CSotD: Wednesday Very Short Takes
Skip to comments
Pros and Cons captures the post-debate mood.
Enough analysis. Enough conversation. Enough advice.
Pour the coffee.
And, if you want an opinion, here's one: Most people's analysis is about as good as their coffee.
Thank god for Sophie, and for good coffee.
Red and Rover offers no Big Issues from which to hide, but it does offer a memory.
I didn't grow up with oak trees. I guess they don't penetrate the inner Adirondacks, where fall was more of a pitter-patter of little beechnuts, to the delight of a very large cross-section of animals, from chipmunks and squirrels to deer and bear.
But when I lived in Plattsburgh, on the edge of that forest, I spent a fall in an old house on the edge of the woods where oak trees were the dominant species, and the neighbor had a camper parked at the edge of those woods. And the woods were full of flying squirrels who would come out at night and leap through the trees, dislodging the acorns which would then fall on the metal roof of the camper.
It was like living next-door to a tone-deaf steel drum band, but I kind of miss it.
Flying squirrels being an issue upon which the greatest of conservationists can differ.
Frazz delights in showing kids dance along the margins of wisdom, and I wish more people would have her skepticism over sources and could come to her clear-headed conclusion. I don't know which I dislike more: Cultural appropriation in the form of condescending fables, or finding myself in the position of having to either bite my tongue or interrupt something sincere, however ill-founded.
I do recall one curriculum guide I was writing that had to do with slavery, in which I tried, as diplomatically and gently as possible, to say that, even if there were any evidence that the song "Follow the Drinking Gourd" had existed earlier than a half-century after the Civil War, the alleged instructions were too specific to have been useful except from one location.
Fortunately, everyone was busy that year teaching how quilts were really a super secret mapping system, so that you could spend three months making a quilt in a wrench pattern to signal "Tonight!" rather than simply leaving a wrench out on the porch rail.
And the appetite for comforting bullshit continues. From that linked National Geographic story, this cheerful dismissal of scholastic rigor:
Fact or myth, people agree that the idea of a quilt code is compelling. Bonnie Browning of the American Quilter's Society in Paducah, Kentucky, said: "It makes a wonderful story."
Yes. Yes, it does.
Another cup of coffee, Sophie, and you'd better put something in this one.
Ben has been contemplating mortality, specifically the idea that he might outlive his wife.
I'd love to see the list of French euphemisms Daniel Shelton came up with for the original Quebecois version of today's strip, but the bottom line apparently cuts across cultures: We don't like the word "died."
Years ago, when obituaries were free, they were treated as news and subjected to newsroom style, in which people died. But once newspapers changed to consider them advertising space and allow people to say whatever they wanted, the "editing" of obits was reduced to checking for grammar and spelling, and nobody ever died again.
The obits came from the funeral directors, which spared us from being caught in the middle of family quarrels, and I remember one that came across my desk in which the Loved One not only didn't die, but he didn't even just go home to his Lord and Savior, either.
Angels came to Earth and swept him away to Heaven.
I called the funeral director and told him, if it happened again, to get a picture.
Finally, Susan continues to struggle with her empty-nest identity in Between Friends, and this one strikes close to home.
Yes, kid, there are mature students, and, as it happens, I dated one who went back to school the year her only daughter headed out to college. She had been Mrs. Colonel for years, and had picked up three hours here and three more there while they were being transferred around the country, but the old credits kept expiring and she wasn't getting any closer to a degree.
Now that she was on her own, she took advantage of Smith College's Ada Comstock Program and landed a fellowship to that school, where she spent four years as a full-time student and — from two hours away — I spend four years as the occasional weekend distraction.
The philosophy behind this sort of decision is based on an Ann Landers riff, which is that the answer to "But, if I go back to school now, by the time I graduate in four years, I'll be 45," is "How old will you be in four years if you don't go back to school now?"
I don't know if Susan has her degree, but, if not, she needs to contemplate that bit of wisdom.
For my part, four years of regularly dropping in on Smithies was an education, too. I didn't have to be tied to a chair and lectured, but I will admit to having some rough edges sanded away in the process.
Brace yourself, Harvey. However she resolves this identity crisis, you certainly don't have to be left behind, but you sure won't be able to stay where you are.
Comments 4
Comments are closed.