CSotD: Saturday Somewhat Short Takes
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Let's start the weekend with Anne and God, in which we address the critical question of how mattress sellers will mark International Vegetarian Day, my life being equally based on meaningless commemorative days and endless mattress sales.
I've noted my thing about bogus commemorative days before, but what's the deal with mattresses?
I'm not suggesting that mattresses, and the companies that make and market them, do not have an honored place within American Comic Strip Tradition.
But I have a mattress and it's a good mattress. I bought it about 20 years ago, I've moved it to a half-dozen places since and I've never had any reason to complain about it.
When I drive down the main shopping street in our town, however, I see hobo signs — those cheap paper signs formerly used almost exclusively by candidates for office — strewn along the roadside telling me of the wonderful mattress sales going on just a few yards to this direction or that. It is as if mattresses had just been discovered, or, perhaps, some new technology had made a new mattress a must-have purchase.
Granted, there are Sleep Number mattresses, which are a sort of new technology and which have inventive TV commercials such that, if I had a serious sleep issue or an unlimited amount of money to throw after non-issues, I might think about getting a Sleep Number mattress instead of, say, a second car, which is in the same price category and, I might add, equally vital to my continued happiness.
But the mattresses being relentlessly pounded into everyone's head by the hobo signs are just, y'know, semi-rigid bags of cotton stuffing or whatever.
I guess if I bothered to find out what's inside a mattress, that would sort of automatically put me in the market for a new one, but I haven't, so I'm not.
Not even on International Vegetarian Day, though that does remind me of the fellow who dreamt he was eating a giant marshmallow …
And I join Agnes and Trout in my all-consuming need for a smoothie, which, were it slightly more all-consuming, might indeed send me off with a hammer and a Baggie, because I'm certainly not going to buy, and repeatedly clean, a blender simply for the privilege of turning a couple of dollars worth of fresh fruit into 45 seconds of slurp.
Smoothies being one of those things like Cosmos and creme brule and quemoy matsu or whatever the hell that layered chocolate dessert is, where, yeah, it's a good enough thing, but it seems the appeal is more in having followed the fad than in having consumed the thing itself.
If over-priced third-rate mattresses advertised on cheap hobo signs ever achieve the fad-wonderfulness of smoothies, it's gonna be katy bar the door down by the shopping center.
Meanwhile, it's much neater and more efficient to just eat the fruit, and you get 100 percent of the fiber.
Or "fibre," if it's organic.
xkcd often gets a snicker, more often a knowing nod, but it got a genuine laff today with this salute to the conclusion of the Rosetta Mission.
The Rosetta Mission was absolutely one of the Top Five Most Bad Ass Things Ever, but there's always this one guy, and here he is.
I am dumbstruck at how much I love this strip.
And while we're on the topic of saluting the relentlessly, incurably stupid, Matt Davies captures the readiness for office of Gary Johnson.
First of all, let's be kind: I remember when Ross Perot chose former POW Admiral James Stockdale as his runningmate in 1992, setting up an honorable man for a disastrous, public face plant.
But Johnson isn't the vice-presidential candidate and he didn't get here by accident and my compassion for his ability to repeatedly humiliate himself is more than balanced by my wonder over the people on Facebook who offer sincere explanations for why he brought a badminton racquet into the batter's box.
Of course, these are the people who feel there is no real difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and so I have a lingering suspicion that, if their man did name a leader of a foreign country, they wouldn't be able to find that country on a map.
With both hands.
As Gary Clement notes, Johnson's intellectual shortcomings only provoke laughter until you stop and consider the office to which he aspires and the weight of the knowledge he so casually shrugs off.
Johnson's followers are equally insensitive to the world outside their parents' basements, and seemingly operate under the delusion that a presidential election is where you express your hopes and dreams, rather than where you make a hard choice between likely outcomes.
If their house ever caught fire, they'd stand there ignoring the buckets and garden hoses, because a fire truck would put the fire out much more efficiently, if only there were a fire truck, which there isn't.
But, they would patiently explain to all who asked and many who didn't, it's an important principle that fire trucks are the most efficient way to fight a house fire, and one must have principles.
Finally …
As Trump prepares to attack Clinton for putting up with her husband's faults, Ann Telnaes provides some examples of US Presidents who found themselves in situations of less than marital perfection. Go here and see the others.
She provides a short but telling list, though lord knows she doesn't cover them all.
For instance, she avoids roping in Rachel Jackson, an innocent victim viciously attacked in her husband's run for the White House not only because her divorce had not been properly processed when she and Andy married, but also because she was a frontier woman and not your drawingroom uppercrust political wife.
And also because dueling had become illegal in most of the US, which made it a little less risky to raise the issue than it had been in the past.
Still, the tactic hardly stood as America's finest hour, and that hasn't changed.
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