CSotD: Anyone Need a Humor Break?
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The gag here is that the scale doesn’t go that far, though if Whitehead realized that when he drew this cartoon he’d have added more beer cans.
Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” and he was a Deist. I’m agnostic and I feel the same way, so I can’t imagine what it must be like for people who believe in a guy who tinkers with the universe.
We’ll get back to that tomorrow. It’s not like it’s gonna go away.
To dwell on pain a little more, I often get a laugh out of Speed Bump, but this one hit me squarely, because I was the at-home parent for much of our boys’ young lives.
When you’ve got a very small toddler you learn that, if you hear a “clunk!” in the next room, you should pause a moment, because much of the time the baby will just resume playing, but if you run in and start fussing, the crying will start.
It’s one of those “Don’t answer a question you haven’t been asked” sorts of things, and it’s not a bad thing for a kid to learn to cope with life’s little bumps.
On the other hand, when there was a situation that required fussing, I was like the dad in the cartoon. I didn’t say “suck it up” but I was prone to taking a matter-of-fact attitude and the boys would accept that. Until Mom walked in the door four hours later, at which point they would collapse into tears and tell her all about whatever terrible thing had happened.
Funny thing is, she was just as practical as I was and her response boiled down to the same ain’t-that-a-shame reaction, except hers came with hugs.
I don’t feel guilty about the difference, but I do find it interesting.
I suppose if we proved too practical in our approach, the kids found ways to comfort each other.
This Brewster Rockit raises a couple of questions, starting with “Where are they?” because I get a sense that if Sol did burn out, they could just go somewhere else, and I kinda wonder if kids living in deep space would even have a sense of one star being more important than another.
It also pinged half a memory of some TV show or movie or comic about a pre-teen girl who lived on a satellite, kind of a “Hannah Montana In Space” vibe. Can’t remember any more than that it existed, so I suspect for not very long.
No surprise to have Arlo once more mirror my own take on things. I enjoyed not knowing, though when the boys were pre-natal finding out would have taken amniocentesis, which is invasive enough that you don’t do it unless you have some reason beyond curiosity that requires it.
What you could do was to put your wedding ring on a thread and hold it over the bump. If it swung back and forth it was a boy and if it swung in a circle it was a girl. Or maybe the other way around. It’s not that I can’t remember now but we weren’t sure which way it worked back then, which added to our suspicion that perhaps it didn’t work at all.
What I remember for sure was that when Baby #1 was coming in 1972, I didn’t care if it was a girl or a boy, except that I realized that, if it was a girl, I was going to have to fight like a demon to make sure she could play sports if she wanted to.
Much ado about nothing, because two years later, Maria Pepe won her court case and Little League was forced to behave decently and let girls play. By the time our eldest was six and playing soccer, he was playing alongside little girls.
And younger son met his wife when they were on the college fencing team. His grandmother had also fenced in college, but at an all-women’s school on an all-women team.
When I see teenage girls walking down the street with their ponytails sticking out the back of their ball caps and a lacrosse stick or softball bat over their shoulders, it makes me wish I was that age again.
However, the struggle to make people behave decently isn’t over, and the fellows that married women who still sleep with their hair in rollers have become loud and militant about their right to remain unenlightened and unawakened.
When I was in high school, girls would set their hair on empty orange juice cans because Spoolies made it too curly and ironing it might make you look like Cher but it might also make you look like you’d scorched your hair.
But it was all hot-rollers by college, despite some of my unwoke contemporaries singing “I want a girl, just like the girl who married dear old Dad.”
And speaking of Sigmund Freud, Lizzie has her issues. Still, I don’t think she’d go out with Drew if he weren’t pretty woke.
Juxtaposition of the Day
One of my ridgebacks ran into problems with bees more than once, and was allergic enough that his whole face would blow up and he’d end up looking like the world’s biggest shar-pei.
Fortunately for him, he was also the dog who broke through my rule about dogs on Daddy’s bed, which was how I found out I’m allergic to dogs. So there was always a bottle of Benadryl in the house and, since he weighed about 125 pounds, I didn’t even have to cut the pill.
The other benefit being that ridgebacks have short hair, so he never slept in rollers.
This ran the morning after we’d been talking about Burma Shave signs at the dog park. There’s a young golden there named Anna Banana, which had reminded me of
Ben met Anna
Made a hit
Scratchy beard
Ben-Anna Split
Those of us old enough to remember the signs agreed that there’s no reason not to have Burma Shave signs anymore. Well, except for the company having gone out of business.
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