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CSotD: We Could Use Some Funny Stuff

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Mike Peterson Published: July 19, 2025 Updated: July 19, 2025 2 minutes 8 comments

One of the options at the moment is despair, but that’s an unacceptable choice.

Besides, we’re not there yet and there’s still plenty of room for comic relief. Like the guy in Bliss, you can still stay aware of things, as long as you’ve got some good coffee, to which I would add “and a few laughs.”

It’s possible to be passionate and still enjoy comedy, and I’d suggest that a well-rounded life requires both, in plentiful supply. Today, we laugh.

Pretty obvious joke here, but it still made me laugh because one of the evergreen and awful assignments for rookie reporters is to do a story on the latest slang. This is based on the fact that middle-aged editors assume that, because rookies are young, they are also hip, which mostly proves how unhip most middle-aged editors are.

Whatever these questors bring back to the newsroom is guaranteed to be well past its sell-by date, and I will once more link to the greatest scam ever pulled over such a foolish assignment.

Even if you’ve read it before, you’ll want to read about those lamestain cob nobblers again.

Speaking of old and unhip, when digital watches first came out, my kids had to have them, but the appeal faded quickly enough that, a few years later, they were making fun of me for owning one. I got it primarily for its alarms and timers, which were valuable to a reporter because we were so often away from phones and offices and even our car dashboards.

I haven’t owned a watch in years, but one of my boys has a magical receiving device on his arm that is basically a smartphone you don’t have to look at. I have a smartphone but I rarely look at it and I don’t have my email programmed in because when I leave the building, I leave the building.

So I don’t know which of us is hip anymore, but I do remember what Alexander Pope had engraved on the collar of a puppy he gave the Prince of Wales:

I am His Majesty’s dog at Kew. Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

If the collar fits …

Speaking of kids and bygone days, I can’t relate to cartoons in which summer and kids are a burden. Summer went way too fast when I had my boys at home and we could either go on adventures or I could just enjoy watching them, as the song says, “doing things we used to do, they think are new.”

Then again, I lived in a world in which one parent could be home with youngsters, taking them to the park or to the zoo or running through the sprinklers with them in the back yard.

It was a privilege even then and is all but unknown today, which makes the rare opportunities that much more worth savoring.

Another blast from the past, though this flash was not about summer vacation but about the holiday break in college. For some reason, the old college calendar let us out for the Christmas/New Years vacation, then brought us back for two more weeks of class before first semester finals.

You wouldn’t, therefore, just bring one extraordinarily heavy book you wouldn’t read home with you.

You’d load up your whole shelf of textbooks, which you then lugged through airports or train stations or wherever. I graduated from college in 1972, which was the year that Bernard Sadow invented suitcases with wheels.

Which was not only lousy timing for me personally, but in general, coming about two years after most colleges had switched to ending their first semesters at Christmas, obviating the need to drag home 60-pound suitcases.

Juxtaposition of the Day

I’m not part of the Zeitgeist because I don’t subscribe to any streamers, which leaves me on the sidelines when people talk about various streaming programs and the Golden Age of Television and suchlike.

Nor do I care. I’m not one of those tiresome anti-TV snobs, but I can’t afford subscriptions to streamers that I’m probably not going to watch anyway.

I have seen a few Amazon Prime movies since they added commercials and it doesn’t bother me much. Apparently there became enough streamers that they started losing money and adding commercials was the logical solution

Granted, it’s hard not to feel like the victim of a bait-and-switch.

But don’t go feeling so special. Dorman Smith drew this one back in 1924 when radio bugs were feeling disillusioned over the debate between taxing radios, as the British finally did, or introducing commercials, which was the American solution.

There was also a time when saloons offered a free lunch, leading to the expression that there’s no such thing.

Carpe Diem is exaggerating a bit, but, then again, splendid isolation may be a thing of the past. It used to be that, if you joined the Peace Corps, you dropped off the face of the Earth for two years, but now you can email the folks back home whenever you want. Meanwhile, schools in the wilds of Africa get regular lesson plans on teachers’ cell phones.

And the Dalai Lama is on Facebook. He has 14 million followers and he follows nobody, which makes sense. Most of his postings appear to be selfies.

Meanwhile, back on this plane of existence, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the courts began bludgeoning us into downloading their apps.

“Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of QR Codes!”

I don’t mind people having apps, but I object to be forced to use them because, as said, I don’t use my phone for a whole lot and, when I walk away from my desktop, I want to disconnect.

Kuper’s right. We’re beginning the transition to Fahrenheit 451.

But that’s no excuse to stop laughing and poking tyrants. I enjoy wandering in the woods, and I can still remember Nov 18, 2016.