CSotD: Sunday short, apolitical takes
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Phew! Just when I was burning out on politics, funny page cartoonists came through with a slew of good, non-political inspiration!
Pen Drop
Start with one I have nothing to comment upon: Today's Rhymes with Orange.
This is just … nah, I've got nothin' but "Wow."
She been hangin' around with Sergio Aragones or something?
John Cullen Murphy is tearin' me apart!
The current Vintage Big Ben Bolt was published March 25, 1956. In it, Ben, having retired from the ring and become a journalist, is hanging out with a group of juvenile delinquents to get a look at their lifestyle.
And I think it gives us a look at John Cullen Murphy's lead time, since "Rebel Without a Cause" had been released the previous October 29. (Here's a contemporaneous, spoiler-filled and vividly unsympathetic review of the movie.)
Any calculation of lead time, I would note, would only work because Murphy (and writer Eliot Caplin) lived in the shadow of the Big Apple and would have had the chance to see "Rebel" upon release.
In those days, O Best Beloved, movies opened in major markets and then the prints were "bicycled" around to smaller cities, such that the hix in the stix might not see a movie for several months after it had been released.
For those in the country, this added to the appeal, because you'd finally get to see a movie you'd been hearing about, which explains why, when my grandfather was on a trip to Leadville, Colorado, to inspect a molybdenum mine in the late '30s, he found the little town suddenly bustling with crowds one morning: "Snow White" had finally arrived at the local movie house and people had come in from throughout the surrounding hills.
That's not ancient history, by the way, or, at least, not all that ancient. When I worked in TV in the mid-70s, reruns of old shows worked the same way: We'd pick up a Star Trek show — on 2.5 inch video — at the bus station, put it on the air and then pack it off to the next subscribing station on the list we were given.
And speaking of bygone days
Warped offers a gag for Certifiable Doddering Old Gaffers (and certified hipsters, I suppose) this morning, and here's a little story to curdle the cream in your coffee:
I used to run a high school quiz bowl with 24 teams from schools throughout the region, a task for which I wrote the questions, and one such question was, under the topic "Technology,"
With what device would you associate the numbers 78, 45 and 33 1/3?"
We ran two games each meeting, with 12 teams of 4 students competing at a time, so 48 hand-picked, extremely bright kids were given this brain teaser.
Turned out most of them wouldn't associate those numbers with anything at all. It was answered correctly, though hesitantly, in only one game.
This was about a dozen years ago, so those kids today range from 26 to 30.
They wouldn't remember this either, but if you do, you could probably use a hit of it about now.
Among my seriously divided memories
Today's Pardon My Planet brings back memories, but only summer memories.
My pals back home spat plenty, but we just spat, and, while we did sometimes target-spit at something in particular, we didn't discuss it a whole lot.
But when I'd go off to Camp Lord O' The Flies in summer, I'd find myself surrounded by a lot of guys who spent their winter months at boarding school, where apparently there wasn't a whole lot to do in your spare time, because they had an entire vocabulary of sputum. I remember being fascinated by the dexterity they had developed as well as by the apparent heirarchy of spittle.
I don't remember it all, but, IIRC, the basic unit was the "Gobber," while "Barbells" was a gobber with two balls of spit united by a thinner strand.
Pete Solomon specialized in the "Droopy," which was a gobber that started down from your mouth but was then sucked back up. Pete could pick up bread crumbs with a Droopy and leave no wet mark on the table.
Coulda been worse: At least city kids never heard of Red Man.
Speaking of country matters
This panel from today's multi-panel Sunday Lockhorns didn't so much spark reflection as synchronize with something I've been pondering for a couple of days, and specifically since I posted a Lefty Frizzell song here Monday.
I always liked Lefty, though I hadn't realized how influential he was on the generation of truly great country artists who followed. I just knew he was fun to sing along with, such that, when some classic C&W came up on my car stereo Friday, I was delighted to join in with him, with Freddie Fender, with Eddie Arnold, with Jim Reeves, and with the rest.
But at some point — maybe during
or it might have been during this reflection on pre-no-fault ambivalence …
(By the way, that's pretty obviously Floyd Cramer on piano)
It occurred to me that it seems the same people who crack jokes about how lugubrious and corny Classic Country can be are the same ones who, when they turn serious, go off at length about how men never express their emotions.
Seriously? If singing about humiliating yourself over someone who has clearly moved on isn't enough openly expressed emotion, how much disappointment and broken dreams are packed into this classic?
Classic Country was expressing emotions and raising serious topics on honky-tonk jukeboxes long before social media was even invented.
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