CSotD: Short takes, with only one (promise) about the NSA
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Reruns (even ones featuring Rerun) shouldn't take up valuable real estate on the print comics page, but they're a lot of fun on the seemingly infinite Web.
Especially when they are reruns of things you didn't see the first time, like this Richard's Poor Almanac entry, kindly presented a few days early so we can all either link it, forward it, print it out or cite it or even re-cite it on the day itself.
I am not a grammar nazi, but we all have our breaking points, and I really, really hate cartoonists who try to use poems but can't master scansion. Richard Thompson credits his wife with the fact that he appears literate, and I'll accept that, though he is a master of self-deprecation.
I don't care why his poems scan, just so long as reading them doesn't make me chew my arm.
Meanwhile, limericks about Joyce and Ulysses remind me of the one by Oliver St. John Gogarty – the prototype, much to his chagrin, of Buck Mulligan in "Ulysses" — whose poetry always scanned and who wrote:
There was a young fellow named Joyce,
Who possesseth a sweet tenor voice.
He goes to the kips
With a psalm on his lips,
And biddeth the harlots rejoice.
"The kips" being the red-light district and Gogarty being not the only transparently autobiographical fellow in the novel, which is worth reading and not just for bragging rights.
And here's how far we've come in 20 years:
Today's Calvin & Hobbes classic, which is copyrighted 1993, aka, "The Good Old Days." No place to hide these days, unless you go to extremes, as in …
… the current Non Sequitur arc, in which Lucy has dragged Danae to a secure, undisclosed off-the-grid location. If horses could talk, little girls might let this happen. But I'm calling it a utopian fantasy.
On account of I'm an old fart …
… as seen in today's Arlo & Janis. I like Jimmy Johnson because he not only captures the on-going midlife crisis we apparently share, but that odd intersection of relatively well-informed adult and grumpy old man which ditto.
I don't have a smartphone for the simple nothing-to-do-with-hipness reason that I work at home and can check my email any time I want to without paying for additional access. But I recently bought a Nexus 7 for travel and for reading in bed, and am learning how to avoid touching the damn thing in ways it does not like being touched.
Go ahead and construct all the double-entendres you like. I'll wait.
Good. Not like I needed more homework anyway:
Speaking of reading in bed, friend-of-the-blog Richard Marcej has an ongoing cartoon journal that is worth checking out, and which often includes reviews of movies he's seen, though, given that the journal runs a few weeks behind, they don't appear on opening day.
Which doesn't matter to me because I end up streaming about 99.5 percent of the movies I watch anyway, and, in this case, I wasn't so much interested in seeing the movie as I have been feeling that I probably ought to re-read the novel.
I read it at 20 and found it pretty so-what, in stark contrast at that point to The Sun Also Rises and The Possessed and Great Expectations and all of Turgenev, which made me curious to see if, at a more mature age, I would feel differently.
And maybe I would, but this review pretty much sums up the way I felt about the novel first time around, and Toby Maguire hadn't even been born then, so you can't blame him.
Finally, and speaking of how far we've come:
Marshall Ramsey got a chuckle of recognition from me on this one, which was probably not his intention.
However, I had a friend who told of checking into a hotel and, when he began to put things away, opened the closet door to have a tangle of wires fall from the shelf above the hangers. No need for James Bond to perform a high-tech scan for bugs in this place.
As he was discovering this, his wife remarked that she had apparently failed to bring the keys to the luggage and that they would have to find something to use to jimmy the locks open.
Moments later, there was a knock on the door and he opened it to find a smiling bellhop with a screwdriver.
My friend, at the time, was a member of the (pre-coup) Sihanouk government of Cambodia on a diplomatic visit to Beijing.
When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge a few years later, he was ambassador to South Korea, and then-President Park Chung-hee offered him the chance to stay, but he came to the United States instead, he explained, because he didn't want to risk his daughters having to go through the same thing all over again.
Well, it's not the same thing.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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