Comic Strip of the Day Comic strips

CSotD: A Good Day For Gravedigging

When we were reading Hamlet junior year, the professor asked why there was the gravedigger scene, and we all dutifully responded about easing the tension, to which he said, “Shakespeare had a clown in his troupe and had to write something for him.”

I don’t know if I accept that, but for either reason, here’s some stuff from the funny pages:

To continue talking about school, here’s a pair from Frazz (AMS) that echoes my experience. One potential advantage of ADD — it’s not universal — is hyperfocus, which is to say that while normally you are completely scattered, when you do home in, it’s extremely intense.

Like Caulfield, I did papers at the last minute and, like Caulfield, I did the reading and writing in the same burst. I sometimes went to the campus bookstore hoping a required text I should have bought three months ago was still in stock because I had to write a paper about it before the next morning.

Which probably explains why I can crank out 1,000 words each morning before nine but have a sinkful of dishes and two baskets of dirty laundry.

I graduated based on my writing skills, not my study habits: It took me three semesters to get through freshman calc, and the latter two were largely gifts. And D’s.

Jef Mallett commented that he should have had Mrs. Olson accuse Caulfield of waiting until Saturday, not Sunday, and I see his point, though she wouldn’t have known he did it so quickly at all, if he hadn’t admitted to doing it over the weekend.

Doing things at the last minute was harder in high school, because, like the grandmother in Grand Avenue (AMS), I’d have to go to the library or a bookstore. We had a good school library, but we were an hour away from anything else, so, if I didn’t plan ahead, it wasn’t going to happen.

I remember getting An American Dilemma by interlibrary loan for an essay contest, and I had to order Ulysses by mail for my senior paper. And, no, I didn’t read either of them overnight.

I wish we’d had an Internet in them thar days, because, apparently unlike little Gabby, I’d have been able to sort the nonsense from the real information. There are still teachers who tell kids not to use Wikipedia, but most of those are about to retire and the younger ones understand media literacy in the online world.

Which reminds me of being at the teachers’ table in a high school lunchroom in the ’90s. As one teacher came with his tray, another teacher asked him to drop by and help her with a computer issue.

“Are you the school techie?” I asked, and he said, “No, I teach Spanish. I’m just the youngest member of the faculty.”

Still at school, Jeremy’s mom is resuming her psych career in Zits (KFS) and he’s horrified. So am I, but mostly because I suspect that, IRL, she’d be frustrated.

Counselor-to-student ratios at most schools are ridiculously out of balance, with the result that kids who genuinely need help coping with life can get sidelined because college admission rates are more readily quantified by principals and superintendents and so tend to demand counselors’ attention.

I say this based on many conversations with school counselors — one I remember was sole counselor for two buildings — as well as my sons’ observations that troubled classmates were left on their own while their counselors focused on college admissions.

Good luck, Connie.

We’ll lighten things up with today’s Ben (MWAM). I realize you have to be cautious and aware of dogs and babies, but my experience matches this.

The most impressive part is that my dogs and I lived alone and they only saw the grandkids a few times a year, but their tolerance and affection were instinctive and absolute.

Tom Toro wonders at the price of all that altruism.

The Buckets (AMS) brings to mind a litany of complaints I’ve heard from people who want to do away with Daylight Saving Time but, paradoxically, are also complaining about how early it gets dark now.

Folks, this is the real time. Now, granted, days are longer in the summer, but if you do away with Daylight Saving Time, it will always get dark earlier in the evening.

Except in Scotland. I remember watching Gregory’s Girl, in which he has a date that goes way into the evening and it was still light out. Once we finish screwing up the Gulf Stream, living that far north is going to come at a cost, but it seemed pretty pleasant back in 1980.

Incidentally, they redubbed the movie for export with modified Scottish burrs, but the original Glaswegian soundtrack is available as an option on the DVD. Absolutely unintelligible.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Tank McNamara — AMS

Cathy Wilcox

Two views of the explosion in sports gambling. Tank notes the flood of replays with blown calls on obvious penalties — a lot of facemask grabbing — and suggests gamblers could be the cure.

For my part, I’ve never enjoyed gambling beyond an occasional friendly bet over a rivalry. Meanwhile, my usual response to people complaining about a loss because of an unfair last-minute penalty is that games are 60 minutes long, so you can lose in the second minute as well as in the last two, and that if you get up by 14 points or so it won’t matter what happens at the end.

