I don’t know that Dan Piraro (who still does the Sunday Bizarros, while Wayno does the dailies) was looking for LOLs so much as nods and chuckles with this one.
There’s plenty of comedy fodder in the sort of adventure-tourism that sends well-heeled suburbanites up the sides of mountains, though perhaps I’m too cynical in thinking they’ll show the photos on their phones to the folks back home, tell how much the experience changed them and then go back to planning the next Debutante Ball at the Club.
But it also sparked a guilty, uncomfortable reminder of when we took a trip to Santa Fe, which included a stop at Taos Pueblo, which I thought was going to mean that the Pueblan people lived over there and we were going to see some historic ruins over here.
However, it quickly became apparent that, no, they still live in the pueblo.
And then it got worse.
A pair of college kids took our admission at the entrance, and asked if we were going to take pictures, which would cost a couple of bucks more, and I realized that I really, really didn’t want to be the guy who paid to take pictures of the colorful exotic native people, and that feeling increased markedly when I found that, while much of the pueblo was roped off for privacy, the part we were invited to was not a display but was the actual homes of actual people.
Who had little corn bracelets and necklaces we could buy and I’m told that homes in that part of the pueblo are much prized because you can make extra money from the tourists and I’m sure that’s true but at that moment I just wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere than standing in the middle of somebody’s livingroom.
However, I have little such compassion for hermits, and I’m thinking that a for-real hermit would move back farther into the mountains, or perhaps even roll a few rocks down as the tourists climbed up.
Though I’m well aware of Noah John Rondeau, a famous Adirondack hermit who was … well … a famous hermit, which is to say that he wrote books and made public appearances at conventions and sports shows.
Y’know: A hermit.
Zits similarly sent me off, with a spectacular opening panel that then bathosed into Jeremy and Hector slogging through a parking lot, which I guess could be at their school.
Eldest granddaughter often complained about how far away her high school’s student lot was, mostly in the context of how driving to school was considered a “privilege” to be arbitrarily rescinded for any petty infraction.
However, my first impression of this Zits was that they were at a mall, where employees were required to park out on the edges, except that Jeremy and Hector don’t have jobs.
Which in turn made me reflect that my kids turned pretty responsible by the time they could drive, and not only had jobs but were first out the door to shovel when the driveway was snowed in. I didn’t touch a snow shovel or lawnmower their junior and senior years, nor did they ever ask me for money beyond their regular allowances.
Ditto with eldest granddaughter, while her little sister — currently a junior in high school — is working part-time, taking drivers ed and studying for LNA certification.
Which in turn made me think that either there’s a helluva gap between real kids and the screw-offs like Jeremy or Dustin who represent young people in the comics, or that I’m a genius parent and passed it on to my genius kids.
The latter being an interpretation I’d accept.
On a more mundane level, today’s Lockhorns reminded me not of flying — I sometimes watch movies on my Fire but not on the airline’s thingie — but of donating platelets.
Apheresis involves one needle taking blood from your arm, then sending it into a centrifuge where it spins out the platelets, and then the rest of your blood returning through a needle in your other arm.
Which is only twice as many holes in your arm as donating a regular ol’ unit of blood but instead of taking 15 or 20 minutes, it takes about two and a half hours.
Before old age and cancer recovery turned my blood into chemical soup, I was a regular platelet donor, and they’d set you up with a movie, which meant that, as the movie drew to a close, you’d start looking over at the computer, hoping to time things out so that they’d be pulling the needles right as the credits rolled.
You should try it. Really. They’ll let you.
This cartoon is not part of the lineup Paul Berge has at his blog, marking the centenary of Prohibition.
Rather, it’s one I pulled a few years ago when I was writing about the history of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, because temperance and women’s rights are absolutely entwined.
Here, Puck Cartoonist Oscar Cesare warns suffragists against joining forces with Prohibition, and the alcohol lobby poured a lot of money into the anti-suffrage movement because they knew giving women the vote would increase likelihood of banning alcohol.
And suffragists did pause before making common cause with the controversial Women’s Christian Temperance Union, but WCTU was well-established, well-organized and well-funded and made a huge difference in the end.
The interplay was justified, as this earlier panel suggests, because women had no legal control over family finances and a woman who divorced an abusive drunken wastrel not only lost all property rights and financial standing, but likely custody of her children as well.
As Berge notes, the two amendments fell quickly upon each other, though the liquor lobby quickly began working to make sure Prohibition was poorly enforced and largely unaccepted.
My grandfather often laughed about how, as a wee lad, this song always made him cry, but shutting down the beer halls of the slums was a major part of the efforts of Jacob Riis, Jane Addams and other social reformers:
I give Double Red, which means the blood goes out of me, they mess with it, and it goes back in through the same needle (only slightly cooler, which always makes me feel creepy).