CSotD: An Early Humpday This Week
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Tauhid Bondia has a brilliant ability to shift between actual kids stuff and kids’ surrealistic imaginary lives, and here’s lovely blend of both. During the week, he’s been probing the real-life horror of Kevin’s mother dating their principal, but now he takes a break in a setting that happens in the kids’ minds, not the real world.
Genuinely, this is probably happening two feet off the concrete, but when we were little, there were no such restrictions. If we played a game that involved ditching our bikes, we were shot from our horses, and if we bailed out, it was from a flaming P-51, not a playground swing.
Which gives Bondia freedom to rocket back and forth between real-world kid issues and fantabulous adventures. As Shelly Duval’s character framed it in Annie Hall, “The only word for this is transplendent… it’s transplendent!”
I miss those days. One of my granddaughters, as a very small child, used to hunker down at the edge of the forest for an extended amount of time. A Mohawk holyman told my son she was able to talk to the little people, and I can’t say it was impossible. As the Irish say of fairy folk, “I don’t believe in them, but they’re there.”
I’m not sure where fantasy and reality mix, but I like Crabgrass.
No problem relating to young Shakespeare’s problem. When I was in sixth grade, we had some kind of essay contest, and I researched and wrote about one of the first Seeing Eye dogs. My teacher told me that she really liked and admired my piece, and thought it was so well written that she checked my sources to make sure I hadn’t plagiarized it, which was very flattering.
She gave me second place and presented the prize to a classmate, which certainly puzzled me. He was a good student, and eventually our salutatorian, but still.
Oh well. I have since made a living as a writer and he became a petroleum engineer in South America, so I guess things worked out for both of us.
No doubt young Will’s teacher gave better grades to that Bacon kid.
And a related gag, though a bit unlikely, given that Hemingway was a newspaper writer and known for his fastidious attention to his famously sparse prose.
However, I never saw his raw copy and until I sat in the editor’s desk I was not aware of the true meaning of “a dog’s breakfast.” Some reporters sure keep their editors busy.
On the other hand, some editors make it their business to be busy. A colleague at one paper complained to me that the editors constantly butchered his prose and did things like chopping off the last few paragraphs. I never had the problem because, having freelanced for several years, I had learned that clean copy sells better and so got in the habit of turning in stuff that rarely needed more than a nudge or two.
We were working on a two-story Sunday project together and he asked me to have a look at his piece before he submitted it. I found it so rough that instead of fixing it, I just rewrote it completely. I apologized to him for overplaying the request, but invited him to take what he wanted from it. Instead, he deleted his version and submitted mine.
The following Sunday, the story with my byline ran just as I’d written it, while the story with his byline was hacked up and had the last three graphs cut off.
A little lesson in how your reputation can affect the way you’re treated.
Juxtaposition of the Day
If you play the game right, you should be able to keep medical bills within reach. I managed to get through cancer with a final bill of somewhere around $1500, and that was because I shifted halfway through the process from Obama Care to Medicare. We need a better system and it looks as though nearly everyone else in the developed world has one.
I can’t tell you how many people I know who had accidents or illnesses overseas and were astonished to find that nobody wanted to charge them for anything. OTOH, I knew a woman from somewhere else who had the misfortunate to have her gall bladder go bad while she was visiting here, and it cost her a lot more than if she’d been at home.
Meanwhile, the Lockhorns issue is 100% valid, because those of us who are retired get a cost-of-living boost in our Social Security payments that is immediately gobbled up by the increase in our Medicare payment.
We are, like the Red Queen, running as fast as we can in order to stay in one place.
We’re starting to feel the change to autumn, and perhaps it’s time to take in your bird feeders, though that’s a minor issue as the bears begin to bulk up for winter hibernation.
Poor old Mink finally cashed in her chips, but she sure led us in a merry race. On one hand, we firmly believe that “a fed bear is a dead bear” and that nothing good comes from from people offering help to blackies. And yet they’re so damn cute that it’s hard not to give them a little something here and there. In fact, back in the Good Old Days, we’d go to the trash dumps and toss the bears marshmallows in the evening.
We’ve got a local place that takes in orphaned cubs but keeps their interaction with people to an absolute minimum.
It’s apple time here now, and local orchards donate their drops — which most commercial growers no longer process into cider — to the cubs, who do indeed need to bulk up before hibernation.
Indeed. Time to pack up your summer gear and head for the mountains and foliage. The dog-walkers will thank you for giving them back their beaches.
And while it’s getting a little chilly to lie out in the sun, you’ll be able to catch some great foliage in a few weeks. Patterson has accidentally made a very good suggestion: The Wild Center is calling from the heart of the Adirondacks.
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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