CSotD: Resorting to Humor
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Boris sums up a truly wretched week and my morning perusal of the news made me angry enough that I decided maybe we need a second Humpday today.
But the good news, and there is some, is that people don’t seem to be taking it all lying down, as indicated by this series of quotes from a Meidas Touch report on the Slush Fund.
My favorite bit of news from it is this:
Jacob Chansely (QAnon Shaman) told CNN he will not be putting in a claim because he is filing a $40 trillion lawsuit and is representing himself.
Then over at Comic Sands, Jeff Bezos tried to smack down the Mayor of NYC and got caught in a bee hive. There are times when it’s lovely to read the comments.
And, of course, where else would you go for a …
Juxtaposition of the Day
Since I have to be up at 2 am to get this thing ready by 8, I haven’t yet seen the last of Stephen Colbert, but, then again, I don’t think Dear Leader has, either.
Espinoza mocks Trump for attempting to ban comedy (The gummint is investigating another satirist, too) while Blitt offers something akin to the final Calvin & Hobbes, as Colbert flies off to go exploring this magical world.
I did record it, which will make a nice flashback to the days when the boys and I would watch last night’s Letterman over breakfast before I drove them to school. Life was a lot easier to laugh at when all you needed was a few Stupid Pet Tricks, but Colbert upped the game to match the conditions.
Keep laughing. It takes a lot, but we haven’t got time for the train.
Which reference leads us to my back pages:
I’m better at prophecy than at baseball, and Wednesday I said Spud had to be in right field so today we see that I told you so, except for the part about him actually being there.
I played a lot of right field until I quit listening to coaches who told me to choke up and decided instead to hold the bat down at the knob like Norm Cash.
Turned out my batting issues had to do with depth perception, not timing, so the more bat I stuck out there, the better the odds it would collide with the ball. Similarly, playing third base meant I only had to be able to move towards my glove side.
Never listen to grown-ups.
I can laugh at this Buckets despite having worked for a publisher whose sole qualification for the job was having married the owner’s daughter. I can laugh because when he chewed me out over something stupid, I said to myself, “He only gets to do that once,” and when it happened again, I was gone.
Life is short. Don’t waste it listening to nincompoops.
But there is grace in listening to kids. When I was about 11, my dad and I took to the woods on my mission to map a trail from behind our house to the nearby town. I had a compass and we tramped through the woods at my direction, talking about all sorts of things.
What we didn’t talk about was that he was the son and grandson of Gegobic Range iron miners, and an MIT graduate who had done research in taconite processing. I’m pretty sure he knew that using a compass in the vicinity of the world’s largest open-pit magnetite mine was a less-than-precise way of navigating.
We did well to come out only a mile from where I had intended, but the destination was less important than the trip.
By their suits you shall know them.
I don’t have a jump suit, though I do like the comfort of overalls. But Pickles reminded me of when Obama caught hell for wearing a tan suit, and of a day when that was the worst thing the president ever did. And that Obama was, and remains, spiffy.
I’m also old and stuffy enough to think your shoes should go with your suit, and that — in the words of Frank Zappa — “brown shoes don’t make it” with a black or navy suit. They’re fine, even elegant, with brown or, yes, tan, which are, in turn, suits with which you should not wear black shoes.
And she’s wrong: Green can go either way. A woman named “Olive” should know that. (Homer nods. See comments. And, no, not that Homer.)
I even threw together a meme on the topic a few years ago, and, no, a navy tie doesn’t rescue the mismatch. I’m not crazy about wearing loafers with a suit of any color either, though at least he didn’t stick pennies in them.
This is how you know they only looked at the pictures; they never read the Playboy Advisor.
Wit all doo respeck, that’s not math; it’s arithmetic. If it were math, you’d be required to annotate.
I had a teacher who knew all the rules of algebra and geometry, and so you had to show your work and if it didn’t match the book, it was wrong, even if you came to the correct conclusion. I ended up just memorizing proofs and not knowing how any of it worked.
My boys, by contrast, had a teacher who would congratulate them on the right answer but explain why the way they got there was going to trip them up when things became more complex. They actually learned to think mathematically.
Some grownups you should listen to, some you shouldn’t. Roll the dice.
You are not required to agree with Marx and Engels, but you should definitely listen to them, because you might learn something and, to toss off one more pop culture reference, knowledge is good.
My junior high social studies teacher made the point more than once that, while communism was theoretically framed for industrialized nations, its most prominent adherents — China and the Soviet Union — were largely agrarian.
I hadn’t read 1984 or Brave New World yet, so a lot of the nuances escaped me at the time, but I’ve since learned that Follow-the-Leader is a children’s game, not a viable political system, capitalist or communist.
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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