CSotD: What do we know and when did we know it?
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Start off with a pair of new story arcs that look worth following:
Piranha Club joins the parade of strips that have delved into the current political scene.
It's an odd development, but these are odd times and I'm sympathetic: This blog has long been a mix of editorial and non-editorial cartoons, but, recently, there have been days when I don't find much of anything funny.
There have been cases where the shift to political commentary hasn't worked out so well. After all, cartoonists have their niches, and not everyone shines when they try to slip into another pair of shoes. But Bud Grace is always good for a laugh and I'm looking forward to seeing where he takes this.
Meanwhile, at Monty, young Sedgewick's latest hobby got me thinking, because it hadn't occurred to me that ventriloquists' dummies are inherently abusive, but the only exceptions that spring to mind without great effort are Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse, and they were, indeed, exceptions, as was Shari Lewis herself as a female ventriloquist who played to an audience of kids.
Even then, Lamb Chop was a disrupter, similar to Senor Wences's Pedro, though Lamb Chop was an innocent while Pedro was more in the insult-comic tradition, on the unintentional Dennis the Menace level, rather than the Don Rickles type. Many are more purposefully rude.
This doesn't apply to marionettes like Howdy Doody or Topo Gigio, whose human interlocuters were interchangeable and weren't doing the speaking for them, or for puppets like Kukla and Ollie.
However, I think — except for Shari Lewis's crew — ventriloquist dummies are universally infuriating. The question is, is this only a factor of the necessary interplay, or is it some sort of tradition?
I'm not sure you can do a two-person act without the antagonism factor, even innocently as with Martin and Lewis or Abbott and Costello. Shari was simply more patient with her response to foolishness.
Anyway, if there is some great cosmic tradition behind ventriloquism, as there is with clowns, I haven't seen it documented.
Speaking of Medieval Traditions
But Joe Heller expounds on a different ancient tradition.
The question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, to the extent that it was truly debated, revolved around the issue of, if angels are real, how much space do they occupy? However, as that linked piece suggests, it was more of an intellectual exercise than a true theological issue and the question has generally been used as an example of intellectual vanity.
The relevance of using a rising Dow to chart the economy is similarly dubious, because, as Heller suggests, it has no appreciable impact on the finances of average people.
The rising and falling of the Dow has long been a source of foolish analysis, and articles appear from time to time linking its fortunes to the height of women's hemlines or the outcome of the Super Bowl or some other random factor, but the laff is that most serious articles that attribute reasons for its fluctuations are equally doubtful.
Which doesn't mean they are invalid, since stock traders read those pieces about how a meeting in Brussels or a hurricane somewhere is impacting stock prices and then go out and make it so.
But the connection between the Dow and your cost of living is at best very long term, though Wall Street speculators do impact things like mortgage rates and oil prices.
The election of Trump is almost certainly the key to the rising Dow, but a large part of that involves the idea that not only will regulations fall away, increasing profit margins, but that changes in the tax code will prevent those profits from falling into the wrong hands.
Like, for instance, yours.
The notion that "a rising tide lifts all boats" only really works with higher taxes, since intelligent management would rather reinvest those profits in the business or donate handsomely to charity — either of which are deductible — than take it all home and leap into a higher tax bracket.
With that inducement gone, the rising tide only lifts the yachts and leaves the small craft to founder in their wake.
Juxtaposition of the Environment
(King of the Royal Mounted, Sept 13, 1941)
In Comics Kingdom's Vintage secion, King of the Royal Mounted is about to confront a villain who will stop at nothing to keep oil drilling from driving away the wildlife.
I have no idea where this story is going, but my guess is that King's not going to make common cause with the "harpooning Eskimos" and their Great White Leader to the extent of halting the exploration, though I'd be surprised if he didn't work out some compromise for the musk oxen.
I was mostly surprised to see the matter raised in a cartoon more than 75 years ago, particularly one that rarely goes beyond punching or shooting the bad guys as a solution to most problems.
Meanwhile, over at Cartoon Movement, Tjeer Royaards offers this panel with a link to a story about an educational film that Shell made about climate change in 1991 and then somehow forgot to send out to the schools and other organizations for which it was intended.
I didn't have half an hour to watch the whole video before posting, but it's right here and I intend to view it in its entirely later.
I did get to the part where, as they look at a computer, one scientist says to the other, "By 1941, the warming has spread across the Arctic and extensively covered most of North America."
It boils down to that familiar question, "What did they know, and when did they know it?"
This film doesn't reveal as much of the answer as the White House tapes did, but the tobacco industry was brought down by seemingly less.
By, of course, a government geared to promoting the public good.
So there's that.
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