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CSotD: Humpday Co-Respondents

We missed all the speeches the other night — okay, we didn’t miss them, but we didn’t get to hear them — but here’s the speech you should have heard at graduation but didn’t.

I realized halfway through senior year that the campus placement bureau never had anyone there interviewing for Philosopher Kings, and started thinking that we should have had an exchange program with the local tech school, so we could tell them all about Plato and they could teach us how to repair televisions.

Yes, that was my plan. Repairing televisions. A career that would have gotten me through, what, the next five or six years? Which, in this cartoon’s terminology, would have been a reverse fluke.

Speaking of outmoded concepts, here’s a

Juxtaposition of the Obsolete

Remember back when the Saudis dumped a whole lot of money into a new golf league called “LIV” and there erupted a whole bunch of chatter (including here) about “sportswashing” in which a murderous, repressive government spends money to create a friendly distraction?

Well, despite the slogan “Long LIV Golf,” it apparently won’t. “Our mission is to build on and complement the existing format of professional golf and take it to new levels of excitement and engagement with generations of fans,” they said, but I guess they got bored, because they’re pulling their money and wandering off on a new adventure.

I’m not a golfer, but I remember when Whitey and the Golden Jet jumped to the WHA. It must be something like that.

Meanwhile, although I like the Other Coast, it brings up my question of how much cartoonists make, given that they still tell jokes about the part of the airplane where the seats tilt back more than half an inch and they bring you food.

Me, I’m sitting in the cheap seats with this guy:

As long as I’m kvetching, my first take on today’s Moderately Confused would have been completely different if it had been a father talking to his child. As it was, their strolling with his arm around her made me think he had ended up with a lot of jokes and she was one of them.

Which was funnier than Stahler intended, but seemed like a stunning level of self-awareness on her part.

On that topic, here’s an asked-and-answered

Juxtaposition of the Day

Mamet is clearly in favor of the pills on the right, not the pills on the left, but, as Harry Bliss suggests, modern pharmacology makes it your choice.

And I skipped the obligatory hipster reference to red pills and blue pills because, thanks to Dear Leader, we’re apparently going to be able to choose the rainbow. And I don’t mean Skittles.

Trump is also easing up the restrictions on marijuana, but “only for medicinal use,” which was also the exception during Prohibition, hence the joking expression.

The new legality doesn’t apply to recreational marijuana, but while recreational weed is legal in Massachusetts and Vermont, I live in New Hampshire, so I couldn’t possibly know anything about that.

Which prompts me to note that Paul Berge has a good array of Ding Darling Prohibition editorial cartoons here.

Arlo and Janis are up to date, such that while other cartoons still gripe about weather reports that get it wrong, they’re pondering the absurd precision of modern meteorology.

Not that it’s perfect. Our local weather gauges are apparently at the airport, which is on a hilltop and so Alexa, who knows where I live, invariably reports several degrees cooler than it really is, but I’m on a wireless connection, so everyone on my computer thinks I’m 175 miles away in Rhode Island.

Fortunately, the TV station that covers our area from 95 miles away the other direction is stunningly accurate and provides not only what is probably going to happen here but explains the reasons it might not.

Unfortunately, that means you have to pay attention, which is the fatal flaw in all sorts of things.

Speaking of the oddities of a G5 connection and nobody but Alexa knowing where I live, I made the mistake a few years ago, having retired from journalism, of finally registering as a member of a political party, which had been a no-no for the previous half century.

I doubt anyone was unaware of my political preferences, but until then they didn’t have my mailing address, and holy guacamole but how guilty I feel about the additional number of trees that have now been sacrificed to keep me abreast of who’s running for what and why I ought to take a survey.

I am also inundated with on-line political spam, but there nobody seems to know just which New England state I live in, and the ones who tag me as a Granite Stater appear to have done so by dumb luck. And certainly not mine.

I’ve re-registered as an Independent, but apparently too late to get off the mailing lists before the mid-terms.

Hoping for some relief by 2028.

One More Juxtaposition

Listen to Frazz, and even to Mrs. Olson, because the news never stops, it’s always current and when you start thinking of it as history, it whips around and whacks you upside the head.

Mark Twain didn’t write, that “History never repeats itself but it rhymes,” but it’s his own damn fault people think he did, because, like Scott Fitzgerald, he was overfond of witty aphorisms and tended to strew them higgledy-piggledy throughout his works, with the result that there’s no shortage of things either of them might have said.

I prefer Stephen Dedalus’ quote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” which he actually did say despite being a fictional character because moments earler, he privately corrected his principal:

Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? “Put but money in thy purse.

Iago,” Stephen murmured.

Dedalus may have chosen the pills on the left a little too often, but at least he understood the difference between author and character, and the mysterious qualities of time.

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Comments 16

  1. One possible solution for your weather prediction problems would be to enter the location of your TV station into the Weather app on your phone (or tablet). Your precipitation events may arrive 95 miles late, but the temperature display would be more accurate.

    1. Not sure why that would solve anything. As I said, the station is invariably accurate on our weather, but, meanwhile, it’s in another state, so I’d still be spammed with irrelevant ads and invited to shop at distant stores.

  2. “…and take it to new levels of excitement…”

    They’re talking about golf here. Not exactly high bar to raise the excitement level above ennui.

    1. Not a golfer, but I’ve shot pool, I’ve played tennis, I’m not a virgin, and I think there are some pursuits that are more fun to do than to watch someone else do.

  3. I’ve never gotten a flyer from the political party I’m affiliated with, but the Whigs aren’t really active these days.

    1. And when the Republican Party turned into Jacksonian Demoracts I really expected the Whigs to make acome-back.

  4. I’m with Winslow. I can’t even stand CNN or MS Now because it’s DJT 90% of the time. That only drops to about 50% when there’s a major disaster. Saw an item that DJT’s face will appear on new passports. A new reason not to travel. DJT wants to approve the renovation plan (why?) for NYC’s Penn Station and have his name prominently displayed inside and out. 997 days to the end to the DJT regime. First order of business for the next president should be to issue an executive order to cancel all of DJT’s EOs. The second order of business should be to issue another EO to remove DJT’s name and face from every and all documents, buildings, coins, currency, stamps, etc. that he has so ignominiously foisted upon us and this country by the end of his term. He has set the bar so low that it’s now buried underground.

  5. Once your addy is out there you are stuck. Sorry. Hubby is registered with one Party. I am independent. We are in a purple state. Any time an election is close i wind up inundated with materials from BOTH of the major parties.

    1. Same here, but while I get inundated by both parties near elections, my wife gets “please give us money” requests year round in addition to “vote for me” (or “vote against them”) from her party as the elections get near. I don’t get requests for money – I guess the parties figure that would make me more likely to vote against them.

  6. Frazz makes me think of Spaceballs:

    “So when will THEN be NOW?”
    “SOON!”

  7. The weather my wife gets from her iPhone (iWeather?) is often stunningly accurate: when the rain will start, when it will stop and how deep it’ll get, described to the minute. When it works, which is most of the time, it’s very impressive.

    Re: Frazz, I once asked my archaeologist daughter at what age something becomes History and she said that it varies by jurisdiction but the rule of thumb in the business is 50 years. At 49.999 years, an old tin can rusting in the desert is garbage; at 50.001 years it’s an artifact worthy of academic study, documentation and protection.

    1. Another advantage of Apple’s “Weather” app is that the locations entered into it do not result in garbage advertisements in any browser.

    2. It’s like, after 25 years, that rusty tin-can becomes an antique and gets pricey. I’ve seen literal examples.

  8. Re: the old Southern Airways “Nobody is Second Class” ad, my father liked to point out that SA flew almost exclusively DC-9s and other small commuter planes, so of course there wasn’t room to divide them into different classes (you could probably sit in the back and hit someone in the front row with a well-aimed spitball). Still, that ad always got a laugh from my friends and I when the back of the plane turned into an eastern European refugee flight from hell.

  9. The back of the airplane was the fun section. They guys would be smoking and playing grab-ass with the stewardesses. And even small inconveniences caused the captain to open the bar free to all. But then I show my age.

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