CSotD: A Dose of Non-Topical Humor
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When I was young, our TV stations signed off at night with “The Star Spangled Banner” and “O Canada,” which made it a better world on several levels. But politics aside, when we said “There’s nothing on TV,” there really was nothing on TV.
Even when the stations were on, which, IIRC, was between 6 am and 1 am, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice. If you didn’t have a rooftop antenna, you got maybe two stations, Watertown and Kingston, and if you had an antenna, the number of choices depended on whether you had a rotor to turn it. If you didn’t, and if there was a wind storm, you might have to go up on the roof and reset it in the right direction to pull in either Ottawa, Syracuse or Burlington.
And no matter how you turned it, you couldn’t watch “Leave It To Beaver” because that was on the Almost Broadcasting Company network and there wasn’t an ABC affiliate anywhere within range.
I don’t know if it was a better world, but it felt a lot quieter.
Anyway, we’re not doing politics today, so if you want topical humor, you’ll have to go read this bizarre round-up of Dear Leader’s current speaking tour, which I will warn you is not the kind of humor that should make you laugh, though it’s the kind that should make you vote.
Halloween is coming and cartoonists are beginning to pick up on it, but I just discovered Graham Annabele lately and he seems always in the mood. If you miss Gahan Wilson and Edward Gorey, you might want to drop a bookmark here and keep that Halloween spirit all year long.
Now here’s my annual reminder that it wasn’t Charlie Brown but little Linus who cut all those eyeholes in his sheet. Linus was a toddler and the joke was his youth, not his ineptitude.
It’s also a reminder that Charles Schulz was slightly obsessed with good grammar, but while I never said “a scissors,” I learned a lot of words from Peanuts, like “deft,” which was how Snoopy snatched the blanket without Linus noticing.
Charlie Brown was more cynical than inept in those days, not quite Shelly Berman but operating similarly as a sort of Greek chorus to comment on the absurdity of life, Shelly Berman being someone whose records we played back when there was nothing on TV.
Today we have Rat to make Shelly Berman-like observations. I just had another update the other day, so I’m waiting for the update that always follows the update so they can fix the things the update screwed up. I haven’t found any flaws in the latest update, but, then, I also haven’t detected any improvements.
Sometimes I think they just have updates to remind us that they can do that.
This really did happen to me when I was running late and had to get to a meeting, back when I used to work on a desktop and only used the laptop for portability.
Not as bad as the time, back at the dawn of Windows, when, at a conference at corporate HQ, I was giving a demonstration to technophobes from the various papers in our chain on how easy it was to incorporate computers into your work and the system went down.
That really assured them that they should jump aboard this wonderful stuff.
Juxtaposition of the Day
We formed a neighborhood watch on our block decades ago, but it didn’t involve patrols, just an exchange of names and phone numbers. Mostly an “If you see something, say something” agreement.
In the early 70s, the Denver police had a program in which you could borrow an engraving pen and — I’m not making this up — inscribe your Social Security number on your TV, stereo, etc. so that, if something got stolen, they could trace it. We were a lot more profligate with SS numbers in them thar days.
But you also got decals to put on your windows that were a badge that said you were a member of Operation Identification and they worked really well, it turned out, because burglars thought they meant that a cop lived there.
A few years later, the Colorado Springs Police Department set up a program to make kids like and trust the police by having them hand out Bronco cards and talk to the kids. The kids could show the cards somewhere for candy and they’d punch a hole in it so you could keep it but not reuse it to get more candy.
It worked so well in those days of the Orange Crush that they had to call it off because kids were running into the street chasing cop cars and they were afraid one of them was going to get hit.
(I chose this one in case there are any Raiders fans reading this.)
As for taking down neighborhood watch and forming an HOA, we were talking about condos the other day and I mentioned that I don’t have to cut my lawn or shovel snow either because my landlord does that, and I don’t have to go to any meetings, either.
No politics today, so I won’t mention what excellent timing Tony Carrillo had with today’s cartoon, and the only way he could have improved it would have been to have a green and a golf flag in the background.
I don’t understand the market for these books, because I think names should mean something. I’ve got one granddaughter with the feminine equivalents of her grandfathers’ names and another named for a grandmother and great-grandmother. The Bible and literature are good sources, though a slew of girls were named Nicole after a character in Days of Our Lives, back when pregnant women were required to stay home from work.
The benefit of robots naming their kids is that binary code means they couldn’t come up with asinine creative ways to spell them that would make newspaper editors tear out their hair if the kid made the honor roll or played sports.
Though I guess you’d catch hell for getting a digit wrong, too.
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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