CSotD: A Few Of My Favorite Rants
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Let’s start with something guaranteed to offend somebody: I’m okay with death. We all die eventually and maybe my stoicism makes it easier to deal with but I can’t think of a major religion in which a well-prepared death is seen as bad.
It’s sad, but it makes sense to deal with it, and Bizarro this morning touches on one of the many euphemisms we use to avoid the direct, healthy conversation. That delights me.
I can live with “passed away,” but when you say someone “passed,” I can’t decide whether they were playing quarterback, got through a class with a gentleman’s C or perhaps were less than candid about their race.
And Bizarro — bless them! — touches on the worst euphemism, which is “We lost him.”
My response to that is “Have you looked behind the couch?” but you can’t say that, so it’s nice to see Piraro and Wayno get it down in print.
I won’t say “And another thing” because today is going to be a series of other things. Mutts brings up the concept of uniqueness, which is an opportunity to annoy grammar nazis with my considered opinion about that word: The notion that “unique” means “one of a kind” is, at best, a figure of speech. It can’t possibly be literally true.
Perhaps every snowflake is unique, but on what level? On a subatomic level, everything is unique. But at a glance, well, line them all up and let’s see.
Meanwhile, on a functional level, every flake may be different but they sure seem the same when they are lying three feet deep in my driveway. Call it “situational uniqueness,” and I’ll marvel at it while you shovel.
As for comparative uniqueness, of course it exists. All male mallards look roughly alike, but one with a dark spot on his bill would be somewhat unique, though it wouldn’t affect his behavior in any way. One with three legs would be more unique.
And if you had mallards packed three-feet deep in your driveway, I daresay you wouldn’t think any of them were particularly unique.
Not so much a rant as a memory. At some point in the early 70s, then-wife and I began getting Christmas cards from Sid and Alma in Livonia, Michigan.
We didn’t know anybody named Sid or Alma and we didn’t even know where Livonia is. Turns out that Livonia is a suburb of Detroit, but we never did figure out who Sid and Alma were. There was never a note, only the signature.
They started out as Sid and Alma and kids, and then became just Sid and Alma and then, unexpectedly, became Alma and Sid, which raised all sorts of questions.
But we’d long since agreed that we weren’t going to do any detective work or tip them off that perhaps they meant to send a card to someone else. The fascination became part of our holidays.
The end was anticlimactic. I moved East and got one more card in 1988, forwarded from Colorado.
But I’d have loved to have been in Livonia when the 1989 card was returned and Sid asked, “Who the hell are the Petersons?”
Question: Does anybody actually kiss under the mistletoe who wasn’t likely to kiss without mistletoe?
This has puzzled me all my life, because even as a young lad, I knew mistletoe wasn’t going to protect you from somebody you kissed who didn’t want to be kissed. I think McCoy has this right, not only about the woman not wanting to be kissed but about the guy who thought he had a cunning plan.
It would be a lot funnier if society were not currently beset with genuinely clueless members of the “manosphere” who honestly can’t figure out how to get kissed and think their celibacy is the result of a woke plot.
Which sets us up for a second McCoy cartoon:
One of the nice things about being single, or maybe one of the bad things, is that I have to blame myself for everything wrong at my place, including cabinet doors left open, ketchup not refrigerated, garbage not taken out on garbage night and, yes, trips to the store in which I forget something.
Not that I haven’t had a wife and several GFs, but we always operated on the theory that if you’re upset over the cap being left off the toothpaste, that’s not what you’re upset over. Which brings us not to Dear Abby or even Carolyn Hax, but to Ken Kesey, and the notion that you’re either on the bus or you’re off the bus, and also why should I take your bad trip for you?
Basically, the answer to “Do you think I’m your maid?” is, “No. Do you think I’d pick up my socks if I lived alone?” And I can verify that answer.
There are men who pick up their socks and there are women who really don’t care. This is why we have cohabitation.
And cohabitation is a helluva lot more fun that test-driving a Prius.
Banx, kibitzing from the UK, notes that there are ways for young people to get around Australia’s new law restricting social media access.
No kidding. I grew up in a state where you had to be 18 to buy liquor, which brought big brothers and older friends into frequent play for those of us not named McLovin. I began drinking the week I turned 14, and had already been smoking for about year before that.
Some of us drank, some of us didn’t, the point being that there will always be ways around the rules, and if you wait to come up with a law nobody can break, you’re going to wind up with no laws at all.
As for Australia’s law, it makes sense, in part because it targets the suppliers, not the purchasers. Bar owners know they can lose their licenses for serving minors, and the various social media companies face massive fines for letting kids have access.
It also sends the message that we don’t think you should be doing this. Whether you pull an end run or not, you’ve at least gotten that message.
Which is often the best we can do.
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