CSotD: All Things Pass
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A twisted little moment from Jeff Corriveau at Deflocked.
Today's cartoon manages to be so very wrong and so very right at the same time.
First, let's deal with the blasphemy issue: Artists do not have to be wonderful their whole lives. It's perfectly all right to enjoy certain periods of Picasso or Bob Dylan or Marlon Brando and to simply shrug off those other moments.
In the case of Dr. Seuss, I find his early political cartoons interesting and above average, but, if that were all he had done, he'd be a footnote. At the other end of the scale, I am absolutely thrilled with his earlier children's books, "If I Ran The Circus" and "Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose" and "McElligot's Pool" and the like.
But, just as John Wayne at some point quit playing the roles of cowboys and started playing the role of John Wayne, there came a point where Theodore Geisel became too aware of his own identity and began to consciously produce "Dr. Seuss books," and his entry into the Beginner Book series with "The Cat in the Hat" is probably as good a milepost as any for that.
I was seven years old when "The Cat in the Hat" came out, and I enjoyed it. But it didn't stick to the ribs like Horton or Thidwick.
There's no exact cutoff, and there rarely is, with artists. "To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street" preceded his political cartoons, and his classic "Green Eggs and Ham" came three years after "The Cat in the Hat." Nor am I going to the barricades in defense of all his earlier books, like "Yertle the Turtle."
But there was a point where the inspired silliness became stylized silliness and the vast bulk of the "Beginner Books" are simply dreck.
And if anybody at the Seuss estate ("Home of the Most Carnivorous Lawyers in the Land") finds today's "Deflocked" disrespectful, hey, look what you let Jim Carrey do to the book.
Not only did this strip crack me up, but it worked better because he didn't do the entire strip in Seuss-talk, one of the more tiresome and overworked memes in memedom. Using it only in the relevant panels was exactly right.
Now then, as to the environmental science: Back when I was an editor/reporter in Maine, there was a case that went nationwide in which a woman there broke a CFL and was given some semi-official advice about the need for an incredibly elaborate and expensive HAZMAT cleanup that made national news, or at least that went viral on-line.
Spoilsport that I am, I called Maine's environmental department and got hold of someone with more authority than whoever she had dealt with, who told me it was, indeed, a ridiculous over-reaction and that nothing on that level was required or even appropriate.
The big caution, I was told, is that you shouldn't use your vacuum cleaner, because it recirculates the air it picks up, together with whatever microscopic particles are in that air, so that you'd be aerating your house with mercury. Instead, grab a couple of pieces of stiff cardboard and scoop up the big pieces, blot the rest with a mop or a damp paper towel and throw it all out in something relatively sealed, like a plastic bag inside another plastic bag. (The official advice is more complex, but nothing like the unofficial advice first reported.)
Basically, she told me, there's no need to panic, but you should be careful with the bulbs, just as you would be careful using Clorox. You don't go to DEFCON 1 when you're adding chlorine bleach to a load of clothes, but most people are a little more cautious with a bottle of bleach than they might be with their fabric softener. And if you did spill it, you'd be more careful and thorough with the cleanup than if it were fabric softener. Same thing here. Just be a little more cautious.
On the other hand, if you do happen to keep all your CFLs in a box without the little dividers to protect them from shock, and you take the entire box up on a ladder and drop it and end up breaking them all at once, then I think Mamet's solution is probably the right one.
(I take this stuff seriously)
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