CSotD: Another Pleasant Valley Humpday
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Today’s Bliss brought about a flashback. The kids were about 3 and 7 and we’d all been East to visit my family. This was before computerization and reserving your seats ahead of time, and somehow the airline broke up our party into three and one.
We explained to someone or other that this wasn’t going to work, and they explained that it was going to have to work. So we explained to the flight attendant that then-wife, seven-year-old and I were going to be the three, and the three-year-old would be placed in the single spot.
Somehow, a few deals were struck and we got to fly as Mom/kid and Dad/kid. Moral of the story is that you should never be afraid to roll out the big guns early.
Another personal response: We happened to be discussing refrigerators the other day, and how disposable they’ve become. Your refrigerator used to be like your furnace. You bought it once, you took reasonable care of it, you might have to replace a part after a few years but you might never have to service it.
Now I’d say 15th Anniversary is about right. I’ve been in this apartment for 16 years and we’re on the third refrigerator, having replaced the original a year after I moved in.
And I’d note that you can still repair a refrigerator sometimes, but other times, it’s like a Bic lighter and you just toss it away and buy a new one.
Except Bic lighters aren’t priced in four figures.
Charging five dollars for a draft should be illegal, consarn it. When I was in high school, I could go to the bar with four quarters in my pocket, buy a beer, put a quarter on the edge of the pool table to challenge and then hold the table as long as I could, drinking for free until I lost a game. Then I’d spend my last two quarters on a beer for the victor and one for the road.
If you want to make America great again, bring the cost of a draft back to a quarter, goldarnit. And drop the age back to 18. If you can hand them guns and send them to Venezuela or Greenland or Chicago or Portland, they should be able to have a beer before they ship out.
A bit of honesty this week, as Opal has been confessing her dishonest postings. It’s hard to accept that sometimes you might have to take online statements with a grain of salt, but there you have it.
Is there nothing we can be certain of anymore in this world? Well, there’s this: If you won a Nobel Prize, you could buy 340,000 beers with the winnings. I don’t know how many Diet Cokes the winner of the Peace Prize could buy, but we’ll deal with that if it ever actually becomes relevant.
It does occur to me that winning $1.14 million could pose a problem or two down at the lab. If you plan to split it up among your colleagues, you’d better have a good tax attorney. And if you don’t, you’d better have a good explanation.
I don’t know if there’s a novel in that idea, but it’s at least good for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Some nice and unexpected messaging from Brian Basset. Red and Rover has been getting somewhat mushy lately, but today adds considerable heft to it all.
Back as the pandemic eased and people went back to work, there was a flurry of stories about “covid puppies” being returned to shelters because people didn’t have time for them anymore, though it seems a bit like being convinced that emergency rooms are busier during full moons. If you seek it, you’ll find it.
But whatever those actual numbers, I’m seeing a lot more dog walkers, which is turning into a good second income. I also suspect that, while doggy daycare had started well before the pandemic, that it has caught a crest because of people returning to the office.
A lot of dogowners maintain a mixed schedule of doggy daycare days and dog walker days, which gives their pups both company and exercise.
Leigh Rubin offers more humor in this look at canine/human relationships. There have been several gags about pretending to throw the ball, but I like this one because there are people who have logical discussions with their dogs, and reversing it simply amplifies the absurdity.
Granted, lots of people who talk to their dogs are just thinking aloud, and the dog is happy to have them talking even when it can’t understand the words, like the classic Far Side of “blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah.”
But there are also people who not only think the dog understands them, but that the dog is capable of processing syllogisms and understanding “if you do this … that will happen” conversations.
Or, in this case, of formulating a counterproposal.
Brilliant timing having this come out just as the Medicare Decision Days are upon us. Three-card Monte is hard enough to win, but this feels more like 52-card Monte, and for some reason comparing all the plans makes this also seem like a good time to try to figure out, if you start collecting Social Security early, whether you should then die early or plan to live forever.
It doesn’t take long before what he proposes starts to sound equally sensible. Which is a pretty good time to go back to bed and hit reset.
Today’s Macanudo hit well because I’m re-reading Dostoevsky’s Demons/The Possessed, which is written from the point of view of a first-person unreliable narrator, which quite naturally keeps the reader in the drivers’ seat.
That’s not what the cartoon is saying, of course. Both good and bad writing can involve you for the moment.
But genuinely good literature does more than that. The great books are like Heraclitus’s statement that you can’t step into the same river twice, because the river changes and you change.
The Sun Also Rises is a completely different book when you’re 45 than it was at 20. So is Catch-22. Try it yourself.
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