CSotD: Hump Day Revisited
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We’re coming up on another obligatory non-holiday which you have to observe but for which you don’t get time off. Blazek is right that the apostrophe belongs before, not after, the S, though if you poke around in the origins of the day you might stumble across more than one St. Valentine, and, besides, as Frankie Avalon said, “Two hearts are better than one heart, four lips are sweeter than two.”
The message being that you should stop thinking about there being more than one St. Valentine and contemplate the idea of four lips, though as I think Petrarch wrote, “There are tulips in the garden, there are tulips in the park, but the tulips that I like the best are two lips in the dark.”
Shakespeare wrote much the same thing, but with a different rhyme scheme.
Meanwhile, while we’re being romantic, a look forward to June weddings. I had a March wedding but I was also actively involved in the planning, being a modern guy, though I let my fiancée handle the food and beverage issues for the reception, and make her own dress. Still, I drove up into the mountains to find the buses that the band lived in and make sure we were all squared away with them.
It wasn’t Barbie’s Dream Wedding, but I didn’t want to be married to Barbie. YMMV.
Is it rude to follow talk of weddings with visions of Hell? Beats me. I’m not married any more, but we each left with the demons we’d originally brought with us, which seems right and fair, and I suspect that Piccolo and Price are correct that we’ll show up with them in the afterlife as well.
Jacob Marley would insist that we started with none and added them one by one as we went through life and I wouldn’t argue with him, nor would Rousseau, though I guess Hobbes would insist we all have demons ex origine.
From the sublime to the ridiculous, and Macanudo had excellent timing with this one, because I just watched Watusi — a version of King Solomon’s Mines — on TLC the other day, which has nothing to do with mountain climbing but shares a pet peeve of mine: They finally got to the mines, having destroyed the only bridge across a chasm, nearly died crossing a desert and infuriating several native groups along the way, and in the next shot, they were back home, without a clue as to how they got back so easily.
Ditto with mountain climbing movies, and it’s good that Liniers explains how they reach the summit after an agonizing technical climb and then are safely home in the next shot.
Special credit to Coverly for featuring a pileated woodpecker, since downeys and redheads and hairy woodpeckers live up to their names and just peck the wood. Pileated woodpeckers are the jackhammers of the family Picidae and you can always tell when they’ve been around, even if their massive excavation is too high to notice because they leave a mound of sawdust at the base of the tree.
I’ve also seen them working on a home burrow, with one doing the drilling and the other standing by, either with advice or waiting to take a turn at the actual work. Since they mate for life, I would assume the latter.
Susan has been offered a stock option, which pinged two memories for me, though as the week went on, it looked as if this might be a good move for her. But I’ll wait for the other shoe to drop.
I once wrote for a start-up videotape rental place, which had no money but gave me stock. That might have been a good investment if they hadn’t cratered the company within a year, but I got to keep the VCR I’d been issued (in the days when they were expensive), so I came away with something.
Two decades later, a vulture capitalist acquired and began gutting the newspaper I worked for, and, when I finally escaped, I cashed out my stock option. Some sort of rounding error left me with a fragmentary share, so for the past 20 years, they have had to send me annual proxies that cost more to mail than my holdings are worth. I’ve dutifully voted against all the board’s recommendations and returned them in the postpaid envelope.
This year, they included a sizeable publication explaining their changes, and it was bulky enough that I called the stockholder line to see how my investment had grown. Turns out I own 0.029 shares, worth a little under 16 cents.
Revenge is indeed a dish best served cold, but I do hope Susan and Harvey don’t get left wanting any.
Doonesbury reruns are replaying BD’s loss of his leg, one of the strip’s better segments. This one reminded me of the summer I spent getting rid of cancer and also my gall bladder and a few extra parts. I hope the VA hospitals are better furnished, because getting hungry between meals only got me a graham cracker and a little school-lunch-sized yoghurt cup. I suspect wounded vets need a little more sustenance.
One of my high-school buddies got blowed up real good in Vietnam, and during his long convalescence, nights were the best part because the night orderlies would get him stoned, which was better than the snacks he got during the day. Though not worth being there.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’m seeing a lot of negative feedback on AI, which is hardly surprising, given how many cartoonists are in my circle and see both their art and their livelihood being undermined by AI slop. But the amount of phony propaganda we’re flooded with is a threat to the nation as a whole.
Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly ecstatic at the amount of slop on Facebook. And goody for him, but Instagram is trying to control things, without much luck.
At least my favorite grumpy cartoonist is getting a laugh out of it, because AI really isn’t all that smart after all.
Which is probably why the Trump administration is posting AI slop to promote Dear Leader.
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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