CSotD: More Saturday Silliness
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Indeed c’est le weekend, and while there are a lot of very important political issues to address, to quote Shakespeare or possibly Harold Pinter, “Tragedy tomorrow; Comedy tonight.”
Besides, I don’t have enough information about the president’s physical beyond the release from the White House, where they report that he’s 6’3″ and weighs 238 pounds, so imagine what NFL QB Cole Payton, who is also 6’3” would look like if he were six pounds heavier.
Looser clothing makes the comparison somewhat problematic.
Elsewhere in sports …
Here’s Aislin with an example of how French and English mingle in Montreal, including that the team is “the Canadiens” in English but “les Habitants” in French and everyone calls them the Habs.
Gazette columnist Jack Todd once described daily encounters there like two people meeting in a doorway and each shifting to let the other pass, but both repeatedly, accidentally blocking each other. I start in French, you respond in English, so I switch back to English but you’ve since switched to French and we’ll go back and forth a few times before we figure out which we’re going to use. Meanwhile, the two languages mix in the same sentences anyway.
Aislin did this cartoon knowing the Habs playoff hopes were on the line and likely to be settled after he’d turned it in but before it ran in today’s Gazette, and, alas/helas, they are indeed out. Worse than being eliminated, they were eliminated by the Carolina Hurricanes.
When I am made emperor, no city will be allowed to have an NHL franchise unless they can play one home game a year outdoors, with no refrigeration permitted. I’d ease into it by taking the league back to Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, New York and Boston, as le Bon Dieu intended.
I know, I know. But I’m done now. However, speaking of marital bliss, here’s the
Juxtaposition of the Day
When I saw that Free Range, it occurred to me that, indeed, backseat driver gags probably do go back that far, but that these days, while there were women in the Greatest Generation who never learned to drive, we have now become a nation of two-car families and if you don’t like how I’m driving, hey, do it yourself.
Then, four days later, this Tank McNamara ran, confirming my observation that backseat driving has become a unisex occupation, the difference being that not only do both parties think they could do better, but now they know they can, though I’m damned if I’m gonna switch seats and let you prove it.
Which leads us to
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
I did have that restaurant experience in Colorado on a first date with a woman who became furious when I said I was looking at newspaper jobs on the East Coast. She demanded to know why I had asked her out if I knew I was leaving, and I didn’t think, “Because I wanted to go out with you” would satisfy her objection.
We barely managed to get through that meal — and fergawdsake it was only lunch — but the next woman I went out with thought my plan sounded exciting and we carried on a long-distance romance for seven years.
So there.
Meanwhile, my ex and I would probably both agree with Wiley, though we certainly didn’t go to that first counter with any expectations of ever going to the second.
But wotthehell, we made it through more than 5,000 lunches before rebooting.
BC raises a question that falls into that category of things we should have learned in history class but didn’t.
We were told that some of Coronado’s horses escaped while he was exploring the Southwest, and that was how the Indians ended up with them. This not only whitewashes the conquistadors in general, but also provides a nicer story than you’d get by taking a closer look at the mission system.
The problem with that story is outlined in this cartoon: If you’d never seen a horse before, how would you come up with the idea of riding it instead of eating it?
Instead, how about this: Picture a couple of lonely vaqueros — native people enslaved by the missions — out in the hinterlands tending the padres’ cattle, cowhide being a major commercial export of the missions. A small hunting party stumbles on their camp and watches from a distance, astonished at the big animals the vaqueros are riding around on.
They come down into camp and offer to trade for a couple of these marvelous beasts, and ask their new friends to teach them how to handle them. Which explains something else: Indians could and did ride bareback, but they also had wooden frames that acted as saddles, and those, together with bridles, were modeled on the gear of the vaqueros.
Now jump ahead 200 years and everybody in the plains has horses and the Nez Perce, who live far from the rancherías of the Southwest, are breeding horses, developing appaloosas and maintaining detailed pedigrees.
Tribes are raiding each other to build up their herds, because horses are as big a technological transformation as iron kettles and knives, for hunting, in warfare and for helping transport the villages as Plains people follow the buffalo herds.
Makes more sense than that nonsense about Coronado’s wandering ponies, doesn’t it?
First Dog and I share a skeptical view of the Guardian’s Top 100 novels, though I outdid him with 17 books to his 12, despite, being honest, I didn’t count all the ones I’ve bailed on.
I’ve also read a lot of good novels that weren’t on the list, by obscure writers like Ivan Turgenev, Anthony Trollope, Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, and while Scott and Dumas wrote commercial potboilers, so did Fitzgerald and Dickens, who are both on there.
Such lists are only there to provoke arguments, but at least First Dog makes his objections funny.
Speaking of complaints, Pearls busts yet another taste barrier, with a joke so subb-till that readers who scream at local editors won’t know they missed a chance to be outraged.
Or why I ended with this:
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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