CSotD: It’s A Hump Day After All
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I would assume that these guys don’t talk much about work at home, but, then again, I don’t know what they would talk about. Maybe they don’t talk at all.
I’ve known a number of cops, but that’s different, because they spend most of their day like Reed and Malloy in Adam-12, driving around finding things that need straightening out, mostly in the category of routine, trivial events.
One of the toughest cops I’ve known was a Gulf vet who had spent an extra tour in Iraq training police there. He was potentially, as the phrase goes, a mean motor-scooter and a bad go-getter, but a genuinely nice guy. Last I saw of him, he’d become chief in a mountain town where he and his family could kick back and enjoy nature while he solved local problems.
I also remember horrified police in Chicago urging us to stay back on the sidewalk while their frenzied colleagues were beating the living crap out of peaceful demonstrators on the street. This was a few months before the Chicago Convention in ’68 and I’ve often wondered how those guys made it through the summer.
Similarly, I wonder if there are good, decent men among the masked thugs of ICE, and, if so, what they talk about when they go home at night and how their kids are growing up.
Enough. It’s Hump Day.
As a kid, I looked forward to school starting, not because I liked learning but because our district stretched 30 miles down the highway, so there were a lot of kids I never saw except in school. It was good to get back together.
Unlike Hammie, we didn’t fret over the actual schoolwork. We had gotten the bad news in June: Our final report card would say who our homeroom teacher was going to be the next year.
Teachers were either “nice” or “mean,” and if you had a mean teacher, you surely didn’t look forward to the start of school. Getting along with her was more of a challenge than any of the coursework would be.
Conversely, if you had a nice teacher, the curriculum’s degree of difficulty was irrelevant. The best, nicest teacher I ever had was in 4th grade and I still remember much of what we learned that year.
Jeremy Banx on the new rules in the UK under which adult websites are required to verify ages. It is expected that a lot of kids will figure out how to game the system and I suspect a number of kids will get help from indulgent parents in doing so.
Which reminds me of this Committed, the strip Michael Fry did before he got involved in Over the Hedge. I can’t make out the date, but suspect it was in the ’90s, so somewhat after I finished trying to police my own kids’ media diets.
As I said the other day, the best you can do is let them know what you approve of, and what you disapprove of, because they’ll be in school with kids whose parents either ignore them or help them do whatever they want.
A useful bit of parental advice in those days was to set up the computer in a public area so you could keep an eye on things. Then they invented smartphones.
Anyway, I expect the age-restricted Internet to work largely the same way: A sea-anchor, not a mooring line.
Speaking of things parents should teach their kids but often don’t, I fear a generation that thinks cooking dinner consists of phoning for delivery. But we’ve already unleashed a generation like the one depicted here.
My own generation had to learn to cook, because many of our mothers (fathers didn’t cook in those days) had been seduced by the wave of convenience foods that came out after WWII.
Whatever didn’t come in a can came frozen, and ads aimed at our children’s generation touting “Like Grandma Used To Make” seem more like warnings than endorsements.
But we got Living on the Earth and Diet for a Small Planet and so forth and we got pretty good at turning raw ingredients into tasty food. But I fear it was a momentary blip on the screen of civilization.
Funny story: A friend went to the USSR during perestroika and was involved in food marketing there. She reported that Ben & Jerry had set up a plant and opened scoop shops, but the Russians prefered Sealtest ice cream because it was imported and therefore superior.
It’s the same the whole world over.
Interesting timing on this one, since it came out around the same time the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes non-issue erupted. I had to look her up and noted that her hooded eyes make her look spacey, which I’m sure she’s not or she wouldn’t have made it so far.
But that, in turn, made me notice people’s eyes for a day or two and nobody’s face is perfectly symmetrical. The differences are more obvious with someone like Jane Seymour, who has one brown eye and one green eye, but few people have two eyes of identical size or, as in Sarah’s case, that line up precisely.
It’s one of those things you shouldn’t notice because, once you do, it can become distracting. And if you mention it, distressing.
The Perseid meteor shower is next week, though it’s apt to be a little disappointing this year because they come just on the heels of a full moon.
It doesn’t matter to me because I not only live in town but next to a group home. They’re good neighbors but because of the risk of residents wandering off, the place is lit up like a prison yard at night, so we don’t have stars anymore.
Eldest son, however, lives on a farm on a hilltop about 10 miles from town. Nights there are a perpetual light show, though, as noted in the cartoon, Elon’s doing all he can to upstage God and Mother Nature.
Banx usually works in a vertical world, but if you can come up with an idea this brilliant, you should feel free to change format in order to accommodate it.
Go ahead and jump, little gastropod!
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