CSotD: Creating ourselves in our own image
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Between Friends introduces today's theme of "self-image and self-deception," and I wonder, not how many hair dressers will clip-and-post it, because it's a natural for them, but how many will stick it up in the back room for their own amusement versus sticking it up where the customers can see it.
One different between a barber shop and a stylist is that a barber shop has copies of "Sports Illustrated" and "Field and Stream" plus various manly pictures on the wall of men fishing or dogs playing poker, while a stylist has fashion magazines plus pictures on the wall of high-fashion, high-maintenance hair-dos.
And, with or without the help of a friend, your bulldog is as likely to draw four aces as you are to end up looking like anybody in any of those fashion posters.
Which is simply to point out that we have different ways of bullshitting ourselves, and I suppose the male equivalent of this fantasy self-image goes back to Friday's remarks about guys who are neither loggers nor construction workers but who own giant pickup trucks anyway.
Which brings us to today's Half Full, and some related thoughts about self-image, this in the area of motivation and self-improvement.
First of all, a backgrounder: Cartoonist Maria Scrivan is a devoted runner, so, while I don't know her specific relation to bicycles, this is not a case of pointing and laughing but, rather, contains an element of healthy self-mockery.
In any case, as I drive the seven miles to the park and back with the dog each morning, I pass numerous runners and bikers, and I suppose some of them are serious, devoted fitness freaks who also have a passion for never turning out at the same time on the same route, and this is why I never see them more than once.
But I suspect that there is a type of person who hopes that, if you buy all the right gear, it will motivate you to get your butt out there on a daily basis, and that there are many bicycles in garages and front hallways festooned with all the right peripherals, none of which have been touched in months.
There are runners and bikers I see regularly. The runners seem to make due with stretch pants and tops, a set of earphones and some kind of smartphone strapped to an upper arm; the bikers seem, as Scrivan suggests, to tote a larger collection of stuff.
I suppose it's because they don't have the same need to keep the collection to a portable minimum, as long as there's a place to clip it onto the bike frame.
And good for them, but I suspect the makers of gear would go out of business if their market were limited to the actual users of that gear.
True of Spandex biker shorts, true of giant pickup trucks.
Not funny
Dogs of C-Kennel with a gag that cuts awfully close to the quick.
The particular fish in the Nemo and Dory films are native to the Great Barrier Reef and, as the cartoon suggests, have larger problems than losing track of their individual families.
It's one thing to deny statistical models, or to dismiss predictions of East Coast cities being under water in X-number of decades as scare-mongering, but there are things happening right now that are not theoretical nor vaguely pegged to the future.
Some African nations, for example, are teaching small farmers how to grow new crops, because the climate patterns are forcing crops like coffee and bananas to relocate, and that's more complex than deciding to plant oats instead of wheat.
And there are people in Bangladesh who live in houses that are made to tear down as waters in one place rise, so that they can be quickly erected on land emerging from the shifting deltas elsewhere. Sometimes they live in ankle-deep water for extended periods while they wait for the right moment to pull up stakes and relocate.
It is no longer theoretical, and the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef is only one example, albeit a sad and perhaps irreversible one.
You expect climate-change conversation at Arctic Circle, because that's a large part of Alex Hallatt's cartooning mission.
But for it to pop up in a strip about dogs in a shelter indicates that well-informed people are becoming aware of this, even if it isn't at the top of their radar, and that raises the question of why cartoonists in the political sector, who are paid to be aware of what's going on in the world, remain apparently ignorant of it all.
Granted, it's been awhile since I've seen floods of "It's snowing, so global warming isn't real" cartoons after every blizzard. That's an improvement, though I wonder if they are correcting their vision or simply avoiding a cliche.
At the moment, frivolous "Gosh, it's hot out" cartoons seem at best insensitive and, in light of the accompanying storms and floods that come with those temperatures, irresponsible.
Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
School bells ring and children sing
GoComics Blog features this 2003 Foxtrot in a collection of Back to School cartoons saluting that time of year, which it is.
It's a tough one to time, since some kids went back this past week while others have another three weeks before school starts, but a 13-year-old cartoon is as current as most of what you'll see for the next several weeks, and, actually, I rather like this one, since one of my sons had a social studies teacher who showed so many films that they called him "Coach."
I question, however, the relationship between how cartoonists portray Back to School and how kids actually see it. Maybe city kids see their friends all summer and that makes a difference, but back to school for me meant being reunited with buddies from 15 miles away and getting back into the swing of things was fine with us.
Still, if you teach, or know someone who does, you might want to pass along Mr. Fitz's thoughts on the topic.
Now here's your moment of nostalgic zen:
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