CSotD: Saturday Funny Space
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Pour yourself a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, because I’m not in the mood for discussing important things today.
I didn’t guffaw at the joke — It’s okay but not mind-bending — but I liked the center panel a lot and I also thought Hammie’s shrug was well captured.
Even on a frivolous day, if you land on one of my favorite squares, I can briefly turn serious. There are good zoos and bad zoos, and thank goodness the days are over for what they once called “postage stamp zoos,” in which the point was to collect one of everything.
The zoo officials I’ve worked with agonize over the limitations of what they can do, but they work harder than in the past to educate visitors and turn them into advocates for wild animals in wild places. The larger zoos even work with colleagues in those wild places to preserve endangered species and unendangered ones as well.
One of the people I ran into when I was editing kid-written journalism out in Denver was Dave Johnson, a zookeeper who founded a preservation group and traveled to places where elephants and rhinos needed help, pitched in, and then wrote kids’ books about them to fundraise and spread the word.
Speaking of my life as an editor and instructor of young writers, I’m glad I retired before we got to this point. I had the advantage that the kids who wanted to write for the Denver Post were highly motivated, which cut down on the plagiarism issues teachers face: We only had two cases over 10 years.
It wasn’t that hard to spot, even without our using software programs to pick it out, but I suppose teachers need AI detectors now, assuming they’re willing to run every suspiciously well-written essay through.
But, as Mellor’s cartoon suggests, we may find that the call is coming from inside the house, or, more specifically, the teacher’s lounge.
Still on kid-literacy, what I like about today’s WtB is how it demonstrates the depth of the characters. Rose isn’t just a goody-goody, Amelia isn’t just a contrarian and Wallace isn’t just a hell-raiser, because kids with such strictly defined personalities wouldn’t be friends in real life. But here we see how those aspects blend in a more realistic universe.
Dan Piraro’s Sunday strips are always an artistic delight, but here he brings up an issue I’ve contemplated whenever someone starts talking about jetpacks and rocket cars. We have enough trouble avoiding each other driving on one plane and I can’t imagine the chaos if we were also supposed to choose our own altitude.
He posits a single height, but, yes, that would increase the traffic on that level. I don’t think there’s a winning formula for this dream.
The timing is good, coming as it did as we saw that near tragedy between a B-52 and a Skywest passenger plane, but, then again, we’ve had enough of those that it would be hard to have slipped this in without encountering real-world parallels.
As a former ink-stained wretch, I still retain a sense of competition with the hairspray brigade and this cracked me up. Competition on the street was semi-friendly, and the sharpest TV reporter in our area only threatened to kill me once, but I made a reference in a column to Sweet Polly Purebred and I heard the local anchor got her nose in a snit.
Good times!
I don’t get it.
I do get gasoline, but I’ve been paying around $2.86 a gallon, which is hardly an arm and a leg, given where we’ve been in the past.
That high point was June, 2022, at $5.032, and the chart ends in June, 2025 at $3.276. I don’t think the current price is anything either to brag or complain about. Anyway, I chalk gas prices up to seasonal adjustments and import issues rather than whoever’s in the White House.
BTW, something I learned in my reporting days: The reason gas prices are so different in the next town over is because they’re in a different distribution area. Learn to locate those invisible lines on the ground!
Nothing to add, except I want one. Though if you used it to shave in your car here, you’d get a $125 ticket.
Speaking of traffic tickets, an embarrassing confession: I was about two months out of my marriage and headed to my first party as a reborn bachelor when I got pulled over for speeding and, honest to god, thought “She’s kinda cute.”
Fortunately, I had more sense than Mamet and realized that, at that stage of things, had I stopped for a tumbleweed, I’d have thought it was kinda cute, too.
I can sum up that part of my life with a twist on an old punchline: “I’m so glad it’s over that I’m glad it happened.”
Still on the topic of things best forgotten, I’m sure there are plenty of Redskins and Indians fans who wouldn’t have to go Dumpster diving to find their old jerseys, if Dear Leader gets his wish to make racism stylish again.
Though speaking of digging through old garbage, given what else the NFL landed on Dan Snyder’s football team for, I’d say bringing up the name change is a pretty counterproductive way to distract people from the Epstein scandal, though at least the cheerleaders weren’t underage.
Jeez Louise, Donny! Haven’t you already screwed up enough football franchises?
SDCC is going on as we speak, and San Diego is full of people like this. The patient at the far right is an excellent touch, given that the woman checking patients in has to maintain a polite demeanor and probably goes through this two or three times a day anyway.
Back in the 80s, Elliot Gould headlined E/R, a sitcom set in a hospital, in which the receptionist repeatedly snapped at people to “Stay back of the white line!”
People who really do that for a living must have watched in envy.
And some people who didn’t really do it for a living were apparently inspired:
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