricity so that, even unplugged, they can knock you into next Tuesday if you touch the wrong part.
In any case, I was wondering if we even bother repairing TVs anymore or just swap the whole thing out, but then it occurred to me that some people pay around two grand for a TV, so I looked up "TV repair" for our area, and, boyjayzuz, they still exist, though most of them seem to be attached to major chains.
I suspect the issue is that I rarely buy a TV that costs as much as a service call.
Juxtaposition of the Coming Apocalypse
Almost like an animation, isn't it?
I stayed up for the Third Debate and I doubt it moved the needle much. Maybe there were some people who weren't sure if he was for real and it might have confirmed things for them, but I think that's probably a number on the scale of the real — not the Trumped-up — figures for voter fraud.
(Of course he believes the voter fraud stories. He believes Obama was born in Kenya.)
What it might have changed is the level of importance of voting for however many people aren't sure they're going to bother. Again, I can't imagine that's a large number and ditto with people who were still planning to vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.
If it took last night's defiant rejection of the nation (as covered in both Clay Jones's cartoon and his accompanying commentary) to get people off the fence, I've got to say they are the slowest low-information voters imaginable.
By the way, with all the fact-checking, one thing that slipped by was Clinton's claim that we've never had a losing candidate refuse to accept the vote.
While technically true, we did have that one time when they accepted the vote but then touched off a war in which 625,000 Americans died, which would be the equivalent of seven million today.
Back then, James Buchanan failed to secure the military bases and equipment in advance of the secessions, which left the traitors well-armed.
A lot of them tote guns today, but they're not nearly so prepared for an actual war.
But they've still got the flags.
Comments
Comments are closed.