CSotD: Sunday Funday

No politics today, but I can’t help but share this morning’s Sunday Times cover, upon which Morten Morland has depicted the Prime Ministers who served the UK in those years. We’ll get back to politics and Liz Truss tomorrow, assuming she’s still in office tomorrow.

 

Not that politics don’t matter, and Deflocked reminds us of how hard it is becoming for cartoonists to be more ridiculous than reality. Mamet may seem like a fool, but, then again, look at some of the candidates who are running successful but nonsensical campaigns.

It’s the real-life Mamets who support them, and who truly can’t differentiate between TV shows and government.

But we have less important things to discuss today.

 

For instance, it occurred to me to wonder if this Bizarro (KFS) was a bit too smart for the room, given that we all knew Dr. Bronner’s Soap back in the day, but I carry a small bottle of the stuff in my car, in case the dog finds something delightful to roll in, and have found a lot of people who don’t know about it.

But then those are the people who would, instead, choose Mr. Clean, which is harder on the environment and probably on the dog as well. I would hesitate to douse my dog with Mr. Clean and then lead her into the Connecticut River.

Though I might try Mrs. Meyers, which makes her attraction to him puzzling.

However, I would also hesitate to buy a shower curtain with this cartoon on it, which shows how little I know. (Wayno reports that if you enter BIZARRO10 at checkout, you get a 10 percent discount. I’m not making this up.)

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee — KFS)

(Agnes — Creators)

You are what you eat and I’m pretty casual. I can tell good food from not-so-good food, but it’s not an obsession and I have never posted a photo of my food online, except for some lobsters who were still crawling around at the time, making it more of a mugshot than a menu.

The issue of suspicious meat and pink slime has more or less been resolved in favor of consumers, but they can now choose suspicious non-meat patties, though if you’re going to have a veggie burger, it seems contradictory to top it with cheese-like glop unless that’s also artificial.

I’m somewhat of the opinion that, if you’re eating enough of this stuff to make a difference, you probably shouldn’t be, whatever it is.

But that brings us to Agnes and I have a whole freezer of whateverthehell that is, and I heartily endorse Grandma’s policy of smelling it to make sure it doesn’t stink.

You could label it, yes.

But you still ought to sniff it before you eat it.

 

As long as I’m ranting about food, I’ll include the topic of this Duplex, in which tips are solicited rather than assumed.

I tip 20% for table service, and, admittedly, there is a line on the tab for you to add that tip, but it’s not shoved in your face.

More to the point, it’s not electronically demanded for counter help, who shouldn’t be tipped employees in the first place. If I have to do all the fetching and toting, I’m the one who should be getting the 20%.

Yes, I’ve been “help” and I’m sympathetic, but I’m not sympathetic to employers who cheat the system by classifying counter help as tipped employees.

I suspect this is largely an American issue, with most civilized countries adding a service fee or simply building employee compensation into the base price of the food. Which makes it tough to wait tables in an area with a lot of foreign tourists who may not even realize how crappy your pay is.

Leading to the joke on our Northern border, “What’s the difference between a Canadian and a canoe?”

Canoes sometimes tip.

 

Wallace the Brave breaks me out of that sour mood with a memory of an early triumph, back in my brief immersion in Catholic school.

Our first-grade teacher, Sister Theophilus, was a legendary madwoman and we were all terrified of her, for good reason. She embodied every aspect of parochial sadism you’ve ever heard, including physical abuse and warnings of everlasting hellfire for bad little six-year-olds.

One day, Sister Theophilus appointed one of her quislings to be the playground monitor, and he busted me for crossing the imaginary line in the concrete from the boys’ side to the girls’ side. He took out his paper and asked me my name, and then — being nowhere near as bright as Rose — demanded “How do you spell it?”

I saw my opportunity and rattled off a random series of letters which he dutifully wrote down.

Later, when Sister was about to rain terror on his list of miscreants, she came to that one and said, “Who’s this?” and the little piglet couldn’t remember.

The next year, we moved out to the country where they didn’t have such schools, and I figure by now the statute of limitations has likely run out, though I guess I’m still going to Hell.

Sister said.

 

Moving to the country not only got me away from Sister Theophilus, but into the most magnificent autumns in the country. Joe Heller is in Wisconsin, and Midwest autumns are nice, but the Northern Forest that stretches from the Adirondacks across Vermont and New Hampshire into western Maine produces colorful displays nobody else can.

One more rant: Anyone who applies filters to pictures of foliage is a liar and a vandal and should have their hand glued to the wall of an art museum.

As the Bard wrote:

The guy’s wife in the cartoon is right: There are perfect days.

And, like any other form of perfection, you can’t predict them, you can’t force them and you can’t fake them.

 

And this fellow in Non Sequitur should have been better prepared. There’s a serious environmental argument to be made for not raking your leaves in the fall. 

 

Better, as Macanudo (KFS) suggests, that you spend your time dancing with the leaves, not raking them.

Even melancholy changes can be beautiful, if you want them to be.

 

6 thoughts on “CSotD: Sunday Funday

  1. So – counter employees don’t get tipped because employers “should” pay them sufficiently. As I’ve heard they say in Vermont, “Ay-yup.”

    “So let it be written so let it be done.”

  2. W.r.t. the linked article about leaf-raking. I’m all for being environmentally friendly but …

    The recommendation to allow your leaves to sit on your lawn so they can degrade into fertilizer is ignoring the fact that grass doesn’t survive without sunlight. If I left the dense blanket of large leaves and pine needles on my yard over the winter, by they time they decomposed the only plant life growing in them would be weeds.

    I also find the claim about methane dubious. Certainly if the leaves are put in a landfill they’ll create methane as they decompose. But why should I expect the same volume of leaves, spread out over many lawns, to produce less methane? The only difference would seem to be concentration, but it seems like you’d add the same volume of methane to the planetary greenhouse gas either way. At least when concentrated at a landfill there’s potential to reclaim some energy from the methane.

  3. Bob, my grass survives quite well without sunlight even when it’s covered in snow for six months.

    In fact, it’s pretty amazing how quickly after the snow shovels can go into their seasonal retirement that the lawnmower needs to come out of its.

  4. When we lived in WI, we had a mulcher that Hubby used in the fall to mulch the leaves, making it less likely that mats of leaves would form and they would decompose more quickly. Still a LOT easier than raking and bagging.

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