CSotD: Overthinking Things
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I understand Sunday’s strip, but I don’t get it. That is, I’m sure kids enjoyed having their cell phones in class, but I haven’t heard a lot of complaints from kids in the states that have banned them.
I was fortunate enough that, while I spent a dozen years or so going into classrooms, those jobs ended in 2006, before cell phones were a large factor. I mostly had to deal with the guys who would come into class, put their heads on their desks and doze off.
Even in those early days, though, some teachers had caddies that students deposited their phones into as they entered the room, while other schools required phones to be kept in lockers. Phones in class were confiscated and schools often required a parent to retrieve them.
Unsurprisingly, this morphed into a kind of Ferris Bueller level of resistance, and I learned about mosquito ringtones from my granddaughters. For the uninitiated, this is a ringtone at a frequency adults cannot hear, mostly used to alert students that they’re getting a text message so they can hold their phone under their desk and have a conversation during class.
However, the bans seem to be accepted on the same level as rules against eating at your desk or wearing crop-tops. School has a lot of rules that aren’t much fun but are greeted with a shrug, and the phone bans seem to fall into that crowded category.
It’s rare that Frazz and Caulfield both miss the point IMHO, but I don’t see much connection between the harvest moon and Thanksgiving, though the connection between harvest time and giving thanks is self-evident.
The Iroquois divided the year into 13 moons, but, as this webpage indicates, they were grateful for each one, and had several moons in late summer and autumn that celebrated the food of the season. And they didn’t just mark one day: The Iroquois, the MikMak and other Woodland People used to head to certain bountiful, largely untrodden places at this time of year for an extended period, to pick berries, harvest nuts and put up food for the winter. Some still do.
I don’t know why the Canadians celebrate it this month nor is there any reason we celebrate it next month, but this might be a better world if we were grateful with every moon, instead of once a year.
I suspect the American tradition about Pilgrims and Indians is a load of hooey meant to attract immigrants to work in our factories and grow our food, knowing that they, too, would be welcomed. Which makes it ironic that the people who defend that myth are the same ones trying to expel immigrants.
November 3 falls roughly midway between Canadian and American thanksgivings, and, if the polls are accurate we’ll both be feeling grateful by November 26.
Speaking of Canadians, and of the season, Whamond was the subject of a lengthy Bored Panda collection of his cartoons this past week, and if that’s not enough, they also posted an extensive list of his works in June.
But wait! That’s not all!
He’s also been chosen to illustrate this Advent calendar for Rogers’ Chocolate, which matters because Canadians take chocolate more seriously than we do, and Rogers offers a choice of milk chocolate or dark chocolate, plus it’s sustainable cocoa, so the only guilt will be when you don’t tell the kids you got one and just eat it all yourself.
Also he’s got a book coming out in three weeks.
Slacker.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Lester doesn’t doubt that Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill, and even has one of the homely women who care about such things point out that she had repeatedly asked for help, though his implication that two men could plead postpartum psychosis doesn’t suggest that he accepted that other woman’s advice to listen.
Rather, he rejects the tdea that mentally ill people might not be responsible for their extreme actions and should be punished.
Kelley, meanwhile, raises an interesting point about people not wanting to disrobe in front of anyone who might find them sexually attractive. Transexual women may be attracted to either men or women, but people who fret over trans women in women’s locker rooms don’t seem to consider the possibility of a lesbian also being present.
Lesbians in women’s sports? Don’t be silly!
Let’s take a more enlightened look at things:
National Coming Out Day is October 11, but Berge offers a preview of his strip for the day, which contains a comforting level of “So what?” in that I know a lot of people who came out only to discover that their families had figured things out well before there was an announcement.
I’d love to see a survey on this, because I know it can also be traumatic and sometimes genuinely brutal. I ran into a young actor who pinged my gaydar the moment we met, but later heard that, when he came out to his family, his father threw him out of the house, and I’m talking about someone becoming homeless at 13 or 14.
I’ve also observed the number of young LGBTQ+ cartoonists who start out with a graphic novel about “How I Came Out to My Family,” just as straight novelists seem to all write a “Collegiate Love” tome.
The best eventually find their voices and address more global issues, but it’s understandable that “write what you know” begins with that sort of adolescent thing.
F’rinstance, Scott Fitzgerald launched his career with This Side of Paradise, a first-love novel that happened to hit at a point when America was fascinated with Jazz Age youth. Granted, the moment passed, but that kickstart was what it took.
Berge’s work, by contrast, deals with sexuality from the perspective of confident maturity, and you can watch that maturing process in Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. It was initially very much about lesbians but became a cartoon about people who were lesbians. Not “who happened to be lesbians,” because sexuality is central to identity, but they also had other things in their lives.
Including a conversation that became the Bechdel Test:
Now here’s an open-ended question:
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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