CSotD: Silly Things Not About Algae
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A commenter responded to my recent complaint about Facebook postings of vacation photos by saying “On Facebook, everybody who is going on a vacation gets snoozed by me for 30 days.”
This is such an excellent idea that I’ve begun doing it myself, and this Flying McCoys happens to have appeared just in time to serve as reinforcement for the decision.
To combine the two topics, I used to see framed photos of exotic vacation locales at doctors’ offices, which always made me glad to see that someone wasn’t wasting all their money on rent and groceries the way I was, but I haven’t recently. Somebody in hospital administration may have sent out a “Guys, no …” memo.
I wonder how old you have to be to have ever seen a test pattern, which used to come on the air when the station was about to sign on in the morning, a vestige of ancient days when stations signed off at night.
They’d also pop up when something went wrong during the broadcast day, but once stations switched entirely to broadcasting in color, they used color bars instead of test patterns.
As for the gag itself, which I like, my practical, experienced side says that most broadcasters maintain a seven-second delay so that they can bleep untoward expressions, though that only works if everybody doesn’t sit there for nine seconds thinking, “Did he just say that?”
Tank is currently making fun of celebrity shots in NBA coverage, which I don’t watch, but I’ve seen the same thing in World Cup coverage, futbol being even more of a constant-flow sport than basketball. It’s good to know that Hollywood stars can afford skybox seats at the World Cup but every second of celebrity sightings is a second of missing what I tuned in to see.
I got annoyed with the fanboy chit-chat of the announcers on the Argentina-Austria game and switched over to Telemundo, where most of the dialogue was about who’s got the pelota now, which you don’t need to speak Spanish to understand.
But a bonus was that that only celebrity they showed was Shakira, and only twice. The rest of the time, for some reason, they showed the game.
Randal Munroe is obviously watching the games, too. The other thing I didn’t see on Telemundo’s coverage was graphs of who has had momentum for how long over the course of the game, which is a completely useless statistic, and he’s only exaggerating the level of meaningless, intrusive trivia slightly.
It’s called “The Beautiful Game” and analyzing beauty invariably diminishes it. A rose is a rose is a rose, and a pass can be as beautiful as a goal, and, as is said of jazz, if I have to explain it, you’re never gonna get it.
Though on Telemundo, they do shout “Gooooooooaaaaalllll!” which is fun.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Still on the topic of sports, Adam is shocked that his son has so little awareness of the concept. My parenting was in pre-electronic days and my boys spent hours outside playing a variety of sports-based games, and I say “sports-based” because they had variations like “500” which consisted of throwing a football in the air and shouting a score that whoever caught it would earn. It seemed entirely random to me, but they didn’t seem to care, which was okay. It’s just a game.
Any number could play, which was necessary because so many kids were in after-school programs that you couldn’t get an actual game of baseball or football together.
Which brings us to Grand Avenue and a reminder of the evenings when we’d get massive groups of kids together to play Spud and Sardines and suchlike, all of them games with rules but none of them involving adults and referees and uniforms, though looking for those rules means running into websites that overexplain and even ascribe sociological values to what in our days was just fun.
And those same over-explaining people would likely be horrified to think of a bunch of kids out playing all over the neighborhood with no supervision, especially after sundown.
Don’t blame electronics for every lost element of childhood.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Both cartoons get a laugh by having the parent actually, purposely teach their kids things they ought not to but most certainly, unintentionally do.
Kids don’t pay a lot of attention to driving until they start closing in on getting a license, at which point you become really conscious of the lousy example you set. At least you ought to.
We all know that the police won’t often write a ticket for someone going five or ten mph over the limit, and we all suspect that speed limits are set slightly below safe speeds because they know nobody’s going to actually drive the posted speed. Except the car in front of you, which is careful to take their speed down five or 10 mph just to be extra safe.
And your kid will hear you cursing that road hog, so stifle yourself.
I did a ridealong with a NYS Trooper on the Interstate one time and we just parked in the median and watched drivers come up over the hill, see us and fishtail as they scaled down in a vain attempt to pretend they’d been going the speed limit. He said he didn’t need to clock them because it was so obvious, but that he mostly clocked and stopped the ones who didn’t notice him there, more for inattention than for speed.
As for electronics while driving, I do find it amusing if not funny that we have laws against being on your phone while driving but then have dashboards that light up with exciting, distracting displays. But only darkly amