CSotD: Another Dose of Humpday Humor
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The important thing to know about those helicopters is that if you split the bulgy part, the inside is just sticky enough that you can wear the thing on your nose as a Cyrano extension.
The Northern Forest is coming to life, with trilliums and jack in the pulpits providing some early color and a whole lot of four-inch maple seedlings popping up and beginning the fight for light that will eliminate about 90% of them over the next few years.
The Adirondacks suffered a tremendous blow-down back in 1995 that took out the woods behind my mother’s house. Three years later, all those little seedlings, with no canopy to block sunlight, were tall, slim and so plentiful that you could barely squeeze through them. It took a while for them to sort things out but the woods are back to normal today.
So if you find yourself among maple helicopters, go ahead and stick one on your nose. Mother Nature will make more.
Spring reminds me of how much time I spent outside as a kid. It was a privilege to live where I could be out in the woods just poking around in creeks to find caddisfly larvae, rolling over logs in search of salamanders or tracing a rustle in the leaves to the garter snake that made it.
When I was raising kids in the city, I had to adjust my expectations, because there were busy streets and strangers and other things I’d never dealt with as a kid, but they still found ways to amuse themselves.
City or country, I think Liniers is right, but it does help to set an example by, for instance, running through the sprinklers with them once in awhile, or sticking maple seeds on your nose. Then leave them alone and let them get bored. They’ll figure out something.
Do take your kids to museums, and not just the ones with dinosaurs. I like Harry Bliss’s riposte to the old line about modern art “My kid could have done that,” but, then again, maybe your kid is Brancusi. You’ll never know if you only take him to kid places.
It’s like raising your kid entirely on chicken nuggets. If he’s old enough to eat them, he’s old enough to also try artichokes.
Now I’m trying to remember how long it’s been since they put toy surprises in cereal boxes. Either my boys were unusually cooperative or it’s been half a century, because I don’t recall having to umpire who got what when they were little.
I do recall a sense that sending in box tops invariably led to disappointment, except that Shredded Wheat — the big kind, not the minis that came along later — had dividers in the box with offers of RinTinTin merch that was actually pretty cool.
Though, while I really liked artichokes, I wasn’t sold on Shredded Wheat.
Different childhood memory, and we did get a phone call so we could let our folks know we’d be home late. Assuming we wanted to, because if you had a dental appointment or piano lesson, they’d let you serve your detention the next day.
Detention meant taking the sports bus home, which would get me there in time for dinner, and the older I got, the less likely I was to come straight home at dismissal anyway. So, come to think of it, I’m not sure my folks ever knew that I’d been on detention.
God knows it wasn’t the kind of information I was likely to volunteer.
An innovation that came along in my newspaper days was the write-your-own obituary. You’ve always been able to write your own, except they were often written by the funeral home, which was one reason they all sounded the same. The other was that they were treated as news stories and so subject to newsroom style rules and edited accordingly.
So you could write what you wanted, but we’d chop it up into what we wanted it to sound like.
People objected when newspapers started charging for obits, until they realized it meant they could say whatever they wanted, within the limits of advertising. That meant you could put in partners, name all the grandchildren and the dog, and mention the dear departed’s love of baccarat.
But we only accepted them from funeral homes so that, if it left out the second spouse or the family black sheep, the funeral director took the angry phone calls, not us.
I remember one I got that said angels had come and borne him off to heaven. We ran it, but I told the funeral director, “Next time, get a photo.”
Wallace and Spud’s creative process reminds me of a conversation I had with a dog park friend who is an acquisitions editor for a collegiate publisher.
I’d been reading Tale of Two Cities, which, like a lot of Dickens’ novels, had first appeared as a serial in magazines. I noted that it appeared Dickens was making it up as he went along, because about three-quarters of the way through, a character appeared who was necessary to the resolution of things but of whom we’d never heard before.
I also complained that Dickens had whole chapters that seemed like pointless discursions, to which she laughed and reminded me that he was being paid by the word.
Carry on, boys. You’re on the right track!
That’s also my reaction to people who prattle on about passive voice, though here’s an excellent explanation of what it is. My issue is not with active or passive voice but with people who think learning rules can cure an inability to write well.
Following rules can make a bad writer mediocre, which is a worthwhile goal. Good writing, however, is an instinct, not a skill.
That’s an example of the active aggressive voice.
To end on a non-humorous note, Donna Lewis gets a Coincidental Timing Award for today’s strip, which hits just as we’re seeing how AI can damage, not help, cartooning, and if you haven’t been watching this, you should be.
And don’t miss this interview with Ann Telnaes and Michael Ramirez on other challenges facing political cartoonists:
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