CSotD: The Monster at the end of This Humpday
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The monster at the start of this Humpday is Ulysses, and Ruben Bolling provides a chance for me to link to my classic examination of books everybody references and nobody has read.
Twain wrote that a classic is “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read,” which I would modify to say “something that everybody wants you to think they’ve read,” for which proof click the link.
For my part, I like big books and I cannot lie. It may be related to the reason, when I was a kid and we’d visit the city, I’d order things like frog legs and escargot, because I wondered why anyone would. It’s similar to why I was eager to visit Yellowstone: I wanted to see what all the excitement was about, and in that case it was well-deserved and I’ve been back.
I’ve also read Ulysses twice and War and Peace more than half a dozen times, but I’m not ashamed of having bailed out on the Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick. This not the Clean Plate Club, and, as my mother would say when someone rejected an exotic food, “More for the rest of us!”
I’m in the downsizing phase of life and have donated several boxes of books — some of which I’ve read, some of which I haven’t, none of which I planned to pick up again — to a local nonprofit used-book store. Recirculation is an advantage of print over Kindle.
Before I step off my soap box, I’m grateful to Lalo Alcaraz for his series on graduation, which continues at GoComics, because it gives me a chance to comment without specific rudeness on something I keep seeing on social media: people congratulating kids for finishing random levels of elementary school, with formal ceremonies and hoopla far beyond its significance. It seems like handing out participation trophies.
Granted, there are still families where a kid can be the first to graduate from high school, and that absolutely merits a party. Graduation’s also often the point when the little bird leaves the nest.
But eighth grade graduation is a remnant of the days when that was where education ended for most people, and unless you take a long time getting there, truancy laws in most states today require you to show up for ninth grade the next September.
Seems like Bravo got sent to the park-and-wait section once too many times. Fast food used to be take-it-or-leave it, but then Wendy’s and Burger King got into “have it your way” and even drive-thru food was no longer fast.
Where I’d fault Bravo’s cartoon is that they’re never waiting for the fries and I wish they were. Instead, they’re waiting for the burger, and “efficiency” means putting fries in the bag in the meantime, so they can be room temperature by the time you get them.
Retirement has solved the problem for me, since I’m no longer driving around trying to grab sustenance between stops. Any not-so-fast food I get now is infrequent and my own damn fault.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I wonder if we’ll ever see budget airlines again? It’s not as if fuel prices are going to fall very soon or very much, while, in the “I’m so old …” category, I’m so old that I remember pre-monopolistic days, when we had several airlines competing against each other.
When I was moving back East in 1987, I used People Express to pop back and forth between Colorado and Vermont because it was cheap, but also because my new job hadn’t started yet, so it didn’t matter how long I sat in Newark or O’Hare. If your schedule mattered more than the price, however, you flew the big boys.
The no-idiots section is a joke, but it’s not long since I first booked a trip to find that seats were extra. And it’s not as if they gave you the option of strap-hanging in the aisle.
We’re all in the idiots section now.
Speaking of olden times, I gather Rall is critiquing Trump’s running up of the deficit, but I’m using it on Humpday as a reminder of the Golden Age of Student Credit. After all, Trump didn’t invent this cavalier attitude towards debt.
Back around 1970 the credit card companies had the brilliant idea of sending unsolicited credit cards to college seniors.
It turned out to be a bad deal for the companies, but great fun for the students, since the bills they ran up were basically uncollectible. Many of the cardholders were still under 21, the legal age then for contracts, and others swapped cards so that the person purchasing pizza or gasoline was not the person whose name was on the card.
And the way a merchant knew a card was bad was by checking in a booklet of tiny little numbers that came out once a month and so was invariably about three months behind.
Who’s in your wallet?
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
This can sure be an easy job, if you collect the right cartoons so that they answer each other.
Constant Readers will see that Sipress agrees with my take on Scripture — which most scholars would also endorse — that the stories are folkloric and not intended either as history or as science.
I’ve often wondered if anyone in Ancient Greece actually thought there were giant people on Olympus doling out rewards and punishments and thunderbolts, but I’m quite certain that we’re more comfortable dismissing their stories as folklore than we are applying the same logic to our own.
Meanwhile, I believe positive thought is good for the psyche, but that posting affirmations around your house only overcomes attitude so much. The collection of abandoned crutches at shrines like Lourdes is evidence of how much believing can benefit a person inclined towards faith, but it would be cynical and cruel to conduct six-month follow-ups.
Much better to agree with Roberts that life remains a mystery.
For my part, I’m willing to put our future, and the future of the space program, in the capable hands of little, furry Grover. He’s the most trustworthy celebrity I know of.
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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