CSotD: Gagbury Eggs
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A consumer tip from xkcd along with its own disclaimer in the form of a punchline.
And, as always, you should go back to the site for the roll-over gag.
"Gag" being operative in this discussion of Cadbury Eggs, which are kind of fun but in a candy-corn sense of "Okay, you've celebrated the season. Now go back to being sensible." As he notes, one is enough. I cannot imagine sitting down and eating three of them.
But I can readily grab a Dew. Or, at least, I could until I read this comic. This gets the message across so much more clearly than images of teaspoons of sugar.
Nobody eats teaspoons of sugar. By the time you consume sugar, it's part of something else.
Like, say, a Cadbury egg.
Then, having laid out this brilliant, effective, impactful argument, Munroe brilliantly whips it onto its head in the final panel.
And another link in the blog chain is established: Two days ago, it was about being more thoughtful through solitude. Yesterday, it was about being silly in solitude, which I described as bathos in comparison with the previous posting. And today a strip's own internal bathos becomes a factor in its selection.
One day, some Phd candidate will analyze CSOTD for a doctorate, and these chains will become a critical attribute in the dissertation.
While we wait for that scholar to emerge, here's an internal connection of no less brilliance: Cadbury eggs are covered with chocolate, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And I'm sick of chocolate.
Not of consuming it. I like chocolate. And I like good chocolate a whole lot, in part because it's not as sickly sweet as a Cadbury egg or as the semi-ersatz milk chocolate that covers a Cadbury egg.
I like chocolate, and it doesn't make me sick
But hearing about chocolate? That makes me sick.
People, it's freaking candy and, yes, it tastes good, but didn't we already know that? Do you really think you deserve the Nobel Prize for Wit because you've announced that you like chocolate?
And I know it's been revealed to have some magical ingredients that blahblahblahblahblah. But I'm old enough to remember the surfing craze, during which some medical fame vampire got his 15-minute fix by announcing that he'd been treating "surfer's knob," an announcement no less idiotic than the idea that someone will one day base a dissertation … okay, it's a little less idiotic than that.
But you get the point, and the point is that every nudnik in the neighborhood hustles to capitalize on a popular trend. There is absolutely no wit whatsoever involved in piling on an overused concept, whether it is "men won't ask for directions" or "chocolate is wonderful" or anything that has anything to do with zombies or bacon.
Or shoes.
Which brings us to Donna Lewis, whose strip "Reply All" doesn't contain everything she wants to say, so that she also posts odd little one-panel very-non-zen koans.
I despise Carrie Bradshaw, but I really like Lizzie, Lewis's main character, in large part because she is not a road map but a confession (granted one that doesn't seem to carry a large burden of repentence attached to it).
As Lewis describes her, "Lizzie has achieved success and satisfaction in life. Unfortunately, she is still ruled by her fifth-grade voice."
And her koans are so very-non-zen that Lewis has released a Kindle collection entitled, "Competitive Zen, Vol. I: The Pursuit of Becoming More Enlightened Than Anyone Around You."
While you dig under the sofa cushions for the necessary 99 cents to purchase that, here's a video/musical slide show for your amusement. And it contains as much enlightenment as a bottle of Mountain Dew, which makes it three times better for you than a Cadbury egg:
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