CSotD: Short takes for a long weekend
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Brian Basset’s Red and Rover is rarely a fall-on-the-floor laugh fest, but its nostalgic portrayal of a boy and his dog in a recent but unspecified past is always a nice stop on the comic highway.
Today, he outdoes himself with a back-to-school strip that rises far above the glut of predictable back-to-school strips.
I wrote the other day about people who weep at graduation and how, by contrast, we couldn’t wait to get out of there and off to the next adventure. I think most of us felt the same way about the start of the school year. Sure, summer vacation was over, but there was a new year ahead.
I wonder if, when they portray kids dreading the first day of school, cartoonists are riffing on anything real? I was always kind of excited about it.
Granted, in a rural area where the district stretched 30 miles down the highway, back-to-school meant seeing friends you hadn’t seen since June. But my kids went to elementary school in the city, in a fairly compact district, and I never had to horsewhip them out the door on the first day of school.
Second day, sure. Me, too. But the first day was exciting.
And I still look back on some of those summers with nostalgia and gratitude, too, especially the year I was eight, a magic interval when I had the freedom to take off in the neighborhood but was still young enough to have few responsibilities.
Which is the magic interval of Red and Rover. Well done, Brian.
Meanwhile, back in the grown-up world:
Bug Martini contemplates the marketing of yoghurt or yogurt or whatever the hell it is.
I think the stuff that tastes like gently fermented milk should be “yoghurt” and the crap that tastes like some kind of fruit-pudding should be “yogurt.” Simplified spelling for simplified food.
I’d probably get a lot of negative feedback if I suggested that the main appeal of yogurt-without-the-h is the cute little packaging. Well, I won’t get any negative feedback for saying that.
Just as long as I don’t try to tie it in with the premise of the strip.
However you spell it, it exemplifies the “organic junk food” discussed here recently.
There was a time, O Best Beloved, when all yoghurt was like what they now sell as “Greek yogurt,” and I mean the plain kind. In the big, manly containers.
It was kind of sour, but you could put some jam or a drizzle of honey on it, and it was good and good for you.
And then they started making it with fruit on the bottom. And then with the fruit stirred in.
And then all Madison Avenue broke loose and today we have some sugar-laden, artificially-colored extruded crap called “Go-gurt” that is about as closely related to yoghurt as Double-Bubble is to beef jerky.
And I don’t mean the processed, semi-softened, multi-flavored beef jerky by the checkout stand. I mean the stuff old-time cowboys chewed on.
Beef jerky and yoghurt used to be pretty rough stuff. Now they’ve become sissy food, goldarnit.
Aural anesthetics
Betty is a minor strip, I guess, in terms of distribution and the amount of chatter it generates, but it’s a bit of an undiscovered gem and, if the home runs are few, the doubles, triples and RBIs are many. Like a lot of mid-level strips, the arcs as a whole are more interesting than any of the individual strips, which means that it’s a good one to have on your page but doesn’t necessarily pop up on refrigerators.
This week, the strip has been riffing on TED talks, about which I’m pretty ambivalent. I mean, yeah, they’re a good idea, but … well, I guess they also get a good percentage of doubles and triples, but a comic strip takes less than 10 seconds to read, unless it stops you in your tracks. By contrast, 18 minutes is a long time to watch someone smack a double, even if it drives in a run or two.
Somebody should do an oral-presentation equivalent of Comic Strip of the Day, where they’d listen to all the TED talks and the Moth stories and then post the don’t-miss-it ones.
If I were to run such a blog, I’d post this Moth story, but it’s almost a cheat on the premise, since it’s not an average person but Hemingway biographer, editor and pal AE Hotchner and much of the appeal comes from his hilarious deflating of the legend surrounding “The Sun Also Rises.”
But, boy, he sure did a fine job of eliminating all the parts that weren’t fascinating, jaw-dropping or funny. Actually, he pretty much eliminated the parts that weren’t all three.
Go thou and do likewise, TEDlings and caterpillars.
Marking the day, much as a dog might
Arlo is such a downer. Of course, he’s right.
Maybe we should begin to celebrate Labor Day the way we celebrate Memorial Day, only instead of going out and leaving flags and flowers at the graves of veterans, we could go decorate the locked and rusting gates of American factories.
Not funny, no.
Not funny.
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