CSotD: Nor sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead
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I've spoken before of how much I loved the Sunday Mark Trail strip as a kid, and how much I wish more papers would carry it now, if only to keep kids somewhat rooted in the world outside.
That rant is worth going back to, but today's strip is a good example of (A) lore, (B) education and (C) service. (Quick but very real criticism: They could sure do a lot more with color than they do.)
The lore and service part is that it's the time of year to think about fleas, ticks, mosquitos and pets. It's a topic that comes up a lot down at the park, though ticks are a bigger problem than fleas. As Mark Trail notes, there's not a lot of excuse for letting your dog or cat be tortured by these little pests.
Ticks are responsible, out on the East Coast, for spreading Lyme disease, and have the added issues of being disgusting and of spreading to humans. They're also apparently more resilient to temperature than fleas and these mild winters aren't doing much to discourage them, though that apparently only changes when they are around and not how many of them there are.
Some people have little plastic things that look like a tiny shoehorn with a notch in the middle, to dislodge the tick at the head, given that grabbing it by the body tends to turn it into a sort of turkey baster and inject your dog (or self) with whatever is inside.
There are many conversations about the comparative advantages of various products and there doesn't seem to be a consensus, but it's interesting to compare how they each line up with regard to the tasks of killing fleas, killing ticks and repelling mosquitos. As noted in the discussion of dog parks here the other day, pet owners are fully as capable of helicoptering behavior as any doting parent.
And the kinds of ticks that infest dogs and deer aren't the worst of their lot, by the way.
Getting back specifically to fleas, John Donne, writing before the days of Pasteur or even Lister, was pretty casual about their impact, his being one of the first poems I remember in which (as you'll see if you scroll down for the analysis) we were taught to look for symbolic references to sex, and not in the sense of "fleas spread disease and so, too, should we."
I think maybe our teachers — purposefully or by happenstance — discouraged us from having sex by turning the subject into homework and forcing us to write dreary, learned essays on the topic.
Donne's poem also could have taught us that people back then regularly had parasites crawling around on them, but I think we'd already learned that from Robbie Burns, who came after Donne chronologically but before him in the curriculum.
In any case, the "lore" and "service" part of today's strip are well outdone, I think, by the "education" portion, since the idea of inch-long fleas drilling down through dinosaur skin is just … more fun than anything else in the comics section today.
I had a college buddy who did some pioneering work in paleontology that went beyond fossil insects and into fossil microscopic stuff, bacteria and so forth, but I'm afraid that, despite Jack's legacy, I still tend to think of fossils as being enormous. Fossilized fleas are nothing compared to the stuff he was finding, but the idea still blows my mind.
And if the creationists are right and cavemen and dinosaurs co-existed, I'm guessing that, when Dino's inch-long fleas got into Fred and Wilma's bed, they weren't seen as an amusing sexual metaphor.
And sort of to some extent in honor of the day:
Norm Feuti takes on a relevant marketing issue in today's Retail:
While Lalo Alcaraz notes the synchronicity from the POV of a Latino cartoonist:
Though his suggestion in the margin that people visit reuben.org is a little futile, since, well, it seems to have gone unmarked there.
How things have changed.
There were giants in those days, dammit.
Well, the Budweiser people didn't seem to push as hard on Cinco de Mayo as they have in previous years, either.
Maybe everybody figures that, with so many people unemployed, holidays are becoming kind of gratuitous. Everyday will be like a holiday, 'til my baby finds work.
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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