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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Short takes on a day of chickens

Published: September 5, 2013 1 minute 5 comments

This blog is generally chicken one day and feathers the next. This was definitely a day of chickens, with such a banquet of good stuff that I had to eliminate some that would have been the only focus on another day.

Let's start with some interesting beginnings:

Trail
"Mark Trail" is not generally known for incisive storytelling in its Mon-Sat strips, but this new arc has me intrigued. (Mark was examining a poacher-shot elk when his game warden friend came along.)

I despise the lazy "captains of industry are building a mall on our ballfield" storylines foisted on kids, because they rely on so many outrageous stereotypes that the message becomes "development is wrong" rather than "development has to be thought out."

But I am intrigued by this, both for the "money is power" element hinted at — a crisis in our system that goes well beyond conservation issues — and for the "exceptions to wilderness" aspect in particular. And I happen to be researching a project that involves the history of the conservation movement, which means I'm repeatedly coming across Muir, Pinchot and the Hetch Hetchy Dam.

One of the people interviewed for Ken Burns' series on national parks noted that the Muir/Pinchot controversy is generally painted far more black-and-white than it was. And this drilling/conservation/poaching confrontation will likely be, as well, but let's see where it goes.

 

Ready for his close-up … ooh, not too close

Rip
Rip Kirby is also starting a new arc, this one about a fading actor and a reluctant producer. The year is 1954, but everything old is new again and here he is speaking about 3-D films.

Meanwhile, in my other life, 3-D gets generally good reviews from the kids, but our eleven-year-old reviewer noted this week that the new "One Direction: This is Us" movie includes a lot of concert footage and that, while the 3-D effect makes it very realistic and exciting, the accompanying combination of loud music and young girls screaming is likely to induce headaches.

As for a fading actor thinking he can still make girls scream with just the right special effects, well, I think that's probably pretty timeless.

As is what the young girls tell him: "I think I should just go home. I'm starting to get a headache …"

 

Lunch Lady isn't laffing

Curtis
And Curtis, like most strips with kids as protagonists, is in a new back-to-school arc, this one set in the cafeteria. The USDA has been phasing in progressively healthier guidelines, which means that a district can serve anything it wants, as long as it's willing to choose between junk food and receiving federal subsidies.

You would expect conservatives to like the idea of not using taxpayer money to hand out ice cream instead of spinach, but you forget that the First Lady has taken up childhood obesity as her project. 

Plus there is that general reluctance among them to let poor kids have any meals at all.

And contributions from certain food companies, but they'd never let that be a factor.

In any case, I suspect young Curtis will find the world unsympathetic to his need for fat, salt and sugar. He lives in a much more sensible world than real kids.

 

Dropping the other shoe … into the creek

Ss130904

Ss130905

Meanwhile, it's payoff time at Stone Soup for an earlier story arc.

Last month, Alix, our budding naturalist, brought home a crawdad/crawfish/crayfish from a camping trip, and then was persuaded to put it back, not where she found it, but in the local stream. My initial reaction was "Yikes!" but of course Jan Eliot was on top of things and here we are.

Carry on.

 

Breaks pie crust, fights and leaves

Smbc
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal versus the Grammar Nazis.

As said before, grammar-obsessed nitpickers remind me of the old joke that likens an economist to a fellow who knows 100 ways to make love but doesn't have a girlfriend.

And, yes, they know a great deal more about how to use the English language than a ruffian like Hemingway or other annoying illiterates like Austen, Thackerey, Fitzgerald, Shaw, Auden … the list of incompetent people who needed stricter editing goes on and on.

 

And speaking of old jokes

Tina
I don't know if Rina Piccolo is part of some sort of "Second Wave of Female Cartoonists," but I do know she's got a wicked streak I really like and that she isn't confining her observational humor to the original woman-cartoonist targets of "I should lose weight but I love ice cream" and "Gosh, I sure like shoes!"

Her willingness to unleash some sharper barbs is refreshing, and, anyway, the punchline of today's Tina's Groove reminded me of an old Irish joke, which you should read with a slight brogue:

So this girl from our parish goes off to England, as so many young people must these days to find any sort of work at all, and she becomes a secretary and, every week, she sends a bit of money back to help her family, as so many of our young people do, bless their hearts.

