CSotD: Monday Miscellany
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This would normally raise questions about how benefits are adjudicated in New Zealand, which I’d probably dismiss as Not Of General Interest. Instead, however, it raises the question of how much of an aging nerd do you have to be to recognize Daleks?
We used to occasionally catch Doctor Who on CJOH-Ottawa, but didn’t watch it often enough to follow the plot. I just remember my father being highly amused at the Daleks in those days before special effects, since they seemed a lot like people wandering around in overturned garbage cans.
I bought a three-inch plastic Dalek from the dime-store junky toy assortment at Woolworth’s in Watertown, just as a curiosity and to make Dad laugh. Probably should have kept it: It would probably be worth a gazillion dollars today.
Add that to my list of lost opportunities.
Horwath is a Yank living in London, and I’ve noted a lot of unhappy commentary about hot weather over there. But this struck me in particular because I happened to watch The Naked and the Dead over the weekend, and a fellow being portrayed as a ladies’ man was cavorting with some mighty fancy painted ladies and it occurred to me that I had an active social life back in my college days, but never with anyone who wore all that stuff.
Except that on my way to school sophomore year I met a girl working the front desk of a motel in Ann Arbor and invited her to Homecoming. She’d been in a sweatshirt and jeans at the motel, but stepped off the bus in full battle-rattle with her hair done up and shellacked.
She was still the same nice person behind it all, but the whole weekend just seemed weird.
And, yes, I know that even the natural look generally involves a little touch-up, but Horwath sums it all up well.
Juxtaposition of Yesteryear
When my boys were little, I was the home parent except for about a two-year period when the younger was being born. But that was half a century ago, and I remember our questioning the move from Denver to Colorado Springs because our house payment leapt from $123 a month to $170.
At $123, our big weekend entertainment started by rummaging through the sofa cushions to find enough loose change to buy a quart of Millers, but then-wife got a better job and not only could we pay $170 a month for housing, but we could have cold duck or leapfrogmilk every night.
And I could stay home with the kids and hammer out freelance pieces that paid as much as $75 but were usually more in the $25-$50 range.
Freelancing isn’t much more lucrative these days, but housing costs have gone up to the point where not a lot of families can afford to have one parent stay home with the kids, even at modest levels.
The other point is that, while the boys quarreled now and then, we mostly had a blast during the summer, which might be an argument in favor of having the slower-maturing gender take the at-home role, since a guy in his 20s can think up some mad adventures an actual grown-up wouldn’t.
Jef Mallett is a Michigander, which I would know anyway but has particular relevance in today’s Frazz, because I would assume that, as in New Hampshire where I live now, seniors there get out of school before everyone else.
It blew my mind when my granddaughters were doing that here, because New York had Regents exams around the second or third week of June and if you didn’t take them, you didn’t graduate. In fact, I remember sweating the physics Regents because I wasn’t doing well in class and college acceptance was hanging in the balance.
I like the idea that every NYS high-school grad knows the same things about math, history and science, but I’m sympathetic to teachers who might find seniors on the brink of graduation somewhat squirrelly.
I will admit that I never found a great difference in dating Regents grads versus high-school alums from less rigorous academic backgrounds. However, I’m going to suggest that her cut-offs and t-shirt suggest someone not burdened by the hazards of melting make-up in summer.
They say — not without cause — that men tend to marry a reasonable facsimile of their mothers. In the pre-Internet days of my youth, my folks had a huge collection of books, and one of my mother’s most common phrases was “Well, let’s look it up.”
By the time she got her first computer, I was well out of the nest and married to a journalism major who, as a child, had read the encyclopedia.
This is less about Sigmund Freud than it is about Knute Rockne: When you’re used to playing at a particular level, you shouldn’t want to lessen the challenges.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Not a precise Juxtaposition, admittedly, but Breen is right to fret not just over the question of whether the grid is prepared to handle the additional burden brought about by the rush to develop data centers but over the question of why we let the grid degenerate over the last several decades.
Not like we didn’t have warnings. My aforementioned then-wife, a Colorado girl on a professional consulting trip that was her first visit to New York City, was present for the 1977 blackout and got to walk down the stairs from her hotel room and stand around in the dark listening to people screaming.
But the tie-in between the two is that, for all the agonizing over the impact of Artificial Intelligence, Benton offers a reassuring reminder that we do, indeed, live in the Idiocracy.
A people who once watched teleplays by Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky are now gushing over “the Golden Age of Television” that has given us the Masked Singer and Two Broke Girls.
Which is to say that, even if we don’t collapse the grid with all this new potential, you probably shouldn’t expect a lot.
But not to worry. The concert may have imploded, but President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho Trump is ready to fill the gap.
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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