CSotD: The Return of Friday Follies
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So to catch everyone up, GoComics apparently now updates at 3 a.m. Eastern Time, which likely only effects me, Arcamax quit updating a whole slew of political cartoons about a month ago, and Counterpoint now has a new format for its subscribers that includes more comics more often.
And I’m still here every day.
Andy Warner has an interesting history of toothpicks over at Tinyview, which is formatted for phones, which doesn’t work here so well and, in this case, is long enough that I will simply direct you to it rather than try to feature the whole thing.
I realize “history of toothpicks” doesn’t sound interesting but trust me.
Speaking of phones, Morrissette’s cartoon reminds me of a time back in my editing days when a young woman had photos of a cheerleading competition we were writing about. I asked her for one and she took out her phone which contained over 850 pictures and she couldn’t come up with the dozen we were interested in.
I’ll admit to having more photos than I need on my computer, but I at least try to get rid of the shots of the ceiling and out-of-focus pics and so forth. And they’re in folders so I can jump to Thanksgiving 2007 when I want to, which admittedly isn’t all that often.
There was something to be said in favor of film, since it at least made you think before you shot. Having 850 pictures of everything is kind of like having no pictures of anything.
Speaking of things that should be sorted and thinned out, I not only have a box of obsolete cables in a closet but a deep drawer full of them in my desk. Granted, every once in a while I need an old-school USB cable, but I’ve got yards of coaxial cable that I’ll never need again, since neither my phone nor my Internet access use it and a bunch of things that I can’t even remember what they connected to.
I’ve even got, at the bottom of the box, a couple of A/B switches, which mattered back when my cable and broadcast TV were on different feeds.
But I know what will happen if I throw any of it out.
This is why we need to announce our preferred pronouns. I had just assumed all these years that the bird and the tortoise were straight males. Suddenly it is revealed that the bird is either female or gay or bi.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But old guys like me tend to assume things, and we shouldn’t.
Yes, this is how old I am. Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be, because between cancer surgery, appendicitis and loss of my gall bladder, I’ve been whittled down considerably. I’ve still got my tonsils and my spleen, but beyond that, I’m all out of optional parts.
And what’s left has arthritis.
I often comment when a comic strip hits an unintended synchronicity, and this Lola comes along just as the editor of Christianity Today has said that a substantial number of evangelical Christians think Jesus was too liberal.
Pastor John may not want Lola to keep on doing what she’s been doing, but there are a lot of people who bleat about keeping Christ in Christmas but don’t want him around the other 364 days of the year.
And it’s not like you have to be able to translate Aramaic or interpret obscure teachings, because he laid it right out there as plain as could be.
It takes more effort to ignore the rulebook than to live up to it.
Buddhist bonzes don’t marry, but it’s permitted in Shinto and Zen communities. I have no idea how well it works out, but this got a chuckle, because monks often take some ironic pleasure in admitting their flaws. I think chuckling over their shortcomings is a level of humility that keeps them focused on the urge to make their wrongness less deep.
I had a friend who spent half a year at a Trappist monastery in Snowmass. He was given the task of reading aloud during the evening meal while the brothers ate in silence, contemplating Thomas Merton’s words. One passage showed the twinkle in Merton’s eye and sparked laughter amid the listeners.
Afterwards, Brother Abbot suggested that, in future, my friend “exercise some judicious editing.”
But only in the spirit of guidance, not as an actual reproach.
The upcoming conclave has spurred a plethora of white smoke/black smoke jokes, most of which provoke a shrug, but Weyant got a laugh with this one. It’s something of a reverse of Warp’s gag, because instead of assuming that even the devout are flawed, it plays on the idea that the devout can be silly.
Even Thomas Merton, yes, as well as the Dalai Lama and Ram Dass and whoever. If you don’t believe that life is absurd, you won’t make it past your ordination.
Or to put it another way, those who don’t laugh don’t get it.
I think it’s in Ecclesiastes: “There is a time for blowing smoke, and a time for blowing bubbles.”
There’s also the matter of laughing to avoid tears, and Lin is not the first cartoonist to put the words of a irrational would-be dictator in the safe, politically-deniable mouth of a fictional medieval king.
It’s wise to be cautious in a world in which young people are seized on the street and jailed for having co-written a column in a student newspaper, and thank god nobody was doing that half a century ago or I’d have been exiled for disagreeing with Lyndon Johnson, and, if not, they’d have gotten me a few years later for my lack of support for Maggie Thatcher.
Fortunately, I’ve come to my senses and today I only criticize fictional medieval kings.
It’s not just about web pages. Now a fictional medieval king has declared a fatwa against public broadcasting, which reports news in ungrovelling ways, and his fictional medieval grand inquisitor has announced her intention to arrest reporters whose writing is disloyal.
Thank god it could never happen here.
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