→2013→05→31→Comic Strip of the Day→CSotD: Guided practice
Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Guided practice

Published: May 31, 2013 1 minute 6 comments

One of the techniques they suggest in teacher school is to structure your lesson plans to allow time for "guided practice," which means giving the kids 10 minutes or so at the end of class time to start their homework. That way, if they get hung up on something basic to the task, they can ask you for help rather than sit at home getting nowhere.

With that theory in mind, I'm going to give you your homework now so you can get started on it:

La-na-tt-china-win-future-20130522-001
I don't feature Dave Horsey here very often because he has a blog where he places his cartoon and then says stuff about it that pretty much mirrors what I would have said. I agree with him here about why China is outperforming us more or less by default, so you might as well just go read his take.

Adding only that, on the choice between old, wizened, loony fortune tellers versus young, rather hot ones, Horsey and I are also in agreement. But it would be uncool for either of us to write about that. (See below, last item)

And speaking of loonies, that's what the Canadians call their dollar coin, because it has a picture of a loon on one side and, on the other, they've got some kind of a duck. (…)

Canada-unveils-new-90000-bill-Artizans.com_
They also have a two-dollar coin, but I don't know what they call it. What they don't have is a $90,000 bill, but the Bank of Canada does have an interest in making sure nobody can counterfeit their $90,000 bill if they ever make one, so they sent cartoonist Dan Murphy a nastygram ordering him to take down this cartoon.

Here's one place to read about it and here's another, both with hat tip to Tom Spurgeon, who specializes in sending comics aficianados to interesting places. 

The only things I would add are:

1. I remember when Dick Gregory ran for president in 1968 and passed out pretend dollar bills with his photo on them. The Secret Service made him stop but not before college students discovered how unsophisticated change machines were back then. Maybe they shipped all those 50-year-old coin vendors to Canada and maybe if you put that cartoon in one, it will dispense 90,000 loonies, in which case Bank of Canada's demand makes perfect sense.

2. Radar detectors are illegal in Quebec because they serve no function except to help people break the law. I assume, based on Bank of Canada's order, that photocopying machines and scanners are similarly outlawed up there, since it would make a lot more sense to scan a real bill than to try to cobble something together out of a cartoon.

3. If their currency really does smell like bacon, it would be back bacon, not our kind. Don't be fooled by a $90,000 bill that smells like our kind of bacon, no matter what it sounds like when you squeeze it.

Anyway, go read all about it. Bank of Canada nastygrams are funnier than anything you'll see on the comics page today, and today was a pretty good day on the comics page.

 

0x600
Liza Donnelly comments on the new poll that shows 40% of women outearn their mates, and those of you who feel I'm handing out too much homework will be glad to know she doesn't go on at length but does offer a slideshow of her cartoons on the topic.

I commented on her Facebook page yesterday that, as a journalist, I didn't feel a part of whatever controversy the media is trying to gin up over this revelation. When my kids were starting out on their careers, I had 20 years of seniority and each of them began — began — with a salary already larger than mine, which was striking in that they were a priest, a nurse and a teacher.

As for the gender issue, it's also worth noting that the priest was my stepdaughter, while the nurse and elementary school teacher were my sons. And, yes, they all had to wear shades.

I've worked for so many women that it isn't even on my radar to find these poll results intimidating. As we said back in the day, "Men of quality are not threatened by women of equality."

 

Social progress, however, is no sure thing. Somebody posted this ridiculous video yesterday, which reminded me of Dizzy Gillespie's quote, "Man, if you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." 

Anybody who contemplates the notion that a "dating coach" could help him get his act together hasn't got a prayer. Son, if it's an "act," it is, by definition, not "together."

Anyway, you've all got your homework assignments now, so let's get to it before the bell rings.

Previous Post
Another Tom Gammill Reuben Award weekend video
Next Post
CSotD: No, this won’t be on the test

Comments 6

  1. The Canadian 2 dollar coins are called toonies, of course.

  2. There was a short period of time around here where “doubloon” was used, but “toonie” eventually crushed it… linguistic blends being already on their way to overtaking puns as the lowest form of humour[*] at the time.
    [*] Really, they are. They carry the same double meanings as puns, only instead of having to find two actual words that sound alike, you just smush together whatever two words you want into a neologism.

  3. I think the toonie debuted just before I moved south. I seem to remember a problem either with the initial design or maybe just one batch. The coin has a silver (colored) outer rim surrounding a copper (colored) circle, and that center piece started falling out of coins. My solution would have been that each piece would then be worth a dollar, but that hasn’t worked since the days of Cap’n Flint.
    In any case, it’s one more example of the Canadians being too polite to muck up their lives the way we do — thanks to the fact that they don’t lie on the ground screaming and kicking their feet every time a sensible change is suggested, they’ve got dollar (and two dollar) coins, they’re on the metric system, and, as Jonathan Wing would point out, they’re “basically unarmed Americans with health coverage.”

  4. And speaking of Cap’n Flint and pieces of eight, a piece of Quebecois coin-related trivia: Because the French got kicked out in 17whatever, Quebec French was left to develop its own slang, cut off from the rest of the francophone community. While some slang — autoroute and depanneur for instance — is quite contemporary, and some other would make the Academie blanch, as in “le weekend,” there are also a couple of odd holdovers from the Olden Days when whatever coins happened to be available were as good as whatever else was available and you never knew who was going to tie up in port: Slang for a dollar, on a level with “buck,” is “piastre” and for cents, “sou.” So $2.03 would be “deux piastres, trois sous,” or, as they say in Quebec, “dupiastwasoo.”

  5. Nice of you Mike Peterson, but we do occasionally lie on the ground screaming and kicking our feet about our present “Harper Government”. And maybe one of these days we’ll actually use our kicking feet to kick this trou d’cul in his cul.

  6. Note: It isn’t that 40% of women outearn their mates. It’s that in 40% of American households, a mother is the primary breadwinner. In 25.3%, that’s because a mother is the only adult in the house. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/business/economy/women-as-family-breadwinner-on-the-rise-study-says.html
    About 24% of female-plus-male couples have a woman who earns more, and I’m sure some of those have relatively minimal income gaps, so you couldn’t call her a primary breadwinner.

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.
^ Top