CSotD: It’s Almost Funny ’cause It’s True
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This took me a minute, after which I felt foolish for having not gotten it right away.
There is no relationship so genuinely wonderful that Maeve cannot screw it up. Between Friends doesn’t provide a lot of belly laughs; the humor is more a sigh of recognition at human frailty, and regular readers know the inevitable failure to come whenever Maeve falls in love.
It’s not the doomed-to-fail comedy we see in Homer Simpson or Ralph Kramden, because we enjoy watching those nitwits mess up.
But Maeve is smart and successful and beautiful and we like her so much that she’s like a real friend: We keep hoping she’ll get it right despite the fact that we know she won’t.
Time again for tea and sympathy, or, between these friends, coffee.
If you watch American daytime TV, you see a cascade of drug commercials, we and New Zealand being the only countries that allow Big Pharma to advertise directly to people.
Though I suppose given who we’ve got running HHS and who’s nominated for surgeon general, medical expertise is passé anyway.
I have noticed one drug commercial now lists the signs of allergic reaction rather than just saying do not take if you’re allergic to it. I forget which one, but it must be one of the few where the side effect warnings are shorter than the running-through-sunny-meadows part, or they’d never fit it all in.
Certain jokes are evergreens. You just have to swap out the names and the punchlines fill themselves in.
I take a longer range view than this, because I remember back in elementary school, when the John Birchers warned us that, if we didn’t fight the Russians, we’d end up with a nation where the authorities would ask you for your papers on the street and whisk you away to a concentration camp if you couldn’t show them.
But we didn’t fight the Russkies, so 65 years later, here we are.
Of course, I’m joking. They don’t care whether you’ve got papers or not.
This scenario bothers me more than the warrantless abductions, because paying attention is how you keep the authorities in line. We have seen a few cases where the public raising hell has thwarted attempts to send dissenters to the gulag at least for the moment, with Mohsen Mahdawi and Rumeysa Ozturk both freed by judges amid protests by citizens.
On the other hand, I ran into a guy the other day who hadn’t heard about the arrests, or about Trump’s tariffs or about any of the events riling people up, and, yeah, he seemed quite happy. Ignorance is bliss.
Unless you are awakened from your torpor by the sound of jackboots coming up your steps.
I wouldn’t want to be a victim, of course, but silence implies consent, and I’d be ashamed to be a collaborator, even by default.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Whatever the insults and impediments of old age, I sure don’t miss working in an office. My last 10 years were spent working remotely, so I got to kind of ease into retirement, and I’m not sure how much more of this stuff I could have taken otherwise.
The advantage of being one of the proles is that you can sit around wondering how management came up with such stupid, unworkable ideas. There’s that saying about not wanting to see how sausage is made, and once you get high enough on the ladder to go to department head meetings, that’s what you get to watch, and it’s not pretty.
The Peter Principle was published, and much discussed, 56 years ago. By now, it’s all assumed.
I never faced this scenario, though I had one job where they harassed me until I quit so they could replace me with a part-timer. But I saw other folks given a choice where the only “severance” offered was head-from-shoulders.
The good thing is that it’s been a long time since businesses took the legal risk of telling prospective employers anything about your record. They’re so lawsuit-averse that they won’t even say good things about you, though of course HR asks anyway, because … well, because references are there on the application that everybody has to fill out.
Arlo and Janis continue their move into Gene and Mary Lou’s current place. I like the idea of a “finisher home,” though “downsizing” seems a lot less, well, final.
I looked up my $23,500 starter home on Zillow. It’s now valued at $494,000, which is funny, considering it was one of those post-WWII chicken coops they built for the returning GIs. I thought $23,500 was a little pricey at the time.
Besides drug ads, I’m also seeing that daytime TV has eased up on trying to get people to sell their structured settlements and, instead, wants them to cash in their life insurance. That’s assuming you’ve already got a reverse mortgage on the family home and tanked that money on a cruise or through on-line sports gambling.
There are many ways to finish your life. Downsizing is probably among the most pleasant.
It’s not such a hot time to be starting out, either. We not only got that $23,500 starter home but lived on then-wife’s starter salary for a four-day week. Not a bad way to live when you’ve also got a starter baby.
My dribbles of freelance writing income wouldn’t have made nearly enough difference if that chicken coop had cost us $494,000. Not even sure we’d have been able to live in Denver at all, since the average rent there now is $1,975 per month.
Is this really equating being required to rent to minorities with being infested with vermin? Yikes.
When I was covering real estate, the Fair Housing people would send a white couple in to inquire about a place, and they’d be told what was available. Then they’d send in a equally-qualified minority couple to see if they were told there was anything available. That’s how Fred and Donald Trump got nabbed.
If earlier victims had stayed silent, there never would have been a Fair Housing law.
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