CSotD: Law & Order – Leafblower Division
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Constant Readers know my feelings about leaf blowers, which I have often said should have governors in them so they can only run for 20 minutes a day. I’m adding another gripe, which is that I don’t know why “leaf blower” is two words when “lawnmower” is one.
However, given that I refuse to accept “livingroom” as two words, we’ll let that go for now.
In any case, while I think that, if there is a Hell, Rat is correct about who belongs there, the solution in Bliss could prove ill-advised, given that a man in Wilmington, NY, is charged with felonious assault with a leaf blower and a fellow on Cape Cod is facing armed assault charges for threatening a crew of leaf blowers with a gun to get them to stop making noise.
IANAL, but if the guy in New York is charged with assault with a deadly weapon, then the Cape Cod guy should be able to plead self-defense, since he only had one gun against several leaf blowers.
Which is probably why IANAL.
Adam@Home did an arc this past week on the horrors of what in Britain is called “wild swimming,” and what, when I was growing up, we called “swimming.” But after watching trends in comic strips for several years, I have concluded that dipping a toe into natural water is now considered at least daring if not death-defying.
Certainly, there are natural waters that aren’t so healthy. I’ve had a dose of “beaver fever” myself, and you do have to know what’s upstream before you swallow what’s downstream: When people heard which clear, fast-running creek I’d imbibed from, their pity for my plight was mixed with raucous laughter.
I made a sentimental stop at Camp Lord O’ The Flies a few years back and was astonished to find that a summer camp where you could learn to swim, canoe, sail and waterski on the lake now has a large chlorinated pool by the tennis courts.
I did see that the waterfront was still intact, but I assume they keep a full medical team waiting in case any of the little darlings come in contact with raw, unchlorinated lake water.
Speaking of the Great Outdoors, I wonder if Nate, like me, will find out in adulthood that he was ADD the whole time. If so, it will explain all sorts of things for him, one of them being how totally counterproductive “Class in the Grass” always was.
My mind could — and generally did — wander away sitting at my desk. Being outside with birds and bugs and people walking by made focusing totally impossible. I kind of wonder if anybody ever learned anything out there, but I didn’t learn much sitting inside, either.
Well, I learned all sorts of things. Just nothing in the curriculum.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This pair ran the same day, and while both cartoonists get a laugh, they also merit a sigh from anyone who has gotten into a disagreement with a partner who is more set on winning than on working out a solution.
If you respond to the charges, you’re being confrontational. If you disengage to avoid a fight, you’re refusing to deal with it.
You’ve lost the argument before even getting into whatever it was about, which is normal. The best advice on relationships I ever had was that, if you’re arguing over who left the cap off the toothpaste, your problem isn’t that somebody left the cap off the toothpaste.
Only solution then is Alt-Ctrl-Del.
Arlo & Janis is 41 years old and going through some shifts in setting and focus, so Jimmy Johnson is celebrating by replaying some of its early strips, and he’s right on both counts in his directorial remarks.
Even my 10-year-old Honda has a range indicator, and I do carry a phone, but a few years before this strip ran, I had an Opel with a broken fuel gage. My solution was to get gas when the odometer hit a multiple of 150. The system worked most of the time, which in them thar days was another example of “Close enough is good enough.”
Not sure anyone lives by that philosophy in these days of constant data.
Becky Barnicoat is emerging at the Guardian as a commentator on small moments, with enough ironic sense of self and of humor to do well at it, if not all that well at cutting her fringe, which is what in the US, or maybe in the past, we call “bangs.”
I’m at a stage where I can’t always distinguish between cultural differences and the passage of time.
In any case, the Guardian also ran an entire first-person piece by an Australian writer about cutting her own fringe, so it’s called “fringe” down there, too.
I have no opinion on this, since my fringe has now retreated to the back of my head, but I like how Barnicoat captures a female perspective without (at least so far) going for the tired pop-culture cliches of shoes and chocolate and Cosmopolitans.
I wouldn’t want a day to pass without my commenting on how two people can have the same idea, though this coincidence is separated by about 30 years. The other difference is that Whitehead shows this board actually accomplishing the impossible, while I had written that our local city council could not conspire to order a pizza. (I forget what they’d been accused of conspiring to do.)
Jon Adams illustrates a more accurate political pizza, given the current flood of gerrymandering, which we will deal with more seriously another day.
I like the kid’s expression, contrasting with his pleased papa’s, and Adams also did a nice job on Gill Fox’s iconic pizza chef.
I lugged around heavy books for Christmas break in college, but now I just slip a Fire into my pocket.
It used to be a Kindle, but my Kindle gave up the ghost and I had a Fire hanging around, so that’s what I read from, at least on the plane if not once I’m wherever I’m going.
Nobody ever gets this. Now at least you will.
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