CSotD: Tuesday Short Takes
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Let's start with the really easy one: Karnak predicts that this Off the Mark is going to be forwarded to a lot of people today.
Remember that old joke in which the dinner guest observes that the dog is staring at him, to which the response is, "You're eating out of his dish"?
Well, my dog has a love seat and a wing chair that are his. He's not protective of them, but he is the only one who uses them except if some human drops by. And, believe me, they qualify as "fur-niture."
There was a time when this would end up on a million refrigerators, but I don't think we have as many "refrigerator cartoons," since print subscriptions are, if not a dying thing, somewhat clustered in an older demographic.
In fact, Hilary Price did this Rhymes With Orange back in 2001, and I'm not sure it works anymore, because photos are shared, not sent, these days.
The only recreational thing on my fridge is a Christmas card with a pic of my youngest granddaughter and her parents. Everything else is informational stuff: business cards and appointment reminders and suchlike.
Once we get the daycares switched over to Wacom tablets and away from paper and watercolors, there won't be anything to post on refrigerators anymore, which is okay because the new generation of refrigerators seem to be made of something magnets don't stick to.
I suspect that if Mark Parisi waits a month or so and does a Google Images search for this cartoon, he'll get a lot of hits, and let's hope not too many of them have scrubbed his name from them, since people who like this one could find plenty of others in a format that would benefit him more than spiritually.
Speaking of Hilary Price and letting your computer go idle long enough for the slide show to start (well, that was implied, anyway), today's RWO reminds me of folding laundry, because that's about the only time I let my computer go idle and have my TV on during the day and jumpinjesusonapogostick but the ambulance chasers are all over the tube.
Only they don't actually chase the ambulances. As she notes in her title panel, they invite the victims to chase the ambulances for them.
"Do you know anyone who has died? Have you ever been sick? You may be entitled to a settlement. Probably not. But, if it's easy to prove and we can pocket most of the payout, we'd be happy to waltz it through a court. Just call 1-800-SHYSTER."
Watching daytime TV is like those cruel "People of Wal-Mart" snark sites, where you can get all judgmental about those losers unless you realize you wouldn't know about it if you weren't to some extent one of them.
Not me. I'm just folding laundry.
Blame it on my cleanliness.
Could this be the start of Rico?
Thimble Theater, from today at Vintage Comics but originally from September 10, 1930.
If you can never remember if he began as "Brutus" or "Bluto," this ought to confuse things a little more, because it looks to me as if he started out as "Joe Bilge."
Transitioning to real villains
Ann Telnaes offers this portrait of Dear Leader and his mentor, which is not only delightful in itself but happens to come just as I was thinking of …
… her classic rendering of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, which, in turn …
… I had filed right next to her commentary on the assassination of Anna Politskovkaya on Putin's birthday back in 2006, which, in turn …
… pairs nicely with today's cartoon by Steve Breen.
The big difference being that the days of looking across the globe and tsk-tsking are over, and that, while those of us in journalism took Putin's murders seriously, there was, even among us, a sense of "It can't happen here."
Which is being modified to "It hasn't happened here yet, anyway."
Liberal paranoia?
Maybe. But Franklin Foer has an article in the Atlantic about "how the Russian president became the ideological hero of nationalists everywhere" and it's not cheerful.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I have been comforted in a still-uncomfortable way by having VP Pence and Defense Secretary Mattis assuring attendees at the security conference in Munich that we don't really mean all the things that pour out of Dear Leader's mouth (and off his fingertips).
In the days when Saddam Hussein was promising "the mother of all battles," Iraqis assured us that this sort of absurd bluster is part of how leaders are judged in some cultures and that nobody in Iraq took it seriously.
Though taking it seriously, or pretending to, was a keystone of our foreign policy back then.
I still don't know how much of what Colin Powell told the United Nations was stuff he had been fooled on and how much he knew he was spinning, but I can think of several hundreds of thousands of people who probably don't much care.
We've also heard it from Iranians, in a more fraught situation because the absurd blusterers have their own Revolutionary Guard that can back up the bluster with intemperate actions that the grown-ups in the government then have to defuse.
And we appear to have people currently in government who would like to overreact to that, since overreaction obviously worked so well for us in Iraq.
So it's good to see somebody in the administration leaning on the brakes, and you can fire the Defense Secretary but I think Mike Pence is there to stay. I don't much like Pence, but any port in a storm.
Meanwhile, as Aussie cartoonist Rowe suggests, our new National Security Advisor seems like he knows what at least part of his job is going to entail.
I hope so, but, however that particular hire turns out, I take some comfort in the idea that the whole world is watching.
Now here's your moment of non-elitist zen
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