CSotD: Yahtzee Days and Humpdays
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It happens, and I’m leading off with Clay Jones’ version because he acknowledged what is known in the trade as a “Yahtzee.”
I hate it when another cartoonist does the same idea that I draw, but honestly, this one doesn’t surprise me, as this might be an obvious joke. Oh well.
If similar cartoons drop within a day or two of each other, as Jones notes, it’s usually a sign of an obvious gag. But sometimes the obvious gag is the right gag; you don’t want to be so subtle that nobody gets it.
The guy who ought to be embarrassed is the one who comes limping in five days later. You’d think, given a week to ponder, that he’d come up with something more groundbreaking, but you’d also think that, by then, he’d have seen the other versions.
And, by the way, it’s been awhile since anybody came up with a clever spin on “Quiet, Piggy.” We shouldn’t ignore the toxic misogyny, but artistry demands some variation in the critique.
Anyway, it’s Humpday and I don’t want to get into politics. I was mostly surprised because I wasn’t sure anybody under 70 has ever had Cracker Jack, and I had to look it up to see if they still have prizes at all. They sort of kind of do, but the prizes are crap, which is quite an achievement because they quit being cool in about 1960 and it’s been a long slide.
I’d also note that, if you have to tell people you still have prizes, what you have is a serious marketing issue. Even in the good old days, we only bought it for the prizes, not for the rubbery caramel corn.
The peanuts were okay, but once the peanuts became better than the prizes, that’s when I guess you had to start telling people what’s in the box, because they weren’t gonna find out on their own.
Which makes it a pretty good metaphor for the FIFA Peace Prize, as long as you don’t mind appealing to an audience of elders.
Onward.
Glad to see Brewster Rockit take on the issue of Artificial Unintelligence, because AI is destroying searches. Google and its brethren have decided what we want is AI inserts at the top of the search, which works if you want to know how long to bake chicken thighs at 375 degrees but generally fails on anything more complex.
I’m a good searcher. I can phrase a search in a way that used to bring relevant answers to the top of the pile, but, under the new system, complicated questions completely baffle the AI engines. What I get now is a completely irrelevant AI answer followed by a half-dozen ads for the thing I wasn’t asking about.
AI needs to go fill out some spreadsheets and let the grown-ups enjoy the Intertubes on their own.
There! That’s what I want! I was happy to go to a graphic interface, but there was something nice about the old C-prompt, because it didn’t try to anticipate what it thought you probably wanted.
When the kids were little and computers were obedient, I used to make them give me directions when we drove. If they said, “Turn right,” I would do it, even if it meant pulling into somebody’s driveway. They learned to say, “When you get to the intersection …”
Mostly, I was messing with their heads, but it did force them to learn a bit of logical sequencing and suchlike.
The alternative to messing with your kids’ heads is to make them uncurious and no fun to be around. You don’t want that.
The technique is simple: You can mess with their heads by being spontaneous. I went to buy some clothesline to tie a tree to the roof one year and ran into one of our copy editors whose car had died at the hardware store.
We — high school son and I — got her started and she offered us a free Christmas tree, so we followed her up into the bush where she lived. She cut us an enormous tree, snicked off the well-shaped top for our house and left herself the rest as some of next year’s firewood.
Your kids need to know that any little chore can suddenly become an adventure.
So do you. It’s fun to be fun.
Frazz has another approach to messing with kids’ heads, which is to hold them to logical conclusions. It’s particularly important with a smart kid like Caulfield (see comments), because he’ll go off on some tangent if you don’t call him on his overreaching.
Here, Frazz challenges him with a combination of Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Law: The simplest answer is preferable and you shouldn’t impute malice where frailty will do. I’m not suggesting that Frazz is a Christ Figure, but JC did caution his disciples to be “wise as serpents and gentle as doves,” which is roughly what’s being suggested here.
Granted, poop bags should be a minor issue in the Grand Scale of Things, but little things become patterns and patterns become big things. You shouldn’t have to be a Buddhist or a Sufi to know that.
It goes both ways, by the by. Dylan’s thing about “he not busy being born is busy dying” has a parental element as well, and you should never stop learning from your kids.
Sometimes it’s cosmic — Tom Bodett offers a timeless classic in how that works — but sometimes it’s just a matter of listening to the “But Dad …” objection you were too busy to hear.
And sometimes it’s unintentional. This Crabgrass reminded me of a project in seventh-grade shop where we were supposed to make ashtrays with our parents’ names hammered into the tin. Instead, wiseass that I was, I put in “Fight Lung Cancer.”
My mother took one look and, instead of laughing, quit smoking on the spot. That was 63 years ago, and she’s 101 now.
We started with artistic considerations, we’ll end that way. Anderson makes a quick point that Paul Noth elaborates on at his Substack.
The lesson is to do what you do do well. Some folks’ll get it, some folks won’t.
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