CSotD: The Getting of Wisdom
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Brave, crazy, whatever. Wallace reminds me that summer vacation involved not just lying in the sunshine looking for shapes in the clouds but also some truly irrational adventures. Not that we didn’t come up with some loony things the rest of the year, but in the dead of winter, we were a bit more confined by the temperatures and also it got dark fairly early.
I was glad to see Spud declare himself ready for school to start, though. Our school district was a 30-mile stretch of rural highway, so there were friends we never saw between June and September. The first week back was a reunion.
Anyway, Chappatte reminds us that there are worse things than going back to school. Between 2001 and the Taliban’s resurgence five years ago, Afghan girls got a 20-year sample of what the world could be like. It might have been kinder not to first show them the possibilities and then snatch them away.
On my twice-daily trips to the dog park, I drive by a house where an Afghan family lives. I always look to see that the kids’ bikes are still on the porch because I’m afraid for them, stuck as they are between the Scylla of ICE and the Charybdis of Kabul. The secret police are not a constant presence here, but we’ve had a few people disappeared.
As long as I’m being somewhat political, I’ll direct you to Joyce Vance’s latest Substack, in which she outlines how we managed to get to a point we left 125 years ago, when the combination of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking and American GIs being sickened by contaminated beef led to reforms which we’ve now put aside. I don’t know if Ellis Rosen’s cartoon is political or comical, but sometimes it takes mockery to wake people up.
Or repeated trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Some people are bright enough to learn from the experience of others, but perhaps not a majority, and we need a majority.
Getting a majority might be a challenge, if we’ve managed to amass a lot of people like this fellow, who, unlike Hamlet, are but sane north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, they put on their ties and go back to the office, where they can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw.
Garry Trudeau seems to be playing the Old Man here, which he didn’t used to but that was in his younger days. He was often insightful, but it didn’t seem so much like grumpiness in those days.
I don’t know how many of these foolish, over-extended proposition gamblers there really are, but they’re enough of a market to have the sports shows flooded with ads to lure them in, and both networks and teams are creating partnerships with the gambling companies to exploit them.
If you watch sports, you’ll see ads for alcohol that remind you to drink responsibly, ads for cars and trucks racing around with reminders that it’s a professional driver on a closed course, and ads for gambling that tell you to get help if you find yourself responding to the ad.
I don’t suppose Nabisco would make all those different kinds of Oreos if people weren’t buying them, but they don’t have to add disclaimers reminding you that they make you fat. I guess you’re supposed to already know that.
More marketing humor, but, again, if the product exists, it’s because the market exists, and, according to Wikipedia, Two Buck Chuck sold 800 million bottles between 2002 and 2013. I tried it, and it was okay. It was better than Ripple or Mad Dog, but that’s not high praise and, to tell the truth, I never actually tried Mad Dog, though I had plenty of Boones’ Farm in my younger days.
Two Buck Chuck was better than Booner.
However, I have a more sophisticated palate now and one of my rules is that the more creativity goes into designing the label, the less I trust the amount of skill that winds up inside the bottle.
I also believe that, once you’ve had a glass of the good stuff, your palette won’t tell you how good the next glass is. I was at a wine tasting where they had garbage pails full of water, but they were to rinse out your glass, not to swish your head around in. The latter, however, would probably work better than the former and certainly no worse.
Another Perlman with wine, and he touches here on a delicate subject. I’ve often said that each dog prepares you to be a better owner for your next dog and people tend to not only agree with that but to praise the notion.
I do not believe they would praise you for saying it about lovers, which is too bad because I would contend, admittedly based on a limited sample, that it’s true. Of course, it could be that you just become more discriminating, that the more often you hear “Danger, Will Robinson!” the more you tend to pay attention in time to avoid disaster.
I’ve known a few people, however, who should have listened to Mark Twain:
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
The only cat I’d take romantic advice from would be Mehitabel, not because she was wise but because she was fearless and went through life singing wotthehell wotthehell, perhaps not unlike this moth her friend archy met.
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
archy
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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