Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Monday Short Takes

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: August 14, 2017 1 minute 1 comment

This morning's Candorville appealed to me because I am very, very old, and a lot older than Susan or Lemont.

I've had a couple of "boy are you old" moments lately, including last night when I went to a Charlottesville support rally at Dartmouth and remembered why, back in the Olden Days, I was a freak, not a politico.

I was perfectly happy to be there to add to the numbers, but I didn't want to sing or carry a sign and thank god they didn't have any earnest speeches.

Ended up reminiscing with a couple about my age about people going Clean for Gene or working for Bobby and so forth, while some Class of 20s were making posters and making me feel even older.

But Susan's musings did cause me to think about how, as a kid, I envisioned the world with a sense of wonder, and how back in about 1962, Coke had a promotion that involved putting nations of the world under their bottle caps, and you were supposed to collect them all. (After carefully prying out the cork liners they used back then.)

This was nearly a decade before Coke wanted to teach the world to sing, but they did give me knowledge of some countries I'd never heard of, mostly in Africa where colonialism was in retreat and new nations were emerging, and, yes, some of them are gone or merged with others or split into new ones, mostly in Africa where colonialism served as a model for ambitious kleptocracies.

And the other day I hit our recycling center and found, in the bookcase that long predates Little Free Libraries, a copy of Osa Johnson's autobiography, "I Married Adventure," which I devoured as a little guy just about the same time the Coke bottle caps came out.

I haven't started it yet, but I'm prepared for a combination of nostalgia and gentle horror over the paternalism (maternalism?) and I really want to see how she describes the people she met in these jungle settings and how it squares with current sensibilities. What I remember is that she really did like them, but she also liked the animals she and Martin were filming, so we'll see.

But, yes, I feel old not in the sense of "feeble" but in the sense of having seen it all and now getting to see it all over again.

Which beats the alternative.

Grime-fighter/Crime-fighter

Speaking of nostalgia, today's "Half Full" reminds me of when we had four dogs and our windows were continually smeared with doggy nose drool.

It occurred to me that this was probably a deterrent to burglars, and that perhaps you could make money by selling bingo markers full of glycerine that people could use to mark their windows, together with large plastic dog poops they could scatter around on their lawns and empty 50 pound Dog Chow bags they could fill with trash and put out every week.

It's not the dumbest idea I've ever had, but it might be the dumbest idea I've ever had that would have worked.

At about that same time, the Denver police launched "Operation ID," which consisted of engraving your Social Security number on your TV, stereo and other valuable stuff. This was before the Internet and the realization that giving crooks your SS# could trigger a bigger loss than whatever you'd engraved it on.

Anyway, in addition to borrowing the engraving tool, you got these window stickers of a police badge that said everything of value had been marked.

Turns out it didn't matter what it said on the stickers because burglars don't read, but, when they saw the badge on the sticker, they thought it meant a cop lived there, which was an even bigger deterrent.

So when we moved from Denver down to the Springs, we put our leftover Operation ID stickers up on the windows next to the dog nose drool.

We didn't bother marking our stuff. Why bother? You only have to be smarter than the bad guys, and it's not like Lex Luthor was going to break in and steal our stereo.

Speaking of public outreach, the police here have launched a program where they have this special cop car with a cooler and they hand out free ice cream, which reminds me of when the Denver and Colorado Springs police started a community-building program where they handed out Bronco cards.

It was such a popular program that they had to halt it because kids were running out into the street to flag down cops cars and they were afraid somebody was going to get run over.

There is such a thing as being too popular.

Still on the subject of artistic drool

I might appreciate a Jackson Pollock approach to latte art, as seen in today's Rhymes with Orange, if only as an efficient alternative to more painstaking creativity.

I'll admit I don't buy a lot of latte, because it's pretty expensive for what is, basically, a cup of strong coffee that takes longer to serve than a regular cup of joe.

Exquisite art just makes it take that much longer, and when I'm interested in a hyper jolt of caffeine, I'm usually operating in an atmosphere where my mood is, come'on, just gimme the goddam coffee.

Meanwhile, back in Charlottesville

I ranted yesterday about a lack of urgency in addressing the nazi uprising, and a couple of cartoonists did post responses by day's end, though, as the second day pieces come in, they seem to be drifting into the predictable and even tedious. 

I guess if I can be content going to a demonstration without singing along and waving signs, I can't bitch too much about cartoons that address the topic in less than gung-ho inspirational fashion, but here are a couple that I really liked:

(Keith Knight)

(JP Trostle)

Trostle brings those silly tiki torches into it, which provides your moment of poor misunderstood zen: