CSotD: Laughing While The Sluggards Catch Up
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I was going to do politics today, but all the day-late Kristi Noem cartoons are flooding the zone, so we’ll have humor instead. Keyes wanders lonely as a clod, his flag to April’s breeze unfurled, and this is the first morning I’ve had to turn off the space heater because it was getting too warm in here.
I’ve seen the field Wordsworth wrote of, but daffodils weren’t blooming at the moment. I’ve since read that you wouldn’t need a computer flower dating site to publicize the place and that sentimental tourists have been planting the wrong flowers there.
Turns out that the wild daffodils Wordsworth saw in 1802 are quite different from the modern hybrid strain, the planting of which on that site annoys purists though boy howdy not as much as criticizing the hybrids annoys this lady.
Anyway, tourists are pretty much the same everywhere, I guess. The Lake Country gets them in the spring and we in Leaf Country get them in the fall.
Going the opposite direction, here’s a pair of marsupials thought to have been extinct for several thousand years before Wordsworth went for a walk, though he’d have had to wander lonely all the way to New Guinea to have seen them anyway. And then tourists would have started releasing regular American possums there in a misguided tribute of some sort.
Probably best to keep Wordsworth where and when he belongs.
There aren’t any penguins in New Guinea, as far as I know, though I didn’t know there were extinct possums there, either. But Pete the Penguin was discovered in Antarctica about the time Dear Leader announced a tariff on them and he’s been assisting with international relations ever since.
And here’s a barb tossed at Bari Weiss and her new, improved network by Glenn McCoy, of all people. Back in his political cartooning days, I’d have expected him to be delighted to see Fox 2 springing up on TV, but perhaps I misjudged him.
Or possibly even conservatives prefer their news straight up. I read the other day that when the major networks, including even Fox and Newsmax, led their evening broadcasts with the Supreme Court’s decision on tariffs, CBS put the approaching snow storm up front.
Granted, the Nor’easter socked the coast from New Jersey to Maine pretty hard, but we’re less than 200 miles from the ocean and we barely noticed it. Maybe Bari needs a map, because the tariffs reached a lot more Americans than the snow did.
Speaking of weather, and the other coast for that matter, I got a laugh out of this, and I also note that my granddaughter in Minnesota reports the first thunderstorm of the season.
She’s got ferrets, and I have no idea how they respond to loud booms, but when we get thunder or fireworks, my dog just looks over at me to see if I’m freaking out and then follows suit. Of the dozen or so dogs I’ve had over the years, only one of them really hated thunder and fortunately he had the good sense to really hate it in the kitchen, which made it much easier to clean up.
One more nature piece: Back when my kids were little, we always stopped to see the naked mole rats at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, in a display that was like an ant farm, with one side of their enclosure a glass plate behind which you could see them running around in their tunnels.
Looks like they’ve expanded a bit since those days, both in space and in explanations.
The attraction is in their weirdness, which I’m sure is what got them their own Oatmeal episode. The best part about the Oatmeal is that he doesn’t have to invent facts in order to come up with weirdness, and, unlike xkcd, which also exalts well-reasoned, well-researched oddities, you don’t have to be good at math to get the jokes.
So go have a look at the naked mole rats — which sounds perverse, doesn’t it? — but come back here afterwards because I’ve still got some entertaining things to share, including a killer double-header at the end.
I understand that on-line recipes are trying to keep you engaged longer for financial reasons, though I’m not sure they wouldn’t do just as well selling you spices — which they also do — and I’ve noticed more and more of them including a “jump to recipe” button, which I would think defeats the purpose of that long cockamamie story.
However, the one good thing I can say about AI is that, as part of its campaign to destroy search engines, it includes enough information at the top to help if you only wanted to know how long and at what temperature you should roast turkey thighs, and didn’t want to read all about somebody’s grandmother to find out.
Though I’d warn you that using it for any more complex search is risky, since artificial intelligence is not as reliable as the real kind and I’ve seen some really stupid factoids trotted out at the top of a search.
GIGO continues to rule the Intertubes.
And this historic note: Norman Mailer invented the word “factoid” in 1973 as a term meaning something that wasn’t true but that people thought was true because they saw it so often in places they trusted. Somehow it metabolized itself and became something that is true but trivial. Like its origins.
I’ve got a note from Mailer somewhere, which I hope I don’t accidentally toss out in the decluttering process that currently has me getting rid of all my cookbooks because it’s quicker to look up recipes on-line, if you hit that “jump to recipe” button or just scroll past the nonsense.
I’m keeping the Polish cookbook, though, because it’s got recipes I wouldn’t have thought of and couldn’t spell even if I did.
I’m certainly not as much against harmonicas as Rat, but he’s right: I can’t think of a Dylan song that was enhanced by his harmonica.
Though, to be fair, I gotta say Eric Clapton did pretty well at finding guys who could play the thing.
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