CSotD: Tiny Jokes
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I'm somewhat more on Janis' side than Arlo's this morning, but only slightly. I don't get the tiny house thing.
I understand downsizing. My boss in Denver just bought a condo, and thereby eliminated a diningroom, an upstairs bedroom, a full finished basement with another bedroom and full bath and a good-sized yard for which they were responsible.
And they've still got an office/guestroom for when adult son and his GF come to visit, while people in tiny houses can only accomodate very tiny guests, if at all.
I'm already in a small apartment — livingroom, kitchen, bedroom, bath and narrow walk-in closet — so I can't downsize a whole lot without going to an actual tiny house, which makes no sense.
To start with, the "cost" is generally deceptive, and not simply because they like to price them as kits and not as finished buildings.
But even one that has been competently assembled has to be somewhere, and land is not free. You are also going to want running water and electricity, and the utility companies really don't care how many square feet are involved: A hook-up costs the same.
And if your tiny house dream includes being in the woods, digging a well will cost the same: The water doesn't rise any closer to the surface for a tiny house than it does for a McMansion.
But, in that case, call me before you find out how much it costs to run a power line from the road to your isolated bit of paradise, because I want to see your face.
I've also seen the theory of keeping your tiny house on a trailer so you can move it around to all sorts of places, but that's equally impractical unless you don't want the aforementioned power and water. (The sound of a generator would drive you crazy, and you wouldn't have room to store it anyway.)
Though there is another type of tiny house has been developed with all these limitations in mind, including moving it around to places where you can rent space and they have utility hook-ups, and it's a nice compromise between Janis's little cottage and Arlo's re-purposed storage container.
It's called a singlewide. They're very well-engineered these days, because they've been improving them for decades.
They aren't cute, but, then, the appeal of cuteness wears off fast, and not just in housing.
In fact, I think the value of "cute" is pretty much limited to impressing other people who don't have to live with all the things that cute isn't.
And not just in housing.
Babies are cute, for instance, but I'm way ahead of Keith Knight on this one, because I have edited very small newspapers where "Five Generation" photos were part of the regular mix.
They featured tiny baby, very young mommy, youngish grandma, middleaged great-grandma and older great-great-grandma, and, yes, Keefe, I referred to those photos as "Salutes to Teen Pregnancy," though not in front of the folks who had brought them in.
Now I want to go watch "The Snapper" again.
If I lived in a tiny house, I'd have to sip chardonnay and watch Merchant & Ivory movies, but I don't, so I can grab a beer and enjoy a Roddy Doyle fillem.
Speaking of the cinema, my first thought on seeing today's Strange Brew was that John Deering had been watching Topkapi, but then the headset made me realize it was only Mission Impossible.
On IMDB, they describe that scene as an "homage" to Topkapi.
Yeah, like Boys in the Hood was an "homage" to Cooley High.
Note that we're still in the tiny house/singlewide conversation here, because the difference between an homage and plagiarism is only in the budget.
Speaking of tiny cute things including Mission Impossible actors, Wages of Sin made me smile today because (A) he's right, (B) it is a Betsy DeVos commentary that does not link contributions to confirmation (scroll down to yesterday's rant) and (C) it reminded me of the biggest laugh at the 2014 Kenosha Festival of Cartooning, which came when Todd Clark began his presentation by asking that the doors be closed and locked, then threw an Amway logo up on the screen.
Though I understand Nordstroms will now be carrying Amway products. Kind of a compromise they've worked out.
Change of Mood
I hate to inject something serious at this point, but I've been holding this Sarah Winifred Searle piece long enough already.
Pop over to the Nib and read the whole thing.
I've said before that I'm not a huge fan of graphic memoirs from young artists, at least not as a genre.
Part of it is my Lou Grant side, which insists that you must start out as a reporter and pound a beat for several years before you gain the perspective and wisdom to be a columnist.
And part of that, in turn, is that I wrote a collegiate novel about being in college and having a roommate and falling in love and it was about as good as all the other collegiate novels. I'm not sorry I wrote it, but it wasn't worth publishing and thank god there wasn't an Internet in those days for me to post it on because the world would simply be that much the less.
However, being young does not automatically preclude you from creating something wise and worthwhile, and this is both.
I'm particularly impressed that she does not hide behind a defensive posture of not caring, nor does she go all breezy and smartass about things, neither of which we'd believe. She's honest on a level most of us don't achieve until way after things have sorted themselves out.
This one will stick with you.
Now here's your tiny moment of tiny zen
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