→2011→04→05→Comic Strip of the Day→CSotD: Turning on, tuning in and dropping out has changed
Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Turning on, tuning in and dropping out has changed

Published: April 5, 2011 1 minute 6 comments

Baby_Blues
Today's Baby Blues breaks out of what has been a slump of yeah-I-get-it routine kid and parent gags. I don't know that it's a case of Scott and Kirkman phoning it in so much as a case of Zoe and Hammy getting to an age that is pretty common for cartoon strip kids. I think they need to get Wren up and moving to shake things up a little. Meanwhile, today's gag touches on modern parenting, which pulls it a bit out of the ordinary, which, in turn, is really all it takes for these guys to deliver a good laugh.

As for the specific topic of today's strip, I understand the appeal of the DVD in the car for long trips. When my kids took their kids to Orlando last year, they plugged in a portable DVD player and plugged in the children. But that was 1400 miles. I've pulled up behind people at night who have local plates and are clearly just running around town, but there sit their kids, zoned out in the back, and, between the little guys glued to the DVDs and the adolescents plugged into their MP3 players, I wonder if these families ever have any conversations at all.

I met a fellow once who tended a flock of sheep on the lower slopes of Pikes Peak, and he had a couple of komondors as protection against coyotes. I asked him what their personalities were like and he said he didn't have anything to do with them, that they were part of the flock and it was necessary that they bond entirely with the sheep. When you get a new pup, he said, you simply put it in with the sheep and then toss it food rather than handling it and socializing it to be your dog. It would accept your presence in the same way the sheep did, but its primary loyalty would be to them, and woe betide any coyote, mountain lion, stray dog or sheep rustler who posed any kind of threat to the flock.

There seem to be a lot of kids being raised that way, but I'm not sure I see a similar benefit. What I think I see is parents in a kind of schizophrenic back-and-forth between turning on the DVD and tossing the kids their food at one moment and then helicoptering over them the next.

Of course, the problem is teacher tenure.*

*Learn this phrase — It works for everything!

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Comments 6

  1. Good lord, Mike, there is no end to what I learn from stopping by CSOTD. I had never even heard of a komondor, much less seen one. Looks like a Rastafarian dog. Thanks for always making this blog such an illuminating read!
    P.S. We gave our son books (or played hangman). For nighttime driving, we kept a book light in the car. Worked great, but perhaps it was because he was an only child. Might have been a completely different ball game if there had been another kid in the back seat.

  2. I wish I’d asked that fellow who gets the job of shearing the dogs when they shear the sheep each year. I wouldn’t mind holding a sheep with one hand and wielding the clippers with the other, but I suspect a 130 pound dog who isn’t all that strongly bonded to humans might be quite a challenge.
    Our kids read, sang, talked, played games and generally behaved well in the back seat. We stopped often and generally didn’t go more than 600 to 750 miles a day, however. The days when we did 1,200 and 2,000 mile marathon drives all took place when they were very young and we’d start in the evening and go overnight so they slept through the first several hundred miles.
    We started taking the more leisurely approach not to control them but because we realized we were getting too old and we’d lose a day resting up anyway — might as well take two or three for the drive instead.

  3. We’ve done a lot of long car trips – 700 miles each way once, and often twice, per year plus others – and listened to a lot of cassettes and CDs. The mix from our post-wedding party (copied from reel-to-reel) got a lot of play, along with other stuff from the 1960s and 1970s plus audiobooks (mostly mysteries). As the kids got older they got their own cassette / CD / MP3 players and, for our youngest, DVD players and laptops.
    But our music, at least, sank in. For his formal installation as the new minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Beverly MA, Kelly picked Phil Ochs’ “Do What I Have To Do” as one of the musical pieces.
    If we’d talked more on those trips perhaps the boys would have a better grasp of comics trivia or quantum mechanics, but I doubt they’d have turned out any better.

  4. I spent a lot of my college years driving between school in North Carolina and home in Florida. My car had an AM radio. I heard a lot about Jeezus, but I didn’t get saved. Maybe it was the influence of the Quaker college I was attending.
    These days I have MP3 books, BBC programmes, and a bit of music, and I don’t make too many 500-mile trips. And I still haven’t been saved.

  5. I was an early adopter and had a cassette player put in my first car in 1970, largely to avoid having to listen to AM radio, FM being a great thing in the cities then but not so good in the hinterlands or while traveling. First time I heard “Let It Bleed” was on the Cross Westchester Expressway at about 5:30 in the afternoon — the car horn on the album cut of “Honky Tonk Woman” nearly sent me into the median.

  6. I was an early music maker and had a cassette player put in my last car in 2001. First thing I heard “The Bright Flight” and “The Love Song” from “BeautyxBeauty” created and perform by Jessi Frown — the lady in the street rapping on the album cut of “Tell Me”, “Signs” and “Big Bang Story” sang by Lori Smith. While i was playing a player in my house…

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