CSotD: Saturday Short Takes
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David Horsey gets the prize today for faking me out — I almost didn't bother reading the captions because I am so sick of lame cartoons in which the kids are, in fact, dressed as the scary candidates.
Those cartoons run every two years or, at least, every four, and it's enough to make you wish Halloween and Election Day were not so close on the calendar.
In his essay, Horsey goes on about how obsessed we've become with the election this time around, and I don't know if it's the election itself or the current status of social media and I suppose it's likely a bit of both.
But I agree we're paying more attention and I'm consequently depressed that people remain so uninformed. There's an old thing that has gone around for years about how Americans can easily name the Seven Dwarfs, or sometimes it's the cast of the Flintstones, but can't name the members of the Supreme Court.
Now we've got people who seem obsessed with the election but can't get past the headlines into the actual facts of much of anything.
Still, we should probably not lose sight of the fact that Halloween is just a holiday and that sometimes trick-or-treating has no greater significance than indicated above.
Speaking of not getting past the headlines, the latest kerfuffle over emails brings forth this cartoon from Signe Wilkinson.
There may come a time when we get to the bottom of this "just one more thing" investigation, but the latest revelations are so pointless that I have to blame the media's obsession with false-fairness for blowing them up well beyond their merit.
Or, as some in the industry have suggested, it's the result of laying off all the people in the newsroom with the experience to be able to judge what is significant and what is puffery. I'm disinclined to put too much into this theory, however, as several of the stories on the FBI "revelations" start with screaming headlines and then read "well, actually, there's really nothing to it."
Which no readers on either side are going to bother to read. You could fill everything past the second paragraph with lorem ipsum and nobody would notice.
As Wilkinson says, Clinton has been through this for the past 30 years and the most they've come up with is some sloppiness, both in her email dealings (which were par for the course when they happened) and the post-White House dealings with money and speeches, which were also sloppy but, again, not criminal and not all that unusual for people in that world.
Except that, after 30 years under a hostile microscope, your choices are to be extraordinarily cautious or to step out of public life. Doing neither is, well, sloppy. And disappointing. And it's why my support for her has less to do with her being a great candidate and more to do with her not being a pathological nutcase who threatens the future of the nation.
Which he is. And this is a very strange election indeed, but stranger yet if you strain to find reasons to believe the candidates are equally flawed.
Someone said on Facebook yesterday that "not as bad as Trump" is a pretty low bar to clear and he was hoping for more.
I think it's like "The Price is Right" where you just see the highest price your competitors have bid and top it by a dollar. You could have come closer to the actual retail price, but you didn't have to, so why take a risk?
Very strange and disheartening election indeed.
My World and Welcome To It
(And there's a phrase to make cartoonists of a certain age giddy)
The Oatmeal's latest is a pondering/diatribe on the pluses and minuses of working at home and I found it pretty funny and sadly not all that inaccurate.
Well, except that he's married and one section includes a spouse, which I couldn't really relate to.
I don't think I could pull this off if I had someone drifting around in the background, though, if I were married, that problem would resolve itself because two people couldn't live on what I make and so she'd be off somewhere during the day, trying to raise us above the poverty level.
Though I wouldn't actually know at this point, since the only people I know in three dimensions are other dog owners, most of them retired, and — thanks to the other place I go when I leave the house — nurses, who work such bizarre hours that, yes, there'd be someone looking over my shoulder often enough to be disruptive.
The contact with dog owners at the park pretty much spares me the above, which (in case you weren't sure) is offered as one of the negatives. I walk the dog often enough that I have to be able to express myself coherently at least five or six times a week.
Or maybe not. It's not the best yardstick, since, when owning dogs is the common bond, the level for tolerance on every other personal factor is pretty astronomical.
And, as Deflocked reminds us, I'm going to have to be somewhat socially adept Monday evening, though, as noted before, my apartment is hidden away such that my fiber bars are safe and, even when I have the light on and actual candy available, I won't be called on for much conversation.
Especially with a huge dog straining to greet the little ones. Some years ago, I got a knock on the door and found a three-year-old on my doorstep for a second time. His father apologized. "He doesn't need anymore candy. He just wanted to come back and see the dog again."
That was a particularly good dog. He handled all my social obligations.
As long as I brought it up …
Can't imagine why this didn't last more than one season.
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