CSotD: Monday Short Takes
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This is a difficult time for cartoonists, because school calendars vary so much that it's impossible to riff on end-of-year and be at all accurate.
However, Zits makes the best guess with the assumption of Memorial Day as the end of the year, and the gag itself brings back memories of one of those things divorced parents shouldn't bother quarreling over.
When my boys were in high school, their summers were divided in half between one home in New York and one home in England, which made summer jobs problematic and thus something for their parents to bicker over.
As with most such things, it turned out not to matter. You can spend a month at your mother's in England and then come back and walk right into a job in the US because a month into summer is about when your classmates quit and create openings.
Incidentally, proposals for year-round school make sense in that we no longer live in an agrarian society where kids are needed on the family farm in summer.
But, besides signalling the end of the farm economy, year-round school would also signal the triumph of Disney and other full-time corporate vacation spots, because smaller seasonal tourist attractions count on students and teachers as staff.
Which serves as a segue for our next cartoon, except that I can't leave this Zits without complimenting whoever did the coloring on the Froot Loops.
Them are some damn fine-looking Froot Loops.
Meanwhile, Heart's mom is not the first to discover that, however much you pay Megaton Streaming Inc for service, they're gonna hold out the good stuff and charge you extra.
As her daughter knows, that's how tech works, whether it's "Wizz Dizzy" or Amazon Prime or whoever, though Amazon is the chief culprit in the bait-and-switch of listing movies without telling you they cost extra.
There's some logic in that, since they're also in the business of selling you things (in case you hadn't noticed), and you can, with practice, filter your choices to avoid being unexpectedly invited to rent the movie or join Starz or whatever.
Our transition to a capitalist oligarchy is a bit bumpy at the moment and not simply because investors want the benefits but don't want to pay the price.
And this is well beyond charging an extra $4.95 for a Very Special Movie. I mean things like health care or paying a humane minimum wage.
So people are currently pissed that Amazon Prime is jumping from $99 to $119 a year, which is admittedly a helluva one-year increase, yes.
But some of those same people are upset that Barnes & Noble is in dire straits, which strikes me as like fretting over the fate of Rite Aid or McDonald's.
Gee, maybe if Barnes & Noble would just devour a few more small, independent bookstores, they'd feel better!
"At least they're not Amazon" is a pretty weak defense, in part because the fact that someone isn't Al Capone doesn't make it okay for them to steal your car, and in part because Barnes & Noble would love to be Amazon if they were able to pull it off.
We're so immersed in the corporate culture that it seems like a revolutionary act to call a scabdriver instead of a licensed taxi, when you're simply putting the money in Uber's pocket instead of the cab company's.
And speaking of what I'd like to think are unintended consequences, Jimmy Margulies notes how Dear Leader's reinstatement of sanctions on Iran will hit Americans in the wallet.
We'll see.
Like everything else in our system's entanglement, it's a little hard to sort this out. It's not as simple as "The US will no longer purchase Iranian oil," which would be more than a blip on the screen but not a crippling blow.
It includes "The US will punish businesses in other countries that don't go along with us," and, at that point, the crystal ball becomes very cloudy.
There was a time when the US could count on the support of its allies in such matters and, in fact, the US can still count on the support of its allies.
What it can't count on anymore is having allies, as noted in the May 12 issue of Der Speigel, which not only featured this cover but included a breathtaking editorial that called for a refusal to go along with Trump, and explained its lack of respect for him in no uncertain terms:
Trump says he is exorbitantly rich, yet Trump ran himself into the ground with his casinos to the point that he was 295 million dollars in debt in 1990. He was bailed out by the banks and by his father. The greatest myth, though, has to do with Trump's alleged negotiating expertise. This too is nonsense. Trump was never proficient in the art of the deal. As a businessman, he paid far too much for substandard properties and has shown no patience as a politician. He isn't curious. His preparation is nonexistent. Strategy and tactics are both foreign to him. Trump is only proficient in destruction.
Meanwhile, the fact that gas prices always rise this time of year as refineries gear up for tourist season is a third factor.
And it's impossible to pin down exactly why prices of stock or of commodities rise and fall because they're primarily based on how investors feel about things, not on any actual objective causes.
That's part of the Capitalist Cloud in which we dwell.
As is …
… the fact the Big Blind Corporate Creators keep rolling out recycled crap like this, trying to capitalize on other people's inspirations.
Even if it works, it won't be brilliant. What made Rocky and Bullwinkle brilliant was spontaneous originality which, by definition, you can't replicate.
(I did, however, get a kick out of Johanna Draper Carlson announcing the move and simultaneously holding her nose.)
Yet it may work
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