CSotD: Sunday Will Often Be The Same
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Dark Side of the Horse doesn’t get a lot of exposure here because it’s not fair use to republish a cartoon without commentary, and there’s rarely anything to say except, “This made me laugh,” which doesn’t count as a critique. But it often makes me laugh.
My commentary is that the cartoonist is a Finn, and Finns are supposed to be dour, but obviously he is not. But they are also reputed to have excellent schools, and his frequent use of language, as seen here, shows a familiarity with both English and oddities of American usage.
When I lived in Colorado Springs, I volunteered as a translator for teams coming to the world junior championships in Greco-Roman wrestling at the Olympic Center. People who could help French speakers were a dime-a-dozen, so they matched me with the team from Finland, who needed me to translate about as much as they needed me to step out on the mat. My job was just to be someone local.
They were all perfectly fluent in English, and they were all funny, as long as you liked quiet, constant humor. (If you wanted pie-in-the-face mischievous laughs, you’d have hung out with the Bulgarians, who were a stitch.)
Happy Turf Roof Day
Arctic Circle is correct that a turf roof is heavy and the excess rain they capture is also heavy, and many people in conventional homes spend time and energy in winter shoveling snow off their roofs. Or suffering the consequences.
Which makes the fellow on The Other Coast seem casual in having installed one without retrofitting, because he’d have some serious issues if all he did was shovel dirt up there and plant some grass.
However, the fanciful scenario he encountered brings to mind the old folk tale of the man and woman changing places. While she is out working in the fields, he’s at wits’ end keeping up with the chaotic demands of housekeeping, and winds up with the cow grazing on the roof, tethered by a rope down the chimney and around his ankle.
Merriment ensues. Here’s a well-told Welsh version, but I’m sure there are others.
I knew someone in Northern New York with a house built into a hillside that was highly energy efficient, the drawback in my mind being that it only had windows in the front room, the rest being underground. This was some 35 years or so ago and I’ve no idea how it has weathered over the years, but it was cleverly constructed.
The above photo, however, is of a soddy, a sod house on the Great Plains in the 19th Century, which served as a home until the residents could construct a more conventional building, which might be several years, given the cost of lumber out there and the profit margins involved in homesteading.
But I don’t think anyone envisioned a soddy as their goal, and I suspect that modern dugouts and turf-roofed homes count as custom housing that, unless you’re a skilled homebuilder, comes with the costs thereof.
Arlo & Janis have gone through a significant transformation with their move from suburbia to the coast, and the strip has become a reflection on that move and the change to an older marriage.
This arc, however, reminds me of when I moved from Colorado to Northern New York and from city to country, and our adopted alleycat was appalled to find himself on the edge of wide-open fields. He had the choice of using the litter box but was put out back to relieve himself, which in his mind meant going around the house close to the foundation and begging to come back in at the front door.
Some of his discomfort with the new digs likely came because on our first day there, he seems to have sought the familiarity of the Volkswagen camper, which I discovered after driving to town and finding him wandering around the store’s parking lot. He had apparently made the six-mile drive on the Interstate while clinging to the undercarriage.
Cats are very strange animals, but I think living with people makes them even stranger.
Juxtaposition of the Day
In addition to being Turf Roof Day, it’s apparently also Stand Up to Political Correctness Day, and I start by pointing out that it ain’t the liberals who are subverting our 250th Anniversary. We’ll deal with that another day, however.
There certainly are people who take themselves way too seriously, but they live on both sides of the political spectrum, and the right has been well-represented with irrational crazies at school board meetings, who also pick on the tiny number of transgendered people and pass laws to make them second-class citizens, and who spread lies about Haitian dietary practices to justify sending them back to a country so violently out of control that our State Department warns people not to even visit there.
Which is not to say that the left hasn’t got its fair share of obnoxious, intrusive people, imposing their views on the general population, but maybe the Census should start counting loonies by political standing, so that we can get an accurate count on who’s where among the politically correct.
I’ve Lost Count of Today’s Juxtapositions
I used to feature Madam & Eve more often before South Africa sank into a morass of political corruption that made most of the strip’s commentary too local and esoteric for a wider, predominantly American readership.
But one of the disadvantages of being a major power is that, indeed, the whole world is watching, and while South African politics can go unremarked on much of the planet, everybody sees what we’re up to. Well, obviously, the folks in Canada and Iran and Venezuela do, but the others are at least puzzled, if not directly impacted, by Dear Leader’s impulsive behavior. And everybody needs gasoline.
I don’t have an answer, except that y’all should keep laughing, because crying doesn’t change things, either, and it’s less fun.
Give us ’til November, world.
Meanwhile, it’s summer. Well, at least on our half of the globe. But you’re already watching us, right? Jump in and hang on!
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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