CSotD: Any Given Saturday
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Generally, Saturday is the day for burying weak gags and inconsequential "group hug" story arc endings. For some reason, a whole lot of people ignored that pattern today, including Olivia Jaimes, who broke out of the New, Improved Nancy's dadaist pattern for this more insightful piece.
Not her first. A few more in the mix and I'll be a true fan.
And speaking of insight, Pajama Diaries delivers a strong blow with this overly-familiar story.
I've seen the basic gag before — though with the demise of video stores, it's now set on the couch as the couple goes through Netflix choices — but the circularity here, plus the addition of the next generation's participation, is brilliantly compact.
And it could easily have been stretched into a Sunday strip, but it would have lost power and become argumentative. It's far better as a bang/boom daily.
Solution: When my boys were little, we set up a pattern of odd and even days to determine who got to ride shotgun in the front seat. And we'd reverse it each year since kids miss nothing and, yes, the person with "odds" got two days in a row when a month had 31 days.
I think marriages would last longer if whole families had a similar rule across the board: "It's an even day. You get to make the decision."
Or was that have to?
Careful what you wish for
Today's Pooch Cafe echoes Pope Francis's assurance that we will be united in Heaven with our dogs, which has, for some reason, started popping up in my news feed despite being a couple of years old.
It's an interesting barometer of papal kindness: According to the above-linked piece, grumpy old Pius IX and Benedict XVI said dogs have no souls, while kindly JPII and Frances teach that they will be joining us in the hereafter. I suspect this divide is more about luring flies with honey or with vinegar than it is about actual theology.
Nobody has approached it with a formal finality that would invoke Papal Infallibility, which, assuming the current pope made such a proclamation, would mean that, when I personally cross the Rainbow Bridge, I would be up for a whole lot of halo-tug and halo-toss, since I'd be greeted at least by Buttons, Puddles, Taylor, Mordecai, Szabo, Ziggy, Josh, O'Malley, Destry, Nellie, Ziwa and Vaska, and also perhaps a few I only lived with temporarily, like Thief, Suzie Creamcheese, Jack and Puck.
And let's just hope their view of heaven doesn't include being reunited with parents and littermates, because this could quickly get totally out of control.
A Mesmerizing Juxtaposition
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(I have no idea if Niklas Eriksson reads Big Ben Bolt's Sunday strips, which, two months ago, featured a hypnotized opponent. I kind of doubt he saw it when it first ran in 1957.
Whatever his inspiration, I suspect it would indeed be easier to hypnotize someone into going down for the count than to use it to make his brain invulnerable to repeated blows to the head.
Though, if you wear that kind of hat, I think you can gesture hypnotically and make just about anything happen.
Observational Excellence
I may be overthinking the funnies today, but Dave Coverly is way ahead of me on that score with today's Speed Bump.
Not only is crowding the entire team onto one part of a single rod an excellent way to simulate youth soccer, but note that he has modified the table itself with a slot such that the teams can run up and down the field in their knot.
This man has watched too much youth soccer, and I say that as someone who has coached the sport.
I would have taught them to play their positions, but we spent most of our instructional time teaching them to kick the ball without stepping on it and falling down.
Also Sprach Alexa
Several cartoonists greeted the re-release of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with jokes about Alexa and HAL, apparently without taking the time to ask Alexa to open the pod bay doors.
It was one of the first things I asked her and, yes, she came preloaded with a snippy answer suggesting that I wasn't the first to think of it and it wasn't funny.
I got my Echo when it was first released in January, 2015, which means that her programmers anticipated the question before anyone had actually asked it.
But Brewster Rockit goes beyond the obvious and has been running a delightfully silly Alexa/HAL story arc all week.
Though I would note that they already make a tiny monolith, which I know because my kids persuaded me to trade in my flip phone and get one.
And if you think the monolith in 2001 was enigmatically black, you should see my pocket monolith in direct sunlight. You need one of those Matthew Brady over-your-head hood thingies to see the screen at all, which, of course, would enhance the "walking around without watching where you're going" factor cartoonists prize.
It's only occasionally a problem, because, while I kept my flip phone in my pocket along with my car keys, my monolith is large enough that it isn't comfortable to keep pocketed and I usually end up forgetting it when I leave the house.
Which doesn't much matter because, like Lemont, I work at home.
The times I leave the house are brief and I'm not so self-important that I fear my temporary disconnectedness will disrupt the cosmos.
Though today being, as noted in Candorville, the day everyone else agrees is Saturday, and specifically the Saturday that my favorite lobster place opens for the season, I'll be leaving the house for several hours.
I'll bring the damn monolith.
But I liked today's Free Range because I'm sorry I ever let those whippersnappers talk me into trading in my phone.
(Yeah, you can look up phone numbers on the monolith. I don't care.)
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