CSotD: Start the Weekend with a Laugh
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It’s true and it could trigger a whole rant, but instead let’s put aside the bad vibes for a day and have a few laughs.
You can decide for yourself whether this is bad vibes or a laugh, but IMHO it’s only funny when everything else in the relationship is working. Which is true of all sorts of things: If it’s working, you write it off as a quirk and it makes you smile, but once things have gone aground, it goes on the list of complaints.
So that was a mini-rant. Sorry. But let me get ranting out of my system with this
Juxtaposition of the Day
This is why you should record everything you’re planning to watch: So you can fast-forward through the ads. I’m not against ads in general: We’re ad-supported here and there was a time I sold (and produced) local TV ads, but the window-installers and bathroom re-finishers are pushing it with their little 120-second infomercials.
However, when they’re done right, advertisements are a reasonable alternative to charging subscriptions, and I’m far more annoyed to see more and more things going behind paywalls.
I’ve run this Dorman Smith cartoon before, but it’s relevant because radio started out as a hobby for tech nerds who had to assemble their own receivers, then morphed into a major medium and, in the 1920s, the question arose of how to pay for it. As Smith’s young radio buff says, totally free radio was too good to last.
The British went for licensing, which is under serious review these days, but David Sarnoff, founder of RCA and NBC, felt that the poor deserved to enjoy radio and the answer was advertising.
You may not be old enough to remember those days, but you may be old enough to remember when broadcasters ran public service announcements warning against “Pay TV,” roughly along Sarnoff’s philosophy. But now we’re paying for Internet access and we’re also expected to pay for Netflix and Hulu and Paramount-Plus and on and on and on.
It’s all voluntary, of course, and so is reading newspapers and magazines, more and more of which are erecting paywalls. I was present for that discussion and felt giving away the product was stupid, but it’s even more stupid to have built a massive system based on free access and then change your mind and decide to charge after all.
As with gasoline and housing costs, the folks making the decisions aren’t the folks struggling to get by. Mister we could use a man like David Sarnoff again. (And he was no angel.)
Okay, that was a full-bore rant. Back to the humor.
Pause here for a moment of kindness, and an observation that Rory is usually the center of some kind of uproar and it’s an interesting break in the flow to see him just being a nice guy. Comic strip characters seem generally to be one-dimensional: The smart guy, the dumb guy, the wise ass, etc., but Rory doesn’t so much break character as he demonstrates different sides of himself.
Simple art. Good writing.
Just a little mini-rant here, because the Department of Unwanted Safety has screwed up swings since the nostalgic days in which Red & Rover is set. You don’t see them on nice, flexible ropes anymore, and instead of boards, they have slings that make it painful to wind them up and difficult to bail out of.
I spent the summer I was eight flying either a P-38 or a P-51 Mustang into battle on a daily basis, and frequently getting shot down and having to bail out. Not only was it a lot of fun, but it was educational, because Bobby and Keith and I spent a good deal of time looking up airplanes in Jane’s, which honed our research skills.
We also spent a whole lot of time thinking great thoughts. That summer would have been just before 4th grade, which is a swell time, because you’re just old enough to start to understand things, but still young enough that it’s all brand new.
It helped that, in 4th grade, I had the best teacher I ever encountered at any level of schooling. She had taught in a one-room school and knew how to reach any kid of any age or ability, and she brought things like wool carders and candle molds to class so we could hold in our hands the things we were reading about. She even brought in Chinese finger traps to demonstrate how indigenous Brazilian women squeezed the toxic juices out of manioc. (You’ll note I still remember, nearly 70 years later.)
Hadn’t thought about pullback cars in a long time, but we sure had them, granted in a much smaller size than this. Which is good, compared to the big toy cars the folks in Atlanta have to put up with.
I, too, spent a good deal of time reading the backs of cereal boxes, but that was back when cereal companies made the boxes more interesting. Sometimes it was just descriptions of the stuff you could send for, but there were often more elaborate things to read.
There were also jelly jars with presidents’ pictures and a quote that, once empty, became milk glasses. That was how I learned that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and lived at Monticello.
Even before the Sputnik launch touched off educational panic, it seemed like everybody was determined to fill our empty little heads.
I don’t know if Sipress was aware that the Rolling Stones were about to release another album, but he’s right that they’re kind of scary in their old age. Granted, I’m a Brian Jones loyalist and consider the band to have broken up halfway through Let It Bleed (apparently a minority opinion).
They’ve just put out a single in which they employed AI to make themselves look young again, though it wasn’t able to bring Bill out of retirement or resurrect Brian and Charlie.
They didn’t have to de-age the women in the video, however, but that’s no hanging matter. That’s no capital crime.
Or so they assured us.
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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