Meanwhile, Wilcox continues a trend among Australian cartoonists to object to the flood of sports gambling ads down there. I’ve no idea why nobody objected up here, but it’s not as if there hasn’t been any impact on people who need it the least.

Her fellow Aussie, Megan Herbert, has another example of how the government’s proposal to restrict social media seems a case of focusing on the mote and missing the log.

And Deflocked (AMS) is unusually political today, with Mamet his normal self-absorbed self, but in a context that kinda gives me the willies, because I’m not sure his attitude is confined to cartoons.

Crabgrass (AMS) is beginning a new, holiday-based story arc. This is a good strip for all-ages, a cliché I hate but a concept I embrace.

By contrast, Gregory’s Girl is PG.



Comments 9

  1. Ignatz

    The clown in Shakespeare’s troupe was a very popular actor named Will Kempe. Hamlet contains a speech that criticizes the way some stage clowns do things, and some people think it may have been aimed at Kempe. He left the troupe shortly after that, and was replaced by Robert Armin, who was a very different kind of clown.

  2. Paul

    Small point but it gets darker earlier in Scotland. Edinburg has 8 hours of day light today and Concord NH has 9.5.

    On the subject of Shakespeare take a look at the BBC comedy Upstart Crow.

  3. Ben R

    I apologize in advance for putting this here, but this crowd seems like they’d find this fascinating…there’s an obit on MLB Trade Rumors (a wonderful site for old baseball fans, and new) for Al Herrera. I remembered Al as a player, but holy cow what a life. Well worth a read.

    1. Unca $crooge

      I read MLB Trade Rumors every day and didn’t remember seeing an obit today. But there were a lot of stories because of roster moves so I could have missed it. Nope, not today. I did a search and couldn’t find him. The only Al Herrera I could find on the “Cube” played one season of college ball in the nineties. Hmmm.
      Did you maybe mean “Al Ferrara”? who died last week? The article referenced his baseball exploits so that didn’t seem to fit. His Wiki entry is a bit more interesting as not many ballplayers played piano at Carnegie Hall – especially at 16.

  4. Brian Fies

    Good one today.

    One summer, my daughters spent a month studying abroad in Scotland. They arrived, got settled at the college, and decided it was a lovely sunny day to walk into town. When they got there, they couldn’t figure out why all the shops were closed. It was 10 p.m.

    I want to get rid of Daylight Saving Time because it’s just wrong. Noon should be close to when the sun is highest in the sky (allowing for the unavoidable slop of time zones). That’s just science. And aesthetics.

  5. Ed.

    After Halloween, we adjust our clocks to Christmas Saving Time.

  6. Mike Tiefenbacher

    Vis a vis: Wikipedia… I don’t know much about most subjects I look up on Wikipedia, but when I do explore pages I know a lot about, I nearly always find lots of “facts” that are completely and verifiably wrong. Every five to ten years or so, I go through the hoops they’ve put up to attempt to correct things. Most recently, I tried to correct the mountain of errors on the page devoted to the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon RUFF & REDDY, starting with the terribly erroneous list of episodes and when they aired. Using newspapers.com, I searched dozens of ’50s TV listings to determine when they aired, when they were rerun, how many episodes were in a half hour and when the new seasons began (none of the posted info was correct). I corrected it all, footnoted it with the newspapers the listings came from, submitted it. It was entirely rejected because the newspapers cited are no longer published, while websites created 50 years after the fact that are pushing complete disinformation remain active, so they trump the actual proof from contemporary sources. The info there is still entirely created out of whole cloth. So if you’re writing a TV cartoon book, don’t accept anything on Wikipedia as gospel. But if it’s ONLY true for subjects I know about, it’s a conspiracy against me. If it’s not restricted to subjects I know, then many school themes the world over are being submitted with very questionable “facts” in them because the people who know better have been successfully scared away by the arcane rulebook which might enable them to correct the errors. (And for living subjects of a Wikipedia, don’t you dare try to correct facts about youself. It’s not allowed. The only workaround is if you have a website which can be footnoted to “prove” that your assertations are true and not simply “self-promotion” because you’re not an objective source on the facts of your own life.)

  7. Rich Stankus

    I’d like to propose a change when moving to DST next year by moving the clocks ahead by just one-half hour and then leaving it that way going forward. No more switching back and forth. There are probably at least one hundred reasons why this wouldn’t work but how would we know unless we try it at least once.

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