CSotD: Hooray for Hump Day
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There’s so much truly awful, frightening stuff going on that taking a day off to be silly seems, well, absolutely necessary. Maybe it’s the residual Yippie in me, but I think that, just as an army marches on its stomach, resistance needs a few laughs to keep everyone from sinking into the Slough of Despond.
We can ease into it with something semi-political, but we’ll wait for another day to discuss how Jerome Powell’s construction overruns match up with the rising cost of Dear Leader’s fabulous ballroom and so forth and so on. Laughing at the obvious hypocrisy of those in power helps remind us that, as it says in the Bible, you ain’t so big, you’re just tall, that’s all. (I may be wrong on that source.)
And when I went to double-check the quote, Google offered me “you’re just tall meaning in hindi” which with all doo respeck to the subcontinent makes me appreciate what AI has done to search engines.
And speaking of artificial intelligence, I really don’t think it’s better than none, because knowing nothing is better than knowing things that just ain’t so. Socrates, for all his profound wisdom, knew he could always learn more, though I prefer Diogenes, who wasn’t as sneaky about directing people to reach the conclusions he’d already arrived at.
But, meanwhile and on a more practical level, I am continually astonished as how little some people know about basic functions of our government, things they would have learned in eighth grade social studies if they hadn’t spent their dear old golden rule days in the back of the room with their heads down on their desks.
Enough of that. We need to stop being relevant, or what’s the point?
Though still on the topic of education, I remember snow days, and Wiley’s right, though back when I was a wee sprat there wasn’t a lot on daytime TV, so after we had enough snow, we mostly drank hot chocolate and played Monopoly. But we did watch Beat the Clock to see if anyone could get a tennis ball to roll up the ramp and stop on the top of the box.
As far as I know, nobody ever did.
Fast forward two decades, and I’m a young father taking his sons, who were eight and four, to what I thought was going to be a movie but quickly realized was a two-hour-and-four-minute toy commercial.
Here you had a civilization capable not only of interstellar flight at light speed but of land cruisers that zipped around like hydroplanes, and they were employing these clumsy, slow, top-heavy things available at Toys-R-Us or wherever you buy the things your kids are begging for.
And, yeah, we went back for the next toy commercial, too, which is how we wound up with pieces of the Ewok Village strewn from one end of the house to the other. The speeder bikes scene was, indeed, cool, but it was more fun to play Tron down at the arcade when they were having one of those $5 unlimited-play days.
One more old-time-TV memory, which is that when I was doing educational work at the newspaper in Plattsburgh, I brought two kids from Ghostwriter to town and we set attendance records at Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood home and at John Brown’s farm.
We also had a huge crowd of kids at the Clinton County Fair, but my young guest stars were city kids and, yes, they were appalled to discover that livestock doesn’t smell like roses. It had never occurred to me. But they were troupers and signed a lot of autographs that weekend, and we won an international award for the tri-county event.
Their shock, however, reminded me of being at the Lincoln Park Zoo in 1968 and discovering that the zoo’s collection of animals included a cow, which was amusing until an inner-city preschool showed up and, yes, it really was an exotic animal to those little kids, not one of which, I suspect, drank milk again for at least a month.
As far as science fairs go, my biggest memory is senior year, when I gave a pal a six-pak of Bud to add my name to his project. Can’t remember if we won a ribbon. Science fair ribbons, however, generally go to the kids whose parents did the best packaging job on the display, preferably for projects that Do Something Colorful rather than just sitting there demonstrating a legitimate scientific principle.
So wotthell, science isn’t fair. I don’t know why they call it that either.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Having twice been harassed into leaving a job so they wouldn’t have to pay me unemployment, I can relate to Free Range. The first time, they wanted to replace me with a part-timer, and the second time, the boss liked me but his wife did not and so we know who won that discussion.
In any case, the days of hanging around until you get a gold watch are long gone and spending 40 years at the same desk in return for a sheet cake in the break room is hardly worth it.
And so I disagree with Bizarro, because people can only hide by keeping their noses to the grindstone for so long, and the real value of staging those fun, mandatory team-building exercises is maintaining staff turnover so you can keep a large proportion of your workforce on entry-level wages.
The ones who think they’re going to be getting a gold watch will carry the productivity load.
And Now For Something Completely Different
I was poking around in some 1916 newspapers and came across a trolley that meets all the trains. Here are some examples of a comic that couldn’t have been done by anyone else because Fontaine Fox had a sense of humor that perfectly fit his artistic style. Such serendipity is truly magical.
The strip ended with Fox’s retirement in 1955, but for years afterwards, amusement parks had Toonerville Trolley rides, and there were other things around the country named for the strip.
But what had actually caught my eye in that 1916 newspaper was a poem by another fellow I greatly admire but who I didn’t know had a shift key on his typewriter.
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