CSotD: Funday Brunch
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Okay, one political comment and then we’ll move on. I liked it when you no longer had to stop to pay tolls, though whether you had a transponder or were billed by a camera, it meant there was a record of where you had been. And for that matter, if you bought gas or food with a debit or credit card, you were similarly trackable.
As I’ve said many times, the more they gather, the less they can sort. Everybody being under surveillance is the same as nobody being under surveillance.
ICE has changed that, beating and arresting people at random, but constant surveillance seems to work against them, or it does when real justice gets involved. That’s an excellent reason to vote for people who will restore law and order.
We’ll get back to the importance of voting tomorrow. Not like it’s going away.
I have to confess I haven’t been to an opera since they added subtitles, but I should tell people I don’t go to operas because the subtitles trigger my ADD and make it impossible to enjoy the show, which might be true.
When they’re well done they are helpful. Obviously, they’re a benefit on foreign films in languages you don’t speak, and when I was a reporter on the border, I worked on my French by watching a nighttime soap opera called Lance et Compte with the French subtitles switched on so I could absorb the fast-paced, slangy Quebecois dialect I’d be encountering in my work.
Incidentally, soaps are a great way to pick up a new language because the characters repeat the plot to each other in every new scene.
But I had a deaf friend who was furious that companies would spend $50,000 to film a commercial but wouldn’t kick in another $250 to add subtitles. She also used to pass along the hilarious misinterpretations when programs were using automatically generated subtitles.
As Perlman suggests, there are times when bad subtitles are worse than none at all.
I’ve never understood the contempt some people have for puns, and I suspect it’s because they’re not good at interpreting them and it makes them feel stupid. That would particularly apply to the Shaggy Dog style, in which a long, meandering story ends up with a pun. Which, BTW, at least is a payoff, as opposed to the actual Shaggy Dog story that just ends. Bathos isn’t everybody’s cup of tea.
Dark Side of the Horse does visual gags Monday through Saturday, then strings together short, sharp wordplay every Sunday. The effect is like Steven Wright, in that some is silly and some is brainy but the barrage is the point.
I don’t even have a dining table. There’s a table in the kitchen, but it’s full of plants and a toaster and there’s no chair in there anyway. However, I have a cordless keyboard and my monitor is on a mount, with my laptop at the back of the desk, so I can move the keyboard and just use the mouse while I eat. I don’t need the keyboard then because it’s rude to write with your mouth full.
Another thing about living alone: You don’t have to close the bathroom door, and I think I might worry about being obsessive-compulsive if I did. It’s just me and the dog, and sometimes she comes in and lies on the carpet, watching me. It doesn’t bother me because I watch her poop all the time.
And she doesn’t bring a plastic bag.
I don’t photograph my food, and I wish social media would invent a filter that would block food shots, though I think only Facebook features them. Each social platform has its specialties. As far as I can tell, Threads is for the under-25 crowd to complain about normal annoyances they’ll get used to dealing with when they turn 26, Xitter is for nazi-adjacent rants and Facebook is for vacation photos and pictures of food.
Okay, confession: Back in 2012, I posted a combination vacation and food shot. I’d gone back to Maine for some Gritty’s and a half dozen bugs, and I’d do it again today, except that my lobster place is closed for the season.
I particularly like Betty because she is a bright, successful professional but also just a regular schlub like the rest of us. I spend a lot of time online but there are all sorts of things I kind of know how to do, or should know how to do, but don’t. My kids, who are closer to Betty’s age than I am, can make magic happen and do things I can’t, and I’m a little frustrated knowing that I could do those things, too, except I mostly don’t want to learn how.
The solitaire punchline reminds me of when I was in marketing at a paper where marketing was in the circulation department. The circ clerks were frantically busy in the morning getting skip calls — calls from people who hadn’t gotten their paper. But after about 10 a.m., that ended and we had a half dozen people waiting for their phones to ring and looking for ways to fill the time.
Our production manager often complained that about 90% of the viruses and malware that entered our system could be traced to the circ department, but they sure had a great collection of games and screensavers.
This isn’t political except that Elon the Clown rigged up a car with rockets and fired it into the sky and we were all impressed for about the span of time it stayed up there. Then we realized it could have been a bathtub or a refrigerator and that it meant nothing.
But Arctic Circle brings up the part of flying cars that bothers me, which is that we seem to have enough trouble operating in two dimensions without killing each other, and I can’t imagine what the skies would be like if everybody had flying cars, or, for that matter, airplanes or helicopters.
Yeah, they’d invent some avoidance software. Great. That would make it like three-dimensional bumper cars.
I’ll stick with the classic method.
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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