CSotD: Humpday Afternoon: I’m just beginning to see
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My friend got some bad news at the doctor’s this week. A new endocrinologist said he was very impressed with how she handled her various health issues and assured her that she had several more decades ahead of her. That’s the sort of prognosis that would have been welcome in our 50s but isn’t particularly encouraging in our mid-70s.
Especially coming the same week as we learn what our Social Security cost-of-living increase is going to be and how much of it Medicare is going to gobble up.
However, sarcasm aside …
Randall Munroe offers a lengthy update on a true-life story his readers began following 15 years ago. Such long-form things don’t reproduce well here, but you really must go have a look at the whole thing.
It makes me feel like kind of a punk, since I won’t be 10 years out until this coming summer, but I sure recognized the steps they trace, and it helps me realize how damn lucky I am to be able to joke about being cursed with two more decades. There’s a very old joke about how getting old sucks, but it sure beats the alternative.
Good on ya, guys.
As long as I’m slipping into Taking Comics Seriously, I’d advise a little caution in comparing teachers to Superman. For those of us who have labored in the vineyard, it brings to mind Waiting for Superman, a well-financed 2010 stalking horse for the voucher movement.
I could do a whole column on this, and maybe a whole week of columns, but the film emphasized my point that, while nobody thinks having eaten in a restaurant qualifies you to be a chef, there are all sorts of people who think having been a student qualifies you to be a teacher. It doesn’t.
In 2003, Toles found a slight flaw in the plan to let kids in failing schools transfer, but what he missed was that both transfers and vouchers allowed good, caring parents to yank their kids instead of staying to go to school board meetings and raise hell on behalf of neighborhood schools. That leaves failing schools at the mercy of parents who don’t know or don’t care or can’t cope.
The voucher movement might well have failed after some of its more fierce advocates got caught in cheating scandals in Texas and Georgia and DC and elsewhere, but sending them to jail didn’t quiet the ardor of the True Believers. We have a voucher program today in New Hampshire, often used not by the poor but by people who could afford tuition at private schools but prefer to latch on to the public teat.
Well, like I say, I could go on. Ask me about the difference between grade level testing and cohort testing. Or about who gets tested in the US and who gets tested overseas. Or about how every other developed country in the world handles voc-tech.
Nah, better not.
How’s this for a segue? Finland is often praised for the quality of its schools, but you don’t have to check test scores for that. Finns also have a reputation for a dour sense of humor, but Dark Horse consistently comes up with puns that rely on a sharp familiarity with the English language, and not only do they sometimes require a second glance, but he never apologizes for them.
The gag here, of course, is that it’s not the ultimate rites, just the penultimate rites, though that certainly suggests that the ultimate will follow.
We used to call it “extreme unction” and I don’t remember anything about “moderate unction,” but I do know that, at some point, they quit just blessing the dying and started blessing people for any sort of semi-serious anything, which is to say that I think you had to be admitted. They weren’t out in the waiting room praying over people there.
It’s part of what you might call Sacramental Inflation. It used to be that you would go to Confession before you headed off to the Crusades, in case you weren’t going to make it back. If you did, you might go again on death’s bed, about the time you were getting X-Trem We Mean It This Time Unction. Then at some point they decided everyone should go to Confession once a year, the dreaded “Easter Duty” that Stephen Dedalus and his mother quarreled over.
Then it became so frequent that the priests who had to go out to convents to hear the confessions of cloistered nuns referred to it as “being stoned to death with popcorn.”
The trick to getting into heaven is to store up enough good stories to make Confession worthwhile, and then to be hit by a bus on your way out of church, not on your way in.
We had mandatory theology requirements at Notre Dame, but we learned the difference between mortal and venial sins on our own. Giving in to an irresistible urge was a venial sin and could be expiated with an Act of Contrition, but preparing for an irresistible urge indicated full consent of the will, making it a mortal sin that would have to be confessed.
Instead, we did an awful lot of praying.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The art of cartooning, in black and white.
About 60% of the people reading this blog do so on phones. Since I used to lay out newspaper pages for a living, I work on a 32-inch screen. This makes me look almost scholarly when I’m doomscrolling, and it also gives me permission to complain about newspapers shrinking comic strips.
If I had my druthers, newspapers would still be 15 inches wide, and the strips would run 4-column. I guess it’s a good thing that modern cartoonists have learned to engrave their work on the head of a pin, but there was some grace in giving people something that covered their breakfast table. In the words of Butch Cassidy, “It’s a small price to pay for beauty.”
In any case, my musical wrapups have expressed gratitude this week, and today I’m thankful to be seeing this on a 32-inch screen:
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