CSotD: It’s a Grand Day for Kvetching
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Start the day with a very old memory. In first grade, we got straws with our milk and we got butter on small plates on the cafeteria tables. In those days, O Best Beloved, the paper wrappers on straws were loose, so if you dipped one end of a wrapped straw in the butter, you could blow on the other end and shoot the wrapper up to the ceiling, where the butter would make it stick.
The ceilings were tall enough that the janitors could not just reach up there with a broom to sweep off all the straw wrappers, so the cafeteria ceiling was festooned with straw wrapper stalactites.
Straw companies now wrap their straws in tight paper, wiping out the only part of first grade that I enjoyed. Oh well. I wasn’t planning on going back anyway.
Juxtaposition of Thandi
I often pass up the requests for product and service evaluations, but having nurses in the family has given me pause, because when I mentioned declining to fill out the form for our local hospital, they were appalled and said those evaluations impacted promotions and pay.
So now I complete the ones from the hospital and don’t feel guilty about not completing others that don’t appear to judge whoever waited on me.
Good thing we didn’t have them for going to the principal’s office, though, because I was a frequent flyer in high school.
RWO notes the eventual impact of AI on readers. Part of it is, as they suggest, an inability to process writing of any length, but the other aspect hinted at is the inability to process beauty. What I’ve seen of AI writing so far is just as flat and bland as the art it produces.
However, while our gummint seems unwilling to deal with the perils of the stuff, schools are reacting and taking steps to keep kids in the real world as much as possible. Of course, they can’t keep kids from using AI at home any more than they can keep them from smoking dope in the bathroom between classes, but making an effort sends a message.
They’re imposing Band-Aid solutions that will help, like delaying when kids begin using computers in class and confiscating phones during the school day. Less homework and more in-class writing would be a genuine solution, but it would require going to longer periods on a MWF/TTh type of schedule.
They could and some do. And I would give the ones that do a very positive evaluation.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Funny that both these appeared on the same day, but even stranger that I was just involved in a conversation about having to remove your glasses for your driver’s license photo, which brought up an old joke:
Cop at traffic stop: You’re supposed to be wearing glasses.
Driver: But officer, I have contacts.
Cop: I don’t care who you know. You’re supposed to be wearing glasses.
It was funnier when contact lenses were relatively new, but now you have to remove your glasses for the picture so they can capture your irises and provide biometrics which is for Big Brother and isn’t going to have anything to do with whether you were speeding or failed to come to a complete stop at the intersection.
It’s been a long time since the DMV issued a license with anyone’s eyes closed, and young Michael may be secretly subverting the system by refusing to have his irises entered into the record.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
I’m a Loose Parts fan, but he’s got this one wrong. People who don’t pick up their dog poop don’t do it at all, much less bag it and purposely abandon it.
When you see an abandoned poop bag, it’s likely because the person meant to pick it up on the way back and either forgot and took another route, or was talking to someone and didn’t notice it, which is a good reason to use colorful bags instead of plain black ones.
As for aluminum cans, we dogwalkers pick them up. We started coming to this particular wooded park 15 years ago after Hurricane Irene wiped out another popular dog park, and our frequent foot traffic has led to less litter, including not just cans and bottles but needles, crack vials and condoms.
But here’s a solution: If you’re seeing a lot of abandoned bags, you should petition your parks service to put out more poop bins so people aren’t as tempted to leave their bags rather than tote them for an unacceptably long distance.
Friendly parks attract friendly people and friendly dogs. Both can be trained, if you make the effort.
I’m not sure when heat became a flavor, but somehow it became a Thing.
Back in the ’60s, we used to laugh over the fact that, while we considered it tacky to brag about how much you drank, it was quite common to brag about how little you had to smoke of your excellent weed. Then everybody took up hot food and life became a contest to see who could tolerate the most heat. Accordingly, actual flavor became irrelevant.
My first encounter with green chili was at a very unfancy bar in Colorado. Green is just a color, but this particular chili got its color not from tomatillos but from jalapenos, which was how I learned about food that “burns twice.” It turned me into a noncombatant in the heat wars, though I prize hot food with actual flavor.
However, I’ve noticed that our grocery stores carry “mild” and “medium” salsa and you have to really search for “hot,” which I assume means that the hot food escalation is largely over, at least out East, because if they could sell heat, they’d stock it.
You can make your own at whatever heat you prefer, and it’s easy: Making pico is a common chore for Chicano kids, which I’ll bet is how they learn to wash their hands before touching their eyes.
By the way, if you didn’t celebrate yesterday, you missed Mexican Independence Day, but you can eat the food anytime.
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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