CSotD: Saturday Short Takes
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No particular theme today, so we'll kick off with Richard John Marcej's reflection on his new (finally!) job and the commute thereto.
I genuinely don't understand commuting. I'm okay with getting on a train and doing your morning newspaper routine while you head towards the office, and my uncle had a variant where he would drive into DC in the dark and then read his paper in the car while everyone else was bumper-to-bumper.
But it's that bumper-to-bumper I don't get. I don't know if it's because I'm country or because I'm a bit claustrophobic — both are true — but I was visiting a friend in Oakland once and she lined us up to go over the Oakland Bay Bridge and I damn near went nuts from the inching, inching, inching forward.
And this was on a Sunday afternoon.
I know folks in the country with insane commutes, but it's because they found the job after they owned the house. Like RJM's temporary commute, it's necessity, not choice.
I did, at one point, live 12 miles from the office, which made it hard but not impossible to nip home for lunch and to let the dog out. Most times, I've been no more than five or six miles away.
Y'all commuters are crazy, and perhaps it's the commuting makes it so.
Speaking of country matters …
Today's xkcd is kind of sad and could really touch off a rant if I were in the mood.
But I get plenty of chances to rant about the urbanization of America, since cartoonists regularly do strips about how nasty camping is and how scary it is to be out where the animals dwell and the cell reception is spotty.
And even when city folks try to report on nature, they don't always make sense. There was a report on NPR yesterday that swatting at mosquitoes will teach them to leave you alone. The individual mosquito, that is. Seriously.
And if you catch snowflakes on your tongue, you won't have to shovel the driveway.
There's nothing new in the feeling that we're losing — have lost — connection with the natural world. Urbanization was the catalyst for both Boy Scouting and the summer camp movement just before the turn of the century, and Theodore Roosevelt used to hand out copies of Robert Burrough's nature books to inner city kids, hoping to inspire them one day to at least leave the city long enough to take a look.
In any case, I live in a "city" of 13,531 people, which isn't all that urban, but it's still city enough that, when I get out into the country at night, the sky takes my breath away.
Maybe some future president should walk around the inner city handing out copies of "Cosmos."
As for those mountain lions …
Here's another episode in the continuing theme of separating reality from cartoon setting in Sherman's Lagoon.
Megan is a shark, not a mountain lion, and there's a big difference in that the mountain lions only eat their neighbors. If people would quit pushing their suburban developments up into mountain lion neighborhoods, they'd remain mysterious and scary.
The people, that is.
And other scary things
Retail has been featuring a conference call that was supposed to spike the store closing rumors but has only made things worse, which is what conference calls are for. This is the first strip in the arc, and it's worth following through.
The pre-call chitchat reminds me that the only thing more annoying than having to set aside time for one of these asinine calls was setting aside the time and then waiting around for it to actually start. I mean, if you're going to waste my time, at least do it actively.
Here's today's episode and we still don't know what stores are closing but we certainly learned how low morale is across the company.
I never heard this kind of unguarded, disloyal chitchat, but I do remember that the best part of a conference call was when someone who was trying to be productive would put the conference call on hold, forgetting that their newspaper had hold music.
You want to hear management get pissy? Give them a dose of untraceable hold music to try to talk over.
Timing!
I don't know what kind of lead time prevailed in 1954, but, given that strips had to be mailed in to syndicates, processed, and then mailed out to papers, I'd suggest it was astonishingly bold for Buz Sawyer to mention Hurricane Hazel by name in a strip that ran the day after she was proclaimed a hurricane.
Roy Crane would have the list of names, of course, but having picked the right one for a strip that dropped on a specific date is impressive, though Hazel was pretty far from "380 miles east of Key West" at the point.
She caught up.
Boy oh boy did she.
And this
Real Life Adventures on the real life adventure of adopting a dog, and they could certainly have done worse. The person who wanted a laid-back dog and got an insanely active one has a lot more to regret.
I had working dogs when my boys were little and they all ran around the yard all day. Then, when the boys were older, I began getting hounds who were content to snooze on the couch with me.
At our unfenced park, the dogs are all great because otherwise they'd run away or they'd get into fights and be unwelcome.
But I see many dogs in town — fenced or leashed — that were available for adoption for a reason, and not every adoption agency is clear about those reasons.
My next dog will likely be an adoption, but it's critical to know whether you're dealing with an agency that's eager to make good matches, or one that's eager to place dogs.
Obviously you can't just ask them.
But 15 years is a serious commitment. Proceed with caution.
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