CSotD: TGIHD
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Thank God it’s Hump Day, coming just as things began to be scary. But we’ll ease into the humor with Rabbits, which would be echoing what I said yesterday except that this strip ran Sunday. Credit where credit is due, and much of the suspense ahead is seeing if the public rises to challenge the powers that be. There were, after all, a significant number of people who declined to vote as a protest against US support of the war in Gaza, which makes me wonder how they like Venezuela and the prospects of Greenland.
We’ll see, but we also need a few laughs, since the outside world is currently furnishing so few.
I laughed because I’m tired of crying. I expect a little spin, but I am gobsmacked by Karoline Leavitt’s capacity for bare-faced, shameless lies that make “the dog ate my homework” seem credible.
I particularly like that Wiley has his flack use the term “hoax,” since it’s a word that has been misused so often lately that it no longer has any real meaning.
Okay, enough politics. It’s Hump Day, dammit.
Count on Jonesy for a delivery that requires just a moment of thought, which is just what it takes to make a dumb joke brilliant. By only showing the reaction, he creates a “Wait, what?” pause, and this wouldn’t be nearly as funny if he’d depicted the event itself.
Dark Side’s creator is Finnish, which is surprising because, while he offers a lot of visual gags, he often plays with language, including jokes that can only work in English. He’s obviously comfortable in a second language, which makes me suspect he may have more than two of them.
His sense of humor reminds me of when I lived near Montreal and would go to Juste Pour Rire, which, in addition to stand-ups, brings in buskers from around the world who exhibit a combination of clowning, acrobatics and juggling that defies borders and languages.
This falls into the category of personal timing. I called a major retailer about a problem with an order the other day and first had to find where I might get customer service and then was directed into a maze of AI chatbots that kept directing me back to the Help page. It took me some 15 infuriating minutes to find a human and complete an action that should have taken three.
However, by happenstance I also ran into a banking issue and since I use a community bank, I was able to call a human being and resolve things in those three minutes. The incident was happenstance, but not the bank, which is in Maine. Though I left the state nearly 20 years ago, I held onto the account for just that reason. Well, and also for the free ATM service anywhere.
You don’t have to abandon the creeping meatball if you don’t climb on in the first place.
More customer service. I like my doctors, but they are trapped in a corporate world in which their time with patients is increasingly regulated, productivity is strictly monitored and scheduling is such that, as Arlo says, you do well to get an appointment within, well, several weeks if not actually six months.
It’s not that “it didn’t used to be that way” in a vague nostalgic way. It didn’t used to be that way when I started seeing these physicians. This is, indeed, an example of the above-mentioned creeping meatball.
Another personal response: My Danish-Swedish Farmdog shares the breed’s love of indoor burrowing. One of the adjustments you have to make if you live with one is to never sit on a pile of rumpled blankets because someone is likely under it.
I suppose if I tucked everything in military style it would frustrate her, but why would I do that? Instead, I pull up the blankets and she pulls them back down and we get along just fine, thanks.
I was delighted to see the New Year come, ending the flood of requests for donations in the last few weeks of the tax year. Like Betty, I support some — both continuing and for specific projects — but I can’t afford to give to them all.
However, like Alex, I don’t unsubscribe to their emails, because for most of the year, I want to read what they’ve got to say. Ditto with Substacks: I figure the ones I don’t give to, other folks do, and vice-versa.
At least I hope that’s how it works.
Like Cynthia, I believed in a healthy give-and-take in education. My class was one not every teacher welcomes: Smart jocks. Worse, we followed two classes of obedient scholars, which may have lulled the faculty into a comfort zone that we interrupted regularly. Even our eventual valedictorian was willing to pull pranks on a teacher who didn’t come up to standard.
However, sneaking things into papers because you suspect the teacher isn’t reading them contains some dangers. Cynthia is wise to fill with nonsense, because actually writing “Hello Mrs. Smith” will jump out even if she isn’t reading closely, and the F-bomb absolutely leaps off the page.
Fortunately, I only learned those particular things second-hand.
Like Cynthia, Danae gets caught in her attempt to play the system, which is a tribute to their teachers. But you wouldn’t need to bring in Chatbot as a co-conspirator to come up with that book report because there are plenty of books which, if they aren’t written by AI, might as well be.
Schools reportedly no longer assign novels anymore, but I hope some teachers demand book reports. OTOH, when I was editing a kid-written weekly publication, we stopped offering James Patterson’s frequent kids’ books to review because they seemed to be extruded rather than written.
Granted, our crew wasn’t typical. We had a musical genius who composed for string quartets and set him up with an interview with Itzhak Perlman and he had Perlman show him how to make music by pushing buttons on a blender. Unexpected but fabulous.
He must be in college now. I hope his professors were prepared to learn.
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