CSotD: Start at the beginning
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I've mentioned this before, but GoComics is now featuring "Origins of the Sunday Comics," selections from a history of the same being compiled by Peter Maresca and, as GoComics says, available in "all of their full, broadsheet-sized glory
in the new book from Sunday Press: Society is Nix, Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip."
What strikes me about today's entry is that 1899 was about the time my grandfather was encountering horseless carriages for the first time as a wee lad on the Northern Peninsula of Michigan.
He first saw them in the form of a souvenir pin from the St. Louis Exposition, a picture of four men sitting in what was called "a horseless carriage," which he took to be comedy: Four goofy guys waiting for the carriage to move on its own. (The Meet-Me-In-St.-Louis-Louis World's Fair was 1904, by which time he'd have been eleven and less naive. But they had an expo every year, and he'd have been six in '99.)
He told me that the first auto he ever saw in person belonged to a rich family in town — possibly the manager of the iron mine — and on Sundays, they would drive down the hill from their house and tool around for a bit, and then they'd hire a horse to tow them back up, since it didn't have enough power to get there on its own.
Automobiles being very nerdy at the time — roughly like that point when most people-in-the-know built their personal computers and sneered at those who bought out-of-the-box models — I suspect that these sorts of folks were the origin of the term "Sunday driver" and that it didn't simply mean a slowpoke who blocked traffic but a "newbie" who, if the car stopped running, would be at a loss.
I'd say Walt McDougall was impressively prescient in predicting not just the stunt-driving auto shows (bottom) but, front and center, the rise of the ATV and four-wheeler.
Adaptation by the military and by romantic couples was perhaps more obvious, but I've gotta give him props for suggesting that one day the rich snobs who knock down farmer's fences and trample their crops would be supplanted by plain folks who turn pleasant woodland vistas into impassable, rutted mud bogs.
(Note that, on this topic, you don't have to be a trained mechanic to get me started.)
And speaking of forest scenery:
Here's "That Is Priceless," also sending my memory into the vaults, and, though the painting is a few hundred years older, the memories are a half-century more recent. Carrying a live weasel draped around your neck would indeed be a good deterrent to muggers, and the glove on her hand suggests that this is, indeed, a live weasel.
But it reminds me that carrying two or three or four deads ones fiercely biting their own tails draped around your shoulders made you a godsend to little boys in church fifty or sixty years ago.
While we weren't in quite as dire straits as poor Laura and Mary Ingalls, forced to sit piously doing nothing through the entire Sabbath, we were expected to sit, stand and kneel along with everyone else throughout Sunday Mass, to not fidget and to keep quiet.
It was a wonderful Sunday indeed when a woman with dead weasels wrapped around her shoulders happened to come sit in front of you and provide something to stare at and wonder over.
I would note that, while some American women still drape themselves in animal corpses today, they generally don't leave the heads and paws on, which I think mutes the statement considerably. It's like throwing a fit in a restaurant because the waiter brought you a trout with the head attached: Did you think it was a flattened, oblong slice of tofu?
I don't object to domination of the animal kingdom but I object to being squeamish about it. You're either on the bus or off the bus.
And I would note with approval that furs remain part of the culture in Russia, not because I think this means they live closer to the black earth of Mother Russia, but because it is such a good thing for little Russian boys.
Russian Orthodox church services go on forever.
All of which reminds me of this Arlo and Janis from 1999:
Juxtaposition of the Day:
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