CSotD: Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera
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Etcetera Days are when I feature interesting political cartoons that don’t spark a full-throated rant.
Today’s headline is a catch-phrase Yul Brynner had in The King and I, and while he and Deborah Kerr (and Marnie Nixon) did wonderful work in the movie, I would have thought there wouldn’t be much contemporary interest in the story of a proper British woman bringing civilization to the benighted people of Thailand.
Apparently, I would have thought wrong. It’s been remade as recently as 2018 and there’s another version in development.
All I’ve got to say is that Anna Leonowens must have done a good job back in 1860, since the Thais that I’ve met seemed perfectly well enlightened.
The outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship, with three deaths thus far, has been in the news, and the more we learn the worse it becomes. Chappatte notes that the cruise was for birdwatchers and had included some exotic locales.
This matters because hantaviruses are generally spread by rodent droppings, which doesn’t mean the ship was unclean but that passengers were getting off and poking around in all sorts of places.
Including some place where they apparently caught the Andes variety, which is the only hantavirus that can be spread from person to person, so now health experts are tracking down passengers who have already left the ship, to find out who they’ve been in contact with.
This could get nasty.
I was going to give yesterday’s Rubes a Wretched Timing Award, but I notice this is a rerun from 2015, and while they couldn’t have known the new plague was about to hit, surely someone must have thought twice about it, given the roughly seven million who died in 2020’s covid pandemic.
Buss makes a more pointed, updated observation, and, to adapt a line from Airplane, looks like we picked the wrong time to quit the WHO and hire a quack to run Health and Human Services.
I’d make an ivermectin joke, but the lunatics beat me to it.
Smith connects the price of gas with the price of ballrooms. As noted here yesterday, the one billion Congress has approved is only for the security additions, not the ballroom itself, but people are still complaining that they didn’t want the ballroom at all, so spending money on what’s under it seems like part of the grift.
However, if Dear Leader can claw back money destined for foreign aid, public broadcasting and other non-MAGA causes, a new Congress could cancel money apportioned for the ballroom bunker. Assuming enough people show up at the polls this November.
And if they don’t, maybe we deserve the consequences.
Though the rest of the world would appreciate our getting our act together, since we don’t exist on an island unto itself.
I’ve seen enough artistic variations on the Strait of Hormuz that I’ve become numb to them, but Turner not only imposes a pair of arm-wrestlers, one with a Crusader Cross tattoo that not only compounds the insult to Middle Eastern Islamic nations, but can be found on Pete Hegseth’s chest.
And the marginal comment at bottom right is dry and dark enough that it could only come from an Irishman. Oh, tá cinnte!
Meanwhile, Bish borrows a familiar scene to describe Dear Leader’s state of paused-panic. Like the coyote, he realizes he’s about to fall, but he’s still hoping against hope that the inevitable will somehow become, um, evitable.
In an interview on Greg Sargent’s podcast, Paul Krugman connected Trump’s refusal to admit he’s bitten off more than he can chew in Iran with his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 election. The whole conversation is well worth a listen, but that piece of insight is golden: Trump cannot ever lose, so it’s a “hoax” if it appears he has.
Like Wile E. Coyote, after every disaster, he just comes back for more.
There have been many cartoons about the death of Ted Turner, too many featuring clouds and/or Pearly Gates, but Wexler goes for a basic less-is-more tribute.
My connections are distant. Back in 1976, when I was in television, one of our engineers decamped for Atlanta because there was a guy down there putting together something really exciting.
And he did, because in 2003, I found myself holding the phone up to the TV so my son and his roommates at Boston University could know what was happening with the invasion of Iraq. CNN wasn’t yet on the campus’s cable system, and the ABC/CBS/NBC coverage wasn’t measuring up.
Well, 87 is old enough to check out, and the timing means he didn’t have the indignity of watching his network turn to crap. Which it sure seems about to.
In lieu of a musical selection
There was some discussion the other day of the difference between folk tales in general and fairy tales in particular. It’s not complicated: Fairy tales include fairies.
Here’s an old English fairy tale I retold for young readers back in 2005, with an illustration by Marina Tay, aka Rinacat, whom I met through her work on Sabrina.
The Tulip Nursery
In a little thatched cottage at the very edge of a small village there lived a little old lady, all alone.
