CSotD: A Little Seltzer Down Your Pants
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A bit of synchronicity: We were just talking about this at the dog park yesterday. Actually, we were talking about the fact that it’s coyote mating season, and apparently they become aggressive then. But we don’t have coyotes. We’ve got foxes, whose mating season is over now.
You know when the foxes are mating because the males mark their territory with something that smells like skunk. Which reminded me of a girl in college who was laughing and gagging at the same time because she’d just passed three guys who, with the same intent, were wearing Canoe, Jade East and English Leather.
Which brings us to today’s Zits, though the problem with Old Spice isn’t a heavy stench. It’s that it reminds girls of their grandfathers.
Stephan Pastis is a master of taking a circuitous path to get to the point, so the pun is barely the point. The fun is trying to anticipate where on Earth he’s headed with his extended build-up. It’s like a shaggy dog story but with a clever, rather that a bathetic, ending.
My elementary school principal used to tell long, ridiculous stories that ended with puns, which is how I learned that people who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.
Willy ‘n Ethel offers something in the same humor family, because the underlying premise is so firmly established that the fun is in seeing how Joe Martin gets there day after day. A lot of comics are based on well-established characters, but only a few of them are inventive rather than repetitious.
Some familiarity is based on your life stage, and parents of young children will get more laughs from Barnicoat’s ain’t-it-the-truth observational humor than those of us who went through this so long ago that the best it can do is trigger a little nostalgia.
But then there are things happening in Pickles that tickle my aging funnybone, and the challenge of putting together a good comics page is offering a variety so that anyone who visits will find something that appeals to them.
The entire newspaper ought to be edited with that goal in mind, but don’t get me started.
Besides, one of the great delights are comics you turn to because you have no idea what they’re going to be about. Part of what keeps WtB fresh is that, while the characters are well-established, their relationships with each other are very fluid.
They also have only a passing acquaintance with reality, such that things happen in the strip that couldn’t happen to anyone any older than this crew. As was true with Cul de Sac, you’re invited into a world that is strongly based on a small child’s worldview, which — like that tent — is not particularly well-grounded.
There’s been chatter about students getting to college without ever reading a book, but that’s on the curriculum developers, not the kids. As Hallatt notes, books for young people are a big deal, though I’d disagree with her over whether it’s new, because Twilight was 20 years ago and Harry Potter launched three years before that. Their original fans now have their own kids.
I’m also gonna bust her for saying “real books.” Helluva phrase for a cartoonist, given the major appeal of graphic novels and the illustrated novels Jeff Kinney, Dav Pilkey and Terry Libenson produce.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I don’t mind having to decide what to do about cookies, but Coverly is right about the tedium of having to choose over and over. I assume that this issue keeps coming up because European governments are more aware of the value of privacy for users, which is quite a contrast with how things are done here.
At some point, however, some smart programmer will find a way to embed your preference in the settings so you don’t have to keep asserting it.
As for those stupid Captcha squares, they don’t work and anybody still using them is antagonizing users for no good reason. There are better ways, even better forms of Captcha, and I don’t mind clicking one box to prove I’m human, but if you’re going to text me a security code, you’d better have some genuinely sensitive information to protect.
Good question, Jeremy. I don’t know very many people who don’t work with computers these days, and “these days” go back a couple of decades now. My father-in-law was a Greatest Generation tool and die maker, and I remember the enthusiasm he showed when the company he worked for began using computers as part of making airline seats. I also knew backshop workers at newspapers who had transitioned from linotype to graphic processing.
Not that everyone gets into the soul of the machine. I went by Dunkin Donuts the other day and they gave me my coffee and donut free because their cash registers were down and they couldn’t collect money. Not that I’d had any cash with me anyway.
I still use my phone as a phone, but I realize I’m holding out more from stubborness than for any rational reason. But I used to carry a small point-and-click camera in my pocket and they’re getting hard to find, since phones have taken over the market.
One advantage of my dedication to a desktop instead of using my phone for everything is that my photos are on there, edited, sorted into folders and backed up. Having everything on your phone makes them chaotic and vulnerable, and Betty suggesting she dump them makes me wonder why she took them in the first place.
But I think that’s where we’re at. We’ve traded letters for email and photo albums for jumbled, overloaded phones.
Our entire generation is going to disappear as soon as we do.
Then-wife and I wrote our own vows and created our own wedding, though it was broadly based on the traditional model. Groovy as we were, however, it still looked like a wedding and we thought the Serial — our generation’s version of Portlandia — was a hoot.
The movie wasn’t as good as Cyra McFadden’s written version, but the wedding scene was fun (naughty language warning).
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