CSotD: Funny Stuff Between Holidays

I’m trying to be more productive than the fellow in Matt’s cartoon, but there does seem to be a lot of letdown in the actual week we’re going through. I’m going to assume things will pick up along about the Eighth Day of Christmas.

Which is Maids A-Milking and let’s hope we do better than this, because we’ll have 40 of them by Twelfth Night.

Though speaking of city girls, Ali Solomon got a laugh this morning mostly because, for those of us who lived amongst the ski hills, having one tag on your coat zipper was not a status symbol at all. The trick was to build up a sheaf of the things all stapled together so that everybody would know you went prit-near every weekend, and it was a tragedy if the whole collection fell off.

I am encouraged by the fact that Solomon’s young women are dressed for winter, though we haven’t had much of it yet this season. One thing I noticed when my folks lived in Buffalo, which has truly wretched winters, is that nobody tries to be fashionable except to the extent that parkas and toques are sensible winter fashion. Not all folks are so practical.

In fact, one thing that brings out the Grouchy Old Man in me is to see young girls echoing the idiot males who wear shorts in winter. Dagnabbit, if it’s cold enough to wear a jacket, put on some damn pants!

And I don’t digress because today doesn’t seem to have a theme from which to wander.

Though I can drag out the city/country thing a little longer by posting today’s The Other Coast (Creators), which is a pretty funny reversal. I’m glad Adrian Raeside used a bear, because for all the panic they induce in people who aren’t familiar with them, black bears are fairly harmless if you don’t count rampant destruction of garbage cans, bird feeders and the occasional automobile interior.

Mountain lions and grizzlies are more apt to get persnickity about people invading their space, and even they would rather avoid trespassers than confront them.

Trapping and transporting nuisance bears rarely works. They have astonishing homing instincts and are very apt to return even over hundreds of miles, as a bear named Mink did here a few years ago. And trespassing humans are apt to return from even further away.

Though I did get a laugh when I was looking for Mink’s story and came across a website telling you what to do if a bear comes into your house.

“Do not lock the bear in a room” is the kind of advice that, if you have to say it, you’re probably wasting your breath. I recall a story of a polar bear in Churchill, Manitoba, that broke into a cottage and tore all the cabinets off the kitchen walls looking for the only food accidentally left behind: an unopened packet of dehydrated onion soup.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Adam@Home — AMS

Speed Bump — Creators

It’s hard to get a laugh from someone who deals with people like you all day long. I had to exchange something for a larger size yesterday, but I think the pleasantness of the encounter stemmed in large part from my not trying to explain anything.

As for Speed Bump, when I’ve mailed books or manuscripts, I’ve occasionally answered the question about hazardous materials at the post office by saying “Just ideas.” Never a snicker.

And while the douanier’s suggestion here made me laugh, in the days when I used to pop up to Canada regularly, I never ever made jokes at customs. Not even when a summer intern of uncertain English asked, “Other than your personal clothing, is there anything you plan to leave in Montreal?”

Though when the liquor store clerk asks if you’d like a bag, if you say, “No, I’m going to drink it at home,” some will indeed laugh.

Others will just stare at you in puzzlement.

Still on the topic of people who don’t get it, xkcd is completely correct on this one. I used to write kids’ serial stories for newspapers, but I also purchased a few and there was some extraordinary dreck out there. (My stuff, of course, was uniformly brilliant.)

The problem is that kids’ books are very often purchased by adults, not by the kids themselves, and a lot of adults — including authors and editors — mistake having a limited vocabulary for having a limited intellect. Moreover, a lot of parents and grandparents buy books based on cover art and blurbs rather than actual examination of the content.

What made Harry Potter and the Hunger Games explode was that the authors didn’t talk down to their audience. But it was other kids, not grown-ups, who turned those books into such runaway best-sellers.

And, BTW, comic strips are selected by newspaper editors, not by readers. The impact of this is similar and should not be underestimated.

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

Paul Berge

Francis

In the commentary on his cartoon, Berge notes that priests can bless all sorts of things, and I had the same thought when the Pope made his announcement the other day. I remembered leafing through the back of my Missal and finding obscure prayers for obscure causes, and I also thought of the beginning of the movie version of M*A*S*H in which Father Mulcahy is blessing Jeeps.

Berge writes “As encouraging as it is to see Pope Francis willing to make this modest accommodation for same-sex couples in the Catholic Church, I’ll wait to see what his successor has to say about it before I get my hopes up that his church has entered the 21st Century.”

Which seems like a segue to Francis, in which it is speculated that the Pope sees his time coming to a close and is trying to set a few things in motion lest they be abandoned once he’s gone.

Well, as a “recovering Catholic,” I’m not nearly as interested in what happens next as I am in what happens now and what should have happened some time ago.

Hugs are welcome, Arlo, but Janis is right: They are necessary but not sufficient.

As both Hamlet and Eliza Doolittle said, “Words, words, words.” Let’s have no more of this papal bull.