CSotD: Cultural touchpoints
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Thankyouthankyouthankyou Keith Knight for today's Knight Life. I was afraid it was just me.
I like the ACLU. But a couple of years ago, they offered a bumpersticker that said something about upholding and defending the Constitution in return for a donation, and, since I feel strongly about the Constitution and the donation was simply a cover for buying the bumpersticker, I sent them the money.
Never got the damn bumpersticker.
Instead, they accepted my "donation" as a "membership fee" and declared me one of the gang. Which, you know, I wouldn't have minded so much if the offer had been "join now and get this bumpersticker," but it hadn't been.
And I never got the damn bumpersticker anyway.
What I have gotten, repeatedly, endlessly, ever since, though three or four years have passed, has been junk mail imploring me to join up again, mail that I promise you has far exceeded in cost the value of the donation I made in the first place.
I know enough about fundraising in the nonprofit sector to know that some big grants can depend at least in part of showing an active grassroots membership.
For example, if you volunteer to answer phones during a PBS or NPR begathon at your local station, they need you to sign off on a time sheet because it demonstrates your commitment, which they can use in some grant applications, and because some funding will actually pay them specifically for volunteer time.
And a donation of even ten bucks allows them to count you as a supporter/member and thus demonstrate their reach to potential big-time donors. Though I'm not sure it's exactly fair to trick people into joining for that purpose.
Especially if you don't send them the goddam bumpersticker which would have cost a lot less than the crap you DO send them.
So anyway.
So anyway, according to Wikipedia, Keith Knight turned 47 this past summer.
Heh.
Wait a couple of years, Keefe, and see what happens when the AARP gets hold of your address.
An observation that may be over-reaching
Edison Lee on the peril of wandering salespeople. We don't have enclosed malls out here in the woods, but I do encounter these people in airports when I travel.
Fortunately, I flew a lot before the one good thing about airport security kicked in and they threw out all the Hare Krishnas and LaRouchies and Moonies, which triggers my one quibble: Orville and I are of an age, and it's an age that learned to avoid eye contact with these pests.
But, of course, Orville is the comic foil in the strip, so I'll give the Hambrocks that. There is, indeed, no fool like an old fool.
Plus, if the cell phone pests in malls are as aggressive as the credit card pests who have taken the place of the religious and political nuts in airports, avoiding eye contact may not be enough.
What made me particularly enjoy this strip was that I spent a couple of days last week sitting a vendor booth at an education convention. There were over 500 people in attendance and, I'm not kidding, I got to talk to fewer than 30 of them, nor was my experience unique. The other vendors in our area were finding the same thing.
There were some reasons like the way the convention was laid out, but one thing I noticed on the final day was how the teachers — the vast, overwhelming majority of whom were women — could walk through the area without even a hint of eye contact.
And I realized that most of the other times I've been a vendor, it has been at more general trade shows, public or trade-only, and that the largest number of contacts there have been with men.
The exception has been sitting a booth at the Colorado Association of Realtors convention, but there the women are Realtors. Put several hundred Realtors in a large space with a couple of dozen vendors and you could start fires with all the enthusiastic eye contact that's going on.
I'd like to see a study, but I don't really need one.
I do not consider this a good thing, but women in our society learn, as a defense mechanism, when to make eye contact and when not to. I suspect they were utilizing the skill purposefully to avoid sales chat, but, by instinct or intent, there it was: I started observing how they walked down the aisle, checking out the booths but expertly avoiding seeing the vendors.
I felt like a cheap sidewalk gigolo.
Your no-fool-like-an-old-fool juxtaposition of the day:
(Big Nate)
I've long since reached the point where, in working with students, I have had to switch from "your parents would remember" to "your grandparents might remember." A lot of comic strip artists need — as Lincoln Peirce and Jonathan Lemon have — to shed the denial.
Your mailbox will fill with AARP flyers whether you embrace geezerhood or run from it, and the question is only one of preserving your dignity.
Which is one helluva segue to this:
(A panel from this work-in-progress)
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