CSotD: Blecch Friday
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I’d like to apologize to the world for somehow having exported Black Friday around the globe. There are a lot things we Americans could apologize for, though Dancing with the Stars was not our idea, nor was the Amazing Singing Head, another program I only know about because they run promos during more interesting things. But I guess we need bread & circuses, though it reminds me of the people in Brave New World going to the feelies, having been programmed to find that fun.
I suppose it makes sense to have a day when everyone goes out and greases the bearings on the machine with a flurry of retail consumption, but it seems damned foolish to have the worldwide date set by a holiday only marked in one country. It could have been based on a solstice or something.
I’d say “Thank goodness we don’t have to get involved in the mad scramble at the stores anymore” except that I suspect the mad scramble is part of the appeal. At least most stores have stopped having their sales start on the holiday itself, though that had less to do with decency than with labor shortages.
Probably not worth it anyway, when you could be home watching people in papier-mâché heads sing.
Caulfield occasionally bends himself into a pretzel to be a snob, and standing out in the rain to avoid Black Friday shopping is a pretty good example. Frazz would run or cycle in lousy weather, but I’ll bet Caulfield wouldn’t go outside if he weren’t proving a point.
Betty and Bub are out in the country, but as part of a planned vacation, not to avoid the sales. This is when small-town living pays off. Last night we were driving to my son’s farm for dinner and it reminded me of when I first moved here and was driving down that road into a similar sunset and said to myself, “This is like a Maxfield Parrish painting!” about a mile before I passed a sign telling me I was on the Maxfield Parrish highway.
Adrian Raeside seems a little more cynical, but I suppose it depends on where you think “country” starts and how long it takes to get there. I remember sneaking around Yellowstone looking for an illegal campsite so we wouldn’t hear our neighbor’s portable TV at night, and that was 1970. The next day we drove out to Hebgen Lake to get away from it all.
I’m sorry and appalled that Dear Leader now wants to charge furriners $100 to see our national parks. Not only is it another case of unnecessary xenophobia, but I’ll bet he’s never been to Yellowstone or the Canyon himself. He did fund a state park in New York which, of course, he put his name on.
Anyway, I started to watch Yellowstone the series but quickly tumbled to the fact that it was just an updated version of Dallas, the update being that the gal who played Sue Ellen kept on a-dropping her britches.
Samuel Johnson remarked that the Giant’s Causeway was worth seeing, but not worth going to see. I felt the same way about that new Sue Ellen’s backside.
This ain’t my first rodeo, but I’m willing to stand mooot on this gag, because maybe rodeo bulls do have that nightmare, but I sure doubt it. “Rough stock” — the bulls and broncos who specialize in bucking off riders — are chosen not so much for fierceness as for refusal to put up with being ridden.
Once you get away from the roadside rodeos into the PRCA-sanctioned events, these animals are treated like royalty, which they are. Like good guard dogs, you don’t have to mistreat them to get them to act on cue, and you’d ruin them if you did.
If reincarnation is a thing, I want to come back as a riding bull. You work eight seconds a day and as soon as you throw some guy off, most times you just circle back to the gate and they let you out to go back to your stall and watch Netflix or whatever.
And if you’re really good at it, you can become more famous than the cowboys.
Though you don’t have to weigh 1,900 pounds and sport a pair of horns to decide you don’t much care what anyone wants you to do, or not do. It’s more an issue of character.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I don’t think anybody wants to be hacked, and I’ve lost two Facebook pages to hackers, though the problem wasn’t that they broke in. It was that I couldn’t convince Facebook to let me back. In one case, they demanded proof that I was old enough to have a page I’d had for 17 years, and neither that fact nor three separate scans of my drivers’ license convinced them.
I remain convinced that sys admins worry about these things more than users, and that the problem isn’t how many letters and numbers and special characters are in your password but rather the fact that you believe someone is giving away laptops and that it matters which character from Downton Abbey you are.
It’s not about verification codes and I can’t figure out those Captcha puzzles either, though now I have another excuse to avoid self-driving cars.
Since the days of GIGO all we’ve managed to accomplish was to automate the PEBCAK error.
This piece from Nature.com makes the point:
This handy chart explains how artificial intelligence means a publication that’s been around since 1869 no longer needs to have sentient, literate beings examine things before loosing them upon the world.
It’s enough to make your factor fexcectron lose all its runctitional features and go totalbottl.
Finally, not to pick on Fell because there were a million similar comics about hard-working women and goof-off guys, but they reminded me that, when my boys had left home and it was just me and the dog, I really missed “doing” for people.
The times I’ve hosted since then have been great fun, fussing and coordinating and keeping people the hell out of my kitchen.
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