Her husband had died years ago and they never had any children, and so she tended her vegetable garden and a small flock of chickens by herself, and was happy enough most of the day, though sometimes, at night, she grew a bit lonely.
She was a good gardener and had quite a large vegetable patch that kept her in fresh greens throughout the summer and furnished her with potatoes and parsnips and cabbages enough to last through the winter.
But her real joy was in the flower bed that lay at the side of the cottage just beneath her bedroom window. She especially loved the tall, bright tulips that came up each year.
One warm summer evening when the moon was just about to be full, the little old lady finished her supper, cleaned up her tiny kitchen and then went off to say her prayers and go to bed.
She blew out her lamp and climbed into bed as she did each night, then lay quietly looking at the shaft of moonlight that came in through the open window and thinking about her day, and about the days long ago when she was young and used to look at the moonlight on her blankets before she went to sleep. And then she heard something.
It sounded like a baby giggling, far away, and then another, and another, soft and faint.
Now, there are many animals that can sound in the night like a baby crying, but there aren’t any animals that sound like a baby giggling in the night. The little old lady listened to the sound and wondered who was out in the night with babies, and why they were laughing so.
Gradually, the sounds died away and a new sound came to her: the sound of singing,soft and sweet.
The next day, as she worked in her garden, she thought about those giggles, and the soft songs, and she smiled to herself at the memory. Whoever they were, she thought, they had probably moved on now, though she hadn’t seen any caravans come through the village.
But that night, as she lay down to go to sleep, she heard again the quiet sounds of babies giggling, and then the sound of soft, sweet song, and this time she noticed that the singing began just before the giggling ended, and so she knew that, wherever they were, these mothers were softly singing their happy babies to sleep.
The little old lady sat up on the edge of her bed and looked out the window. In the moonlight, she could see the meadow that went from her cottage down to the river, and she could see the dark trees of the forest beyond.
Perhaps a band of travelers had stopped for the night in the woods, she thought. She looked to find a glow from their fires, through the trees or perhaps reflected from the leaves at the top of the forest. But the only light came from the moon.
She lay back down in her bed, listening to the soft, sweet singing, and soon she fell asleep.
The next night, she sat up on the edge of her bed again and looked across at the forest, but, just as on the night before, there was no glow from fires.
Then, as she sat listening, she realized that the sound was not coming from the forest. She put her head closer to the window. Yes! The soft sound was not distant at all, but came from the flower bed just below.
The little old lady knew better than to put her head out and look. She quietly lay back down and listened to the singing until she fell asleep, and again she awoke with a smile at the memory of those sweet songs.
But the next night, instead of going to bed, she quietly stole out the front door of her cottage and crept up to the corner closest to the flower bed, then slowly peeked around. There she saw the tulips swaying back and forth in the moonlight, although there was no breeze to move them, and soon she heard, coming from inside the tulips, the sound of babies giggling.
And as the moon came out, she saw the tiny fairy mothers, rocking the tulips back and forth as their babies giggled with joy. Then the mothers began to sing sweet lullabies, and to rock the tulips more gently and slowly, until the giggling stopped and their little babies were all fast asleep.
The little old lady quietly crept back into her cottage and went to bed and never again tried to see the fairies, for she knew that, if they found her looking at them, they would leave forever.
Instead, from then on, she simply lay in bed each night from spring to fall, enjoying the sounds of the happy babies and their sweet mothers, and then let those sounds keep a smile on her face all the day after, and all through the long winter besides.
In the village, everyone knew what a fine garden the little old lady kept, but soon they began to remark upon her flower garden, and particularly her tulips, for each spring it seemed they bloomed sooner than they had the year before, and each fall they held their blossoms longer than any other tulips in the village, and each year they grew brighter and taller than ever.
Mortals do not live forever, of course, and after many years the little old lady died and was buried in the village churchyard next to her husband.
Her cottage was sold to a man who didn’t care for flowers. He guessed the soil there must be fertile indeed, however, so he dug up all the tulip bulbs and planted herbs instead, hoping to sell them in the market in town.
But nothing ever grew there again, once the tulips were gone.
Text c. 2005, Mike Peterson — Illustration c. 2005, Marina Tay
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