CSotD: Saturday Short-Takes
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Pajama Diaries has always provided me with smiles, as Jill works within the home-office atmosphere I adopted for many years. But as the girls morph into teens, it's taking on new elements of nostalgia. Jill (and cartoonist Terri Libenson) have a pair of girls while I had a pair of boys, but there are plenty of ways that doesn't matter and today shows one of them.
For at least the first of their teen years, I paced like a caged cat when my boys were out of the house at night. Like Jill, I temporized with rules more geared for my needs than theirs, but that can't last long.
As a kid myself, my late-night adventures were mostly confined to the bar in our tiny rural town, since everything else was at least 45 minutes away and not that much more exotic.
There were a few merry adventures: A biker gang camped in the area for a few days, and I also got involved with some high-steel workers who were painting a radar tower for whatever they called NORAD in those days, but most nights were just beer and pool with my buds in the days of an 18 drinking age.
This made me uniquely unqualified to relax when younger son was popping up to Montreal for the urban clubbing scene or elder son was having interesting experiences I only learned about a decade or two later when the boys would come home for a holiday and start trading stories and laughing about things the Old Man never figured out.
However, I did find a solution to the sleep issue, which was to place a plastic drinking glass upside down on the doorknob in the kitchen before going to bed at night, so that the clatter would wake me up and let me know when my wandering teen had come back to the nest.
This was particularly valuable in that it taught them the skills they would need if they ever decided to become cat burglars.
I can't wait to see the Pajama Diaries cartoons that emerge in another 15 years or so, when the girls begin to reveal whatever work-arounds they discovered.
Now this backdoor avoidance of the Prime Directive
Jim Morin isn't the only cartoonist noting the hypocrisy of the "ransom" accusations from Republicans, but his stolid, straightforward approach is my favorite because you don't have to go all creative to make such an obvious point.
Picking a favorite from those who note the precedent is an easy way to avoid a violation of the Prime Directive, because the temptation is to single out and excoriate some of the cartoonists who falsely accuse the administration of doing what their sainted Ronald Reagan truly did.
Though I will fault Morin for not being clear on that point: It's not just that Reagan did ransom hostages from Iran, but that Obama did not.
It's not simply that the elephant ignores the precedent. It's that he is lying about the present case.
I understand spin.
It was spin when the Republicans, and their supportive cartoonists, depicted the Iran treaty as an agreement between Iran and the US, rather than between Iran and a coalition of Western nations.
And it was a symbolic, graphic shortcut — albeit a deliberate and perhaps racist one – when they depicted the Iranian negotiators as mullahs rather than modernists.
But this is different. This is a lie, and not one that can be explained by confusion.
The timing of the cash delivery was unfortunate in a country where the press is, if not hostile, at least stunningly lazy and scandal-driven, but the payment had been announced in January.
Not a ransom.
Not a secret.
Not a scandal.
Perhaps some confusion was involved.
Apparently, Fox News quit chasing their female correspondents around the desk long enough to mis-report a video of the release, and Trump claimed to have seen secret Iranian video coverage which may have been on the same reel as the video he saw of thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Towers fell.
Still, the facts took no effort to uncover, and the "ransom" accusation required its perpretrators to deliberately ignore publicly accessible, easily Googled explanations.
That's not spin.
It's just dishonest reporting, and I'm not sure it can even be dismissed as "lazy" when finding the facts takes so little effort.
Simple brilliance
There have been a kabillion cartoons about the pollution, zika and other environmental disasters behind the Olympic hoopla, and most of them have been what you might call "ticket-punchers" — mandatory commentary that is topical without being particularly inspiring or even very interesting.
Then here comes Matt Davies and the only thing I need to know about this is did he sit bolt upright in bed when the "rings" motif hit him, or did it drift into his studio and just plant itself?
And my only comment is to note that the notoriously litigious International Olympic Committee hates when anybody screws with their logo.
So he gets extra credit for that.
Language barrier
BC brings a smile, and a reminder of a very good relationship that survived an odd cultural difference.
This was in middle life, so actual behaviors were not at odds, but musical taste sure was, and her soft-pop sensitivities and my hard-rock preferences might have sunk things had it not been a long-distance relationship. When we got together, we stuck to Simon & Garfunkel and James Taylor, and left Enya and King Crimson for private listening.
But one of the odd, enduring bits of confusion was that, when she said something was "funky," she meant, as noted in the cartoon, moldy and nasty.
And every time, I had a moment of confusion, because I liked funky things.
I felt like the wise philosopher who once said, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
And yet it did. And it also meant what I thought it meant.
We'll let Carla's daddy provide the tie-breaker:
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