CSotD: TGIHD (Plus ca change)
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I didn’t stay up for the SOTU, though I recorded it in case something untoward happened, but looking at this morning’s summaries, I gather it was all rather toward.
In an entertaining analysis of last night’s festivities, Moira Donegan points out that the Constitution only requires a report, not a speech. I looked it up and there weren’t any State of the Union speeches between 1801 and 1913, in case you wanted to pin down some exact dates for “The Good Old Days.”
I don’t know if John Buss stayed up for it but he wouldn’t have had to in order to have this ready for the morning. I hope I can find cartoons about something else in the next few days, because the world is full of more interesting things.
I’m also calling a halt to cartoons about frogs and princes. Thanks to you-know-who, we’re buried in cartoons about frogs no longer being princes. I did feature the first one I saw but that was also the last you’ll see from me, unless I decide to compile a book of them.
Thank god it’s Hump Day and I don’t have to deal with politics.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Asked-and-answered on today’s GoComics page. I suppose you could do an experiment in which some people got no politics and other people got nothing but political news, then do polls comparing the views of people who know what’s going on with those of people who haven’t a clue. Not that we don’t already kinda do that.
Wiley is right that some people prefer to be aggrieved, though he leaves it up to the reader to decide if the fellow gets aggrieved by the news itself or by the way cable news outlets present it.
Possibly both.
Sipress examines efforts to be fair. The problem with being fair is that you become somewhat like instant oatmeal: Bland and boring. But we already see attempts in the weather, because they’ll cheerfully announce an upcoming week of sunny weather and then admit that we could really use some rain.
In any case, he’s right that we’re starting to see everything in red and blue terms, and with one team denying climate change and the other warning of it, weather is teetering on the brink of being one more divisive issue.
Why are we having so many destructive hurricanes? A shortage of Sharpies!
Granlund dropped this one before that Noreaster buried the East Coast this week, but he’s right that more kids used to make money going door-to-door offering to clear people’s sidewalks than you see now. I think that’s also true of kids who used to contract to mow lawns.
I didn’t need to pay: I had my own kids. What I did find is that they started doing a better job on the driveway once they had drivers’ licenses and a personal interest in it, but that only lasted a short time before they left home and it became my problem.
Betty is a little more cynical. However, part of the problem may be smaller families. There were so many of us that our mother kept a notebook of how much allowance you got and what your chores were at each age.
It was all laid out, which cut down (somewhat) on the nagging as well as (somewhat) on the whining.
Baby Blues is in a story arc that I think goes back to the stone age. There’s a familiar old story of the husband and wife changing jobs, common enough to qualify as folktale category #1408. It’s always the husband who screws up, most likely because women were occasionally called upon to help in the fields and so knew the job, even if it wasn’t theirs.
Fortunately, I’m seeing far more sharing of home duties these days, including childcare and cooking. We’re getting to a point where a guy who doesn’t pitch in is indeed as much a fool as the fellow in the folktale who ends up being dragged up the chimney.
Not that everyone is becoming a good, sensible parent. We’ve got people not only refusing to change but backsliding, and this kid is right that we risk a whole new generation of ignorant nitwits.
It’s theoretically a good thing to cut down on the mandates and let people think for themselves, but the operative word there is “think.” You can’t force that.
There was a time when making vaccinations mandatory worked, and maybe it will work in Britain, despite Venables’ misgivings. But here we’re diverting public school funds to support Academies of Alternative Reality for parents who want their kids to be ignorant and unhealthy but don’t want to pay for it.
I’m sympathetic. During the pandemic, some of my favorite rock musicians revealed themselves to be utter nincompoops on the topics of masks and vaccines, and it’s hard to listen to their work without thinking “What a great solo. Too bad he’s an idiot.”
There was a time when producers paid fixers to prevent anyone from knowing that being able to act or play an instrument or whatever was separate from being able to lead an admirable life. Now the stars are free to reveal their gaping flaws to the public.
It’s more honest, of course. But it’s still discouraging.
Regular folks have always been willing to reveal themselves, though I’m less judgmental than Rat. I just feel that more than two bumperstickers is a cry for help.
We’ve all got things to learn. I don’t know where tariffs are going, but I’m well aware that putting in self-check was intended to avoid raising prices, not to cause them to become lower. And even if stores could pay more clerks without raising prices, I don’t know where they’d find them in this job market.
Besides, we generally have longer lines at the self-checks anyway. One of our groceries put in even more stations to handle consumer demand.
Grocery self-checks are user-friendly, but fast-food places seem more devoted to apps, saving money by using a level of tech that seems to assume they’re only serving digital natives.
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