CSotD: Pour the Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs
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I’m glad to have run into this pair in this order, because Heller bucked up my spirits somewhat after Granlund’s negative take on election signs. It is indeed fall, and as much as I look forward to the foliage, this year I’m substantially happier than Heller’s semi-glum couple, looking forward to the midterms and glad we are offered a reset button every two years.
Political yard signs are indeed a sign of autumn in the United States, and, unlike the changing leaves, they’re not a sign of a coming dead season but rather a hope for new life.
So break out the Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, because it’s Saturday morning and I think we could use some laughs.
Here’s last Sunday’s Dark Side of the Horse, and I get a kick out of the way Samson plays with the English language, given that he’s a Finn. It suggests both an ease with the language and an outsider’s ability to pick out its oddities.
Finns have an international reputation for being somewhat dour, but, as with Scots and Mainers, it’s more a case of what in New England falls under the same category as the “droll Yankee.”
The trick to droll Yankee humor is to say the most ridiculous things with an absolutely straight face in an attempt to make the other person break up. Here we have Senator Olympia Snowe (D-ME) in an earnest colloquy with a state senator, as someone who was “from away” is all but falling on the sidewalk.
I was at an advantage there despite being “from away” because my grandfather was Danish and very much like Victor Borge, who at least gave away the game with a satisfied twinkle in his eye when he’d gotten off a good one.
Finns are not Scandinavians, BTW, but they are Nordic, and Scotland isn’t tropical, either, nor is Maine. Perhaps it’s the climate.
A different sort of straight-faced discussion and this not intended to provoke laughter. First time I played at the campus coffeehouse, I had carefully timed my set but hadn’t accounted for my introductions and ended up doing about twice the time I’d been given.
Fortunately for my audiences, by the time I got to the point in life where my romantic adventures began spurring existential angst, I’d learned to keep the intros short and let the music — mostly in minor chords — speak for itself.
I note, by the way, that Harry Bliss’s frequent collaborator isn’t credited on this one, since Steve Martin has long contended that you can’t play morose tunes on a banjo.
Nor is he alone in that theory.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This war is just about over. I think the early adaptors were, as in Siegel’s depiction, happy to show off, if not by posing, by showing that, hey, I’m a hip person who can use a scanner! And I’ll admit that my kids bullied me into giving it a try by mocking me for being such a Luddite.
But then we get to Noth’s cartoon, and the joke there is that the self-service scanner doesn’t have to tell anyone not to use the staffed check-out. The stores have added entire banks of self-scan that are constantly in use by shoppers of all ages and levels of hipness.
Though if Tractor Supply ever starts using them, I’ll still have to go to a tended register because my dog expects to be handed a doggy cookie and I don’t think they’ve got self-check-outs that will do that.
However …
Noth has the robot dog issue well-covered on his Substack at the moment, and you even get to vote for the one you like best.
You don’t have to be a Luddite to understand that there is a divide between people who fly all the time and people who only fly occasionally, and that critical difference is that the frequent flyers get to eat hot food while the only-occasional travelers have to settle for cold sandwiches that were assembled three weeks ago and wrapped in cardboard tortillas.
The difference is that the sandwiches are at grab-and-go places while the sit-down restaurants seem to have nobody waiting on tables and you’re supposed to already know how to use the electronic menu.
Yes, there are exceptions. To the mandatory electronic ordering at sit-down places, that is. The wraps, I think, are assembled and aged at the same sad factory somewhere.
Another confession: I wrote about new housing for a couple of years, touring various projects on a biweekly basis, and I never really learned to stand amid framing and get a clear idea of what the place would eventually look like. Until the sheetrock was up, it was all just lumber, wires and plumbing to me.
But, boy, did I learn about marketing. There were a lot of fly-by-nighters who, if you asked who they were building for, would answer “High tech,” without differentiating among the enormous variations in job descriptions, education and incomes within that vague demographic.
Others were quite targeted. One place, near a major military base, had expensive townhouses with extra long dining room walls because so many officers brought shrunks — immense German breakfronts — back from overseas. But they set up their less expensive models with mongoose-and-cobra taxidermy on wicker shelving, which units they expected to sell to dogfaces.
And then there was a condo builder who had bathrooms under a gabled roof, with no showerheads because there wasn’t space for them beneath their slanted ceilings. A group of Realtors toured the site and someone asked him about it, and he replied that a warm, relaxing bath was very nice in the morning.
“What do you take?” she asked, and he admitted he took showers.
A few years later, he was elected mayor.
Which brings us back to politics.
Juxtaposition of Equal Access
The Federal Communication Commission insists that when candidates appear on television, their opponents deserve equal access.
Recently, the administration began running ads praising its accomplishments, paid for with taxpayer money:
To avoid FCC controversy, and in the interests of trying to repair our relations with Canada, we offer this response supporting Dear Leader’s clearly apolitical public service announcement:
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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