CSotD: Sunday Short Takes
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I find most generational/technical-gap gags pretty lame, but I really like today's Zits, and would be curious to know how postcard sales have been impacted, first by digital cameras and second by the Internet.
According to Wikipedia, there was a craze for postcards touched off by the Columbian Exhibition, which opened 125 years ago this coming Tuesday and touched off all sorts of things.
Obviously the immediate impetus for postcards was the ability to send photographs in an age before Kodak put photography in the hands of the people.
Even later, when we all carried film cameras, the advantages of a postcard were, first of all, that the pictures were taken on days when the weather and lighting were perfect, and, second, you could see the quality of the photo right there at the moment instead of a week after you got home and turned in your film.
It's a little more subjective to suggest that another advantage was that the people making postcards understood that the goal was to show the great place where you had been and not what your big fat face looked like blocking out the great place where you had been.
Unless you are Brian Fies, in which case it's intentionally funny.
This is one time when I'm going to go with Jeremy: I think the postcard has largely served its purpose, which is kind of too bad, but then so has the phone book and I'm not gonna get too sentimental over either of them.
Plus, I can balance it by going with the old folks in today's Arlo and Janis, because the couch on the front lawn brings back some wonderful memories of youth, but, then again, I'm not sure how the neighbors survived having us around.
I'm also not sure how the couch made it even through the summer, much less the months it was out there before, though Boulder is a semidesert climate and it was somewhat tucked under the eaves.
As for the difference between Arlo and Janis, I remember sitting out on the couch Sunday mornings with a cup of coffee, watching Mom and Dad and Bud and Sis cruise by in the station wagon, and it was Dad, not Mom, who would be looking out the window with a wistful sense of longing.
The poor ol' sod.
Now on to more weighty matters
David Fitzsimmons explores the deplorables who cannot be converted into facing reality.
One thing that occurs to me is that, when the nation was first set up, the founders not only expected voting to be limited to people with some grounding in how things work, but backstopped the predictable foolishness of the masses by having a Senate that would, like the House of Lords, act as a restraint on temporary folly and unexamined concepts.
The Senate's own website has an interesting if perhaps self-interested analysis of why we went from having state legislatures appoint Senators to voting directly on them. I'm certainly willing to concede that there were problems and shortcomings in the original system, but I kind of wonder, had we reformed it instead of overturning it, if the Senate today might be a more effective body.
New Hampshire only has two congressional districts, so the difference between our two Reps and our two Senators is a little less that it might be elsewhere, but I think that, in most states, you know your Representative better than you know either of your Senators. That was certainly true in Northern New York, where I'm not really sure our Senators knew anybody even lived north of Kingston, never mind north of Albany.
Though I must admit that, while both Bobby Kennedy and Hillary Clinton used the Empire State as a carpetbagger's launching pad, Hillary did wander off into the countryside and have a look around, which set her apart from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whom I admired for many reasons but who was, in effect, a national Senator and didn't do jack for most of New York State.
I think our state legislature might have done better than the people ever did in selecting Senators who would represent our interests.
The other thing about Fitz's cartoon is that it brings to mind the fact that only half of Trump's basket was deplorables and the other half could presumably be reached, and I suspect many of them have been.
I keep seeing articles about what percentage of Republicans believe this or that, and it seems to be presented as if half our nation were Republican and half Democrat. We're a two-party system, yes, but only about a quarter of voters identify with either party, which means that, if 60% of Republicans or Democrats believe something, it filters down to just over half of a quarter.
Not insignificant, but, then again, no landslide.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(I'm not sure how shocked or surprised we should be that Paul Ryan fired the House of Representative's Chaplain for preaching the word of Jesus in a place where Jesus would have been kicking over the tables and beating people with a rope end.
But I do kind of suspect that, had he gotten up there and offered a prayer that rejected birth control or abortion, there would have been a lineup of legislators prepared to go to the mattresses to preserve his Freedom of Religion.
I'm not sure why we even have chaplains wandering around the halls of Congress, where they'd probably be a violation of the First Amendment's ban on established religions if they weren't pretty much content to be fishes' tits.
Though maybe if they weren't willing to act as tits on a fish, we'd have fewer elected legislators boastfully claiming to worship the fellow the chaplain would stand up and quote accurately every morning.
Well, perhaps better to back off and let the professionals continue to exchange the full bottle for the empty bottle until the Man in White stops needing either.
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