CSotD: Friday Funnies
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Okay, now I'm completely confused. Just as Judge Parker was getting somewhere in the business of tying up any loose ends it couldn't simply eliminate, semi-celebrity Godiva Danube has reappeared, Neddy is freaking out over being seen waiting tables and her fellow-waitron suddenly drops a wall-shattering piece of patented Marciuliano dialogue on us.
Careful, fellas. It is indeed possibly she just said it because she's creative and feels Neddy is leaning too hard on her, but let's leave the bizarre self-awareness to Ted and Sally Forth.
And Nancy. Still waiting for "Olivia Jaimes" to find her legs with the strip — always a process, nothing personal — but in the meantime, the unaccustomed weirdness is almost as much fun in itself as watching the audience freak out over it.
As noted here before, I find that a little dada goes a long way, but Zippy is popular, so maybe it's just me.
She's on my daily feed for now, anyway.
Speaking of self-consciously weird, Deflocked is in a good story arc, and I say "good" because it both freshens a frequent storyline of Mamet and cookie-selling Girl Scouts and offers an unusual bitcoin gag.
There are a lot of bitcoin gags going around lately and it's hard to break out of the pack, but this'll do. And this particular punchline cracked me up because I did have a publisher who, bless her heart, put a strict limit on parental peddlers in the workplace: An order sheet in the break room and that was it.
I was exempt for a few years anyway. When some kid came to the door or a parent approached me at work, I just said, "My son plays hockey," and they'd back off, knowing they were outgunned.
This Baby Blues hit me harder than usual because it came up earlier this week just as I was back in town, having spent a day and a half with my son and his family after the Satire Symposium wrapped up.
His house didn't have much to say, but his Alexa piped up unbidden two or three times while I was there and I remarked that, if she says anything on her own at my place, it's not more often than maybe every couple of weeks.
He pointed out that, since I live alone, there's probably a lot less talk for her to mistakenly respond to, which explanation I accepted until my ex remarked, in a totally unrelated conversation, that her Alexa keeps speaking at random intervals, and she is, like me, down to herself and a dog.
Only thing I can figure out is that I was an early adapter. Maybe the first generation of Alexas were less blabby.
By the way, I tried an experiment where I purposely mentioned corn starch several times aloud over the course of a week, to see if I'd start getting Amazon prompts to purchase it from them. I didn't.
I wasn't paranoid about it in the first place, but I'm less so now.
Today's Arctic Circle got a good laugh. I wonder if we could devise some way to cycle all the plastic up there to form an anthropocenic polar cap? The polar bears could just walk across the laundry bottles.
I'd be satisfied, by the way, if we could all agree on whether the plastics problem is actually a large mass of bottles and Big Wheels or a widespread soup of microbeads. I've heard both and, when I say "both" I mean I've heard the problem is one, and I've heard the problem is the other, and, if we're going to quarrel over that, I doubt we'll solve either.
I do know that microbeads go through the filters in our water systems and shampoo bottles don't. After that, it all starts to get a little less clear.
And while Alex Hallatt's gags at Arctic Circle are aimed at environmental awareness, I'm taking this evolution gag in Free Range as one that is intentionally silly but perhaps more thought-provoking than intended.
The assumption that we're the end product of evolution is a strange mix of religion and science: God works slowly through natural processes in order to create his masterpiece.
Which then leads to "Manifest Destiny" and the idea that the more technologically advanced forms of humankind are what God actually had in mind, which is today called "white privilege" but has long been a root cause of imperialism, colonialism and cultural hegemony: The assumption that less technologically advanced cultures are less worthy and that it is "our" (using the word advisedly) mission on Earth to help them become more perfect, which is to say, more like "us."
I did a project on the early history of New York State, which is necessarily deeply involved with the Iroquois, whose metaphorical Longhouse dominated the map. Their interactions with other Indian nations aside, the way the Big Three European nations approached them was fascinating.
The Dutch accepted them as a nation, if not precisely at parity, at least on the level of "you have furs that we want and we have metal tools and other things that you want." Their trade meetings were conducted very much along Iroquois cultural lines, which is to say that getting together involved long speeches, some gifts, several dinners and perhaps a week, not counting travel time.
The English had no such patience: Here are some knives and kettles and guns. Give us some furs. Now. We're busy people!
And the French wanted them to convert to Catholicism, move to suburban Montreal and make themselves useful. Or else.
Sadly, you don't have to know a lot of history to recognize which of those three European empires faded first.
And speaking of how we treat each other on all sorts of levels, this Dog Eat Doug is a lovely illustration of one of my favorite columns, which I've probably served up before but which I'm serving up again:
(My dad, his dog, that fence)
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