CSotD: Downer Jokes and Upper Pups
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Arctic Circle makes a point that has long bedeviled me, because I don’t live on the seaside. I also don’t toss away a lot of plastic, though I realize much that goes into recycling bins winds up not being recycled.
Meanwhile, landfills have had liners for quite a while and, however much plastic may leak chemicals over the decades, it doesn’t dig itself out and leap into the ocean.
And, since I think the days are over — at least in this country — when major cities like New York would send their garbage out to sea on scows, that leaves litterbugs and, as suggested here, defective trash barrels responsible for whatever plastic rolls into rivers and collects itself into a massive plastic island in the Pacific.
Slobs may be the answer, since we used to have a deal with the Philippines to recycle our plastic, but they called it off because the plastic we were sending them was so contaminated with dirty diapers and other pure garbage.
Leaving the explanation that, yes, we have enough slobs and fools to frustrate a major, concerted clean-up effort.
And a happy Sunday to you, too!
Juxtaposition of the Day
Speaking of things drifting and leaking and such, there’s more and more politics leaking onto the funny pages these days. Or maybe not. After all, Little Orphan Annie was quite political and L’il Abner became a redneck mouthpiece in its latter years, while several strips like Pogo and Winnie Winkle frequently had political implications even when they weren’t addressing issues directly.
Garry Trudeau wished papers wouldn’t run Doonesbury on the editorial page because he wanted to reach readers who would normally skip that section. I was ambivalent about his theory then, but I agree with it now because sneakiness is frequently part of a goal of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Case in point: Granlund is a political cartoonist, PMP is a humor panel, but here they are making much the same point about the economy. Granlund’s piece would run on the editorial page, so people who see it might agree but they’d already be in that mindset.
Pardon My Planet would likely hit people more by surprise and might, therefore, have greater impact. Political commentators often think everybody walks around thinking about this stuff all the time, but they don’t.
Though if people went ballistic over the price of eggs, wait’ll they see Big Beautiful health insurance deductions on their paychecks.
This isn’t a political cartoon, but I saw it about the same time I saw yet another claim that Trump dodged the draft five times, which he didn’t. He took four routine II-S student deferments and one bogus medical deferment. A lot of American males took a II-S in college but then were drafted or signed up. Some died in Vietnam.
However.
There certainly were guys who would normally have dropped out but were afraid of being drafted, and there were colleges that specialized in admitting slackers who just wanted the deferment, the best-known of which was Parsons, which went out of business about the time the draft ended.
Also there was, IIRC, a for-real student who managed to stay in college for several years by repeatedly changing his major.
And there were a few wealthy students who avoided flunking out by having their parents make generous donations to the school. I’ve heard that some of them graduated with business degrees but didn’t even understand how tariffs work.
But enough politics.
First Dog speaks for me. I saw something the other day about how having a paper boarding pass is, like, Squaresville, man, and the last time I flew I saw lots of people waving their phones over the reader. It does make you think you should also be doing that, but I’m somewhat resistant to peer pressure.
I use my phone for phone calls and very short texts of the “Be there in a minute” variety, I read books on a Fire tablet and I have Alexa read me my flash briefing each morning while I’m bathing and shaving.
Plus I’ve worked on computers for the past 40 years or so. I know how to do what I want to do — mostly with Quark and InDesign and Photoshop — and I know there are things I don’t care about. I don’t think not giving in to other gizmos makes me an old man.
My phone keeps telling me I have unused apps, and I sure do.
“Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of QR codes!”
Normally, Arlo and I are on the same page, but not here. This one took me back to the days when I was a smoker with a small child (now about to turn 50) prone to asthmatic bronchitis.
I had to go outside to smoke, so that, if there was a punt or a turnover and that flurry of commercials was coming, it was my chance to go have a cigarette, which helped me decide to quit because I realized I was being a real jackass.
This is an example of what I call “autoresiliency,” from “auto” meaning self and “resiliency,” meaning to bounce back from anything.
The term describes possessing the ability to get over yourself.
One side effect of the pandemic has been people working remotely, which not only allowed some to adopt puppies, since they’d be present for housebreaking and other training, but also means that we have more people at the dog park during the day because they control their own schedules and can take doggy breaks.
It’s great for the dogs, because they are social critters who would rather not be left alone for hours at a time. The dog in this cartoon is taking the only revenge he can that doesn’t involve eviscerating the sofa, though I had a GF who had to put child-proof locks on her kitchen cabinets and refrigerator after the dog learned how to help himself in her absence.
The guy in the cartoon is getting off comparatively easy.
My little dog laughed to see such sport.
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