Only, after about a year and a half of this, she starts sending larger amounts home, telling her mother she's had a raise, and, sure, that's all well and good, but the money becomes more and more until her mother begins to wonder.

So finally, three years goes by and she decides to come home for a visit, and her mother meets her ship at the landing, and they hug and cry as well you might expect, and then her mother says, "Daughter, I must ask. I'm grateful for all that you send home, but it seems odd to me that a secretary would make that much money that you could live yourself and still be so generous."

And the girl sighs and says, "Well, I didn't want to tell you, but I've become a prostitute."

Her mother screams and faints dead away, and everyone rushes to revive her and she says, "Daughter, I can't believe what I thought I heard from you. Tell me once more, for it can't be true."

And the shame-faced girl confesses, "No, it's true, Ma. I've become a prostitute."

"Oh, saints be praised," her mother says. "I thought you said 'Protestant.'"


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Comments 5

  1. “Oh, saints be praised,” her mother says. “I thought you said ‘Protestant.'”
    We’ve agreed on the savior, now we’re just negotiating the denomination.

  2. On the one hand, I liked the votey for SMBC. On the other hand, proofreaders would be really useful in the publishing business, especially in the age of automated spelling and grammar checkers. 🙁

  3. Having been a freelancer through quite a bit of my career and an editor through a fair amount of it, I have been astonished at the lousy copy turned in — stuff I never would have dared to submit. On the other hand, I’ve also been appalled at editors who thought they were writers and who, in the name of “rules,” wrung every bit of life out of copy. And, in any case, no matter how much time you put into editing a piece, one little misspelling will slip past and you will have made some reader’s day.
    It sometimes makes me miss working the grill. I kind of liked that.

  4. I think ’twas my 11-grade composition teacher who told me that I had to know the rules to be able to break them effectively. She also introduced us to the MLA Style Manual, so we knew the difference between rules and “rules.” 🙂
    Late last week, I read a book from the late 70s. Toward the beginning, two men meet for the very first time: one of them mistook the other for someone else, they were so unfamiliar. Toward the end of the book, one of them is murdered. The other then spends several pages mourning, including reminiscing about years of shared dinners.
    A more recent book, which I read back at the end of last year, had “tow the line” for “toe the line.” “Hone in” for “home in” is also common. I guess these could qualify as “little misspellings.”

  5. Nope — those are examples of using the wrong word and SHOULD be corrected, unless the writer was using them as dialect — which in the case of a homophone like “tow the line” wouldn’t be the case, unless it was in a letter from a character. (Imagine if some editor had gotten his hands on Mrs. Malaprop or Slats Grobnik!)
    And I don’t mind a note from a reader if I miss one — as long as it says, “I think you missed one” rather than “Horrors! Doesn’t anybody ever proofread anything! You ignorant people missed what any schoolchild would have caught.”
    Yeah, professor. You shoulda seen the ones that didn’t get away.
    And I agree that students should learn the rules. But first the rules should make sense and, if you drill into the linked Jane Austen page there, you’ll see that a lot of the rules are nonsense, based on the theory that English is like Latin and follows strict and consistent patterns, which we know it doesn’t — thus the humor in that old “goose/geese, moose/meese” poem.
    As you note, there are rules and there are “rules,” but the grinders rarely understand the difference and tend to obsess on the “rules.” And there are even elements of style that should give way to color and nuance, not to mention changes in language over time and issues of audience.
    I used to fume over the insistence that, in writing business stories on the Canadian border, I had to write out “Free Trade Agreement” rather than FTA on every first use, while the sports department was free to use RBI without explanation, but they really did preach to the choir, while my work needed to be accessible to more than the business community. Fair enough. But it was a “style” point that could be debated rather than blindly imposed.
    I got a fair amount of that red-ink notation in high school, but it was the cantankerous old college prof often referred to here who would point them out with sufficient vigor that I learned to check my work more carefully simply to avoid his pen, which is as it should be. I was his student.
    That said, he had a rich, deep and well-developed sense of wordplay, not to mention a liking for character. There is something both sad and elitist in the assumption, for instance, that people are being ignorant when they use ironic folksy humor like “I could care less.”
    The same obsessive grinds who explain why that doesn’t make sense would likely also have fits if people still used the expression, “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth!”
    Of course it would. Butter has a melting point of …

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