CSotD: Son of Saturday Morning Comics
Skip to commentsA little late, dated four days after the Big Event, but if you remove the glands under their legs, they reportedly cook up like rabbit or chicken. However, don’t try to eat Phil. Nothing about sentiment, but he’s kind of old and would be pretty tough.
Hey, they’re gonna eat your garden. What goes around comes around.
I never sang to my dogs, but I did slip their names into songs that I sang to my kids. Which I thought they realized, but there came a point where one of the boys heard the original — I don’t know if it was Rocky Raccoon or Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da — and he was surprised that (A) our dogs’ names didn’t come up in it and (B) apparently, I hadn’t written it.
Not the only time I disillusioned them, mind you. Just the one that makes me laugh.
Speaking of the dogs, at one point we had four of them, and a cat. Three of the dogs were fairly normal, but one was the Barney Fife of Canines, and the cat used to crouch on a dining-room chair and wait for him to come by, then give him a swat on the backside.
He’d yelp and skitter away and while cats don’t laugh, the response from Kitty was much as if they did. The dog was probably lucky that cats only wield mallets in cartoons.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This pair popped up in my feed Thursday, and since I’m still reading Barbara Tuchman’s history of the 14th Century, they got an extra laugh, which her discussion of the Black Death has not, at least so far.
Some people like rats and keep them as pets. And some people eat groundhogs. It’s a big, wide wonderful world.
And some people drink hard seltzer. Apparently, a lot of people, because that and hard cider are starting to crowd out the actual beer at the grocery store.
Back when I ran the streets a bit, there was something called “Shake’em Up,” which was when poor alcoholics couldn’t afford drinkable wine, but could afford a bottle of cheap rotgut and a packet of Kool-Aid to make it semi-palatable.
Never tried Shake’em Up myself, but I think of it when I see those cases of hard seltzer in what ought be the beer cooler.
A bit of a chill over this week’s story arc in Zits, because I knew a very bright young woman who got admitted to the college of her choice only to have her parents tell her, once the aid package arrived, that it was still too expensive. There should have been more of a discussion earlier, though she went somewhere else and turned out fine.
When my kids got to the age for planning, I stuck one of those unofficial, truth-based guides to colleges in the bathroom and let them ponder at their leisure.
My guidelines were that I wanted them close enough that they could come home if they had a three-day weekend but far enough away that they’d have to do their own laundry.
It’s important to set standards.
Zits’ drama continues. I think insisting your kid graduate in four years is a foolish demand, assuming you mean four consecutive years.
I dropped out after junior year and spent a year writing, but told my grandfather I intended, somewhat reluctantly, to go back and finish. He said it sounded like a good idea because, little as I wanted to spend that year getting the damned sheepskin, I’d have wasted a lot more time later in life explaining why I hadn’t.
To emphasize not doing things just because it was expected of you, he told me of a fellow he knew who had gone to college, gone to law school, passed the bar and hung out his shingle before realizing he didn’t want to be a lawyer. He joined the Army and went off to fight the Kaiser as an escape.
Another way to look at other people’s expectations. I’ve never thought putting your business in the street was a particularly wise move, certainly not when it comes to your love life. And now that “the street” is the Information Superhighway, it’s an even worse idea.
I don’t even need to know what you had for dinner, much less who you had breakfast with.
I will share with you that the worst blind date of my life was with a girl from Appleton, Wisconsin, which is where they make napkin dispensers, which I know because there was one on the table and she told me that and that was the highlight of an otherwise wretched three-day campus festival.
However, if I ran a fast-food franchise, I might put some of those dispensers behind the counter so my employees would have to take a napkin or two at a time instead of grabbing a handful. If you can tell them how many pickles go on a burger, you should be able to cut down on wasted napkins.
Also, our co-op and the state liquor stores have cash registers programmed so that they can ask you if you want a receipt before printing it out. I don’t know how much money that saves, but somewhere there are trees that would like to live a little longer rather than being turned into napkins and receipts for the landfill.
Here’s a little tip: If you’re British, stay the hell away from pederasts, because they take that sort of thing a whole lot more seriously over there than we do over here. They de-princed Randy Andy and fired their ambassador to the US for hanging out with Epstein, while we can’t quite manage to shake a disapproving finger — or lift one — at anybody on this side of the Atlantic.
Other countries also seem more concerned than we are about the impact of social media on their children, though, as Jonesy notes, Britain isn’t among them.

Finally, this tip: Turner Classic is running Looney Tunes between movies, so I set things to record them automatically. Can’t share from there, but here’s the much, much shorter butchered version of “A Wild Hare” available on YouTube:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.












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