CSotD: Saturday Morning Cartoons Redux
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Might as well start this morning’s collection of funny comics with one that didn’t make me laugh. Harry Bliss often features rural beauty, and this one brought back a memory.
I was doing a light Sunday feature about people with side jobs, one of whom was an old guy in Upper Jay whose yard contained racks of colorful whirligigs that twisted in the wind, together with a price and an honor box.
Turns out he was a retired mason with congestive heart failure who was only allowed on his feet a few minutes a day, during which he made these things as one of the few projects he could do in his straitened circumstances. He told me how he’d hunted and trekked the woods all his life and really missed being able to get out into the wilderness that surrounded him.
He could still look at the forested mountains, but on the very top of the one seen from his window, a rich city person had built a large mansion that ruined the unspoiled landscape.
He was particularly furious about it because the owner of that house was the publisher of a major regional magazine that extolled the beauty of the Adirondack wilderness.
Speaking of unspoiled wilderness, I’m not a big fan of jet skis on rural waterways. I don’t mind them on the ocean because it’s already noisy and, besides, you can ride your jet ski to France or Havana or wherever you like, and I hope you will.
But zooping up and down a quiet river or around a small lake seems pointless unless your goal is to make noise and erode the banks.
I should, however, watch what I wish for. We used to complain about the noise of snowmobiles, so they made them quiet and now if you’re walking on a winter trail, the damn things are apt to sneak up on you.
Difference being that snowmobiles have some practical applications and are good for long rides and even winter camping. Jet skis have no function except creating noise and wakes.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Every good dog deserves favor, a thought that will ruin your ability to read music but will make you popular at the dog park. My dog is an inveterate panhandler and has a list of soft-touches she greets with great excitement and affection, which fools nobody but she’s cute enough to get away with it.
Fortunately, I adjust for that with her regular meals so she can retain her girlish figure. I note that parents who reward (or silence) their kids with food don’t seem to have a daily caloric limit in mind. And of course Earl and Opal Pickles are daily examples of how you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Experienced dog owners know that you do better to teach your dog that it might get a treat for obeying an instruction. Praise and a possible treat is as good as praise and a guaranteed treat in reinforcing good behavior, and you retain some control even if you run out of doggy cookies.
That approach also works with humans.
It’s not, however, foolproof.
It’s hard to come up with a foolproof plan because they keep making bigger fools. However, Sherman takes advantage of the fact.
By contrast, you can invest in all the expert planning Hawthorne recommends and still go out of business anyway. It just costs more.
Here’s a cartoon Paul Noth couldn’t sell to the New Yorker, which hardly surprises me, since it doesn’t fit with their sense of NYC being a happenin’ and stylish place.
Most of the times I’ve ventured into the Big Apple in summer, I’ve thought they could use one of those, but I wouldn’t expect their chamber of commerce to endorse the idea.
Oddly enough, however, those Little Tree air fresheners were invented in New York and are still made there, but not down in the part where they need them. Rather, the company is headquartered in Watertown, which is not “Upstate” but “Northern” New York.
It’s right near Clayton, where Thousand Island dressing was invented. Probably.
And not all that far from where I grew up, which is why I know these things.
I grew up in Northern New York without half the charisma of my classmates. But it didn’t bother me because charisma hadn’t been discovered yet.
Obviously, it existed. We just thought it came in a bottle, either labeled “Jade East” or “English Leather.” Fortunately, I was disabused of this idea before I got to college.
Spud is too young to know about Axe yet, but I suspect he’ll give it up before college, too.
Yeah, I paid more attention to the other kind of conjugating, too, which sounds like bragging but I barely made it through Latin. I scraped by Latin I but took it again because I was so unprepared for Latin II, which I eventually also scraped through.
I could translate Caesar’s Gallic Wars well enough, mostly because he was a model of clarity and the story was interesting, but memorizing declensions and conjugations was not my strength. Oddly enough, I did just fine as an altar boy in the days of the Latin Mass because I could learn all the responses with no trouble.
But if you wanted me to change “Our Father who art in heaven” to “Our Father who was in heaven” or “Our Father who will be in heaven,” I’d have to get back to you later.
That is, I’d have to save it “pro cras.” Assuming that’s the right declension.
More language notes: At first glance, I took “dig it” in its hip, rather than its literal, sense, maybe because they were looking through books.
I suspect the hip meaning of “dig” may come from Irish, where “tuig” is pronounced “dig” and means to understand. An dtuigeann tú Gaeilge? means “Do you understand Irish?” though the more common idiom would translate to “Do you have Irish?” which I find particularly appealing.
I can understand French, but I don’t really have it, and so can’t carry on much of a conversation en francais.
Can you dig it?
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