CSotD: Wednesday Short Takes
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Today's Duplex brings back some memories.
This is a good example of "kidding on the square," though, while parasitic credit card companies don't waste their mailers on people who have a grip on their personal budgets, I doubt they actually target people who pay late.
But I'm quite sure they share the news of who signs up for those balance-transfer offers that say "You can transfer your current credit balance for 0% though if you are a day late we will jack your ass up to 28% which we're going to do in six months anyway."
I've been pretty outfront about how I know this, but I was only a tourist in that world, juggling single parenthood with a low-paying career field.
I left work late one evening, after our office doors had gone to automatically locking, when two of Da Boyz approached me and asked me to let them in so they could talk to one of the staff upstairs.
Fat chance, pal, but I found out what they wanted, then went back inside to tell her that someone was there to repossess her car.
She wasn't all that surprised or upset. I guess she had been around the barn with whoever held the paper and knew it was coming, but I drove away and then circled back and parked with my lights off to make sure things remained civilized.
I suppose there are people with good incomes who buy things and deliberately scoot out on the payments, but most repo men are not jacking Cadillacs from suburban driveways but rather taking away the means someone has for getting to work at a shitty job that wasn't paying enough in the first place.
There was a time when supporting our commercial sector was tacitly rewarded by making interest paid on credit debt deductible on income taxes, but we managed to get over that bit of governmental enabling.
They've bred a type of mosquito which breeds with the mosquitoes that carry dengue and zika but renders their eggs infertile. However, this GMOsquito only targets that particular species, because wiping out all mosquitoes would seriously disrupt the food cycle.
Which I mention as a way of saying, golly, even parasitical bloodsuckers are a vital part of our robust economy.
Right?
I reported about a year ago that Sophie, the real-life model for the Dog of Dog Eat Doug, had died.
The strip didn't acknowledge that, of course, but Brian Anderson has added a new element in which Doug and Sophie's family has begun fostering adoptable pups. It's a good way of promoting adoption, but also of injecting fresh comic material into the strip.
I mentioned yesterday the life cycle whereby comic strips find their legs, get into a groove and then find themselves in a rut, and this is one that could easily bog down in an endless repetition of Sophie eating Doug's food or, worse yet and heaven forfend, letting young Doug grow beyond pre-verbal baby.
Having these tiny, temporary disruptors wander through the strip regularly, however, is an excellent way to keep things juiced up.
And I'm sure Sophie would be honored.
Also in the field of art imitating life, Rex Morgan has, as I noted earlier, been on a storyline about art fakers ripping people off on Ebay, which has at the moment become particularly relevant.
In the strip, the perp has turned out to be Buck's psychotic ex-wife, who just tried to attack him and fell down a staircase, and so we come to today's strip which features one of the most stunning partial-recaps I've seen in a good long time.
It's a serious topic and Rex Morgan is not a comedy strip, but the fact is, if you take it all too seriously, it stops being any fun at all.
I honestly can't tell if Terry Beatty is being purposefully droll or simply deadpan, so I guess I won't say that it cracked me up, in case he didn't want it to.
Arlo & Janis hits on all cylinders (see what I did there?) today, in a follow to yesterday's strip in which he commented that she can throw random ingredients together and it still comes out delicious.
It may be that Jimmy Johnson had a choice, but I certainly didn't: Boys took Shop and girls took Home Ec, which was less a nefarious plot to preserve the paternalistic system than it was an assumption that society functioned that way.
Girls took home ec and boys took shop, with the result that Sue, who could have been a nuclear engineer had the option been out there, was one helluva seamstress and made Dave Clark Five-style paisley shirts for Walt that we'd have had to go 300 miles to NYC to buy, while Walt could start her car for her if she needed it.
And, unlike Arlo, I'm sure he kept up with the changing technology, though he didn't marry Sue, the fool.
Meanwhile, my mother insisted I take typing, which surrounded me with chicks, including the cutest cheerleader of all, who became a good friend.
So I could type my own papers in college while the honor roll students mentioned yesterday were paying a buck a page and never knew any cheerleaders.
Tant pis.
Finally, the absurdly late arrival of November weather in New England makes the current xkcd timely.
I'm for moderation in all things, or at least the weather, and there are places I absolutely wouldn't live, mostly adjacent to the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi Valley, where the constant humidity makes extremes of both summer and winter.
Having lived in both the Adirondacks and South Bend, Indiana, I can testify that minus-10 Fahrenheit in northern New York was not as unpleasant as 10-above in SoBend, while summers in the Midwest feel like you were sprayed with Pam.
But I suppose it's home, as Lou Rawls noted, even with the Hawk lurking outside your door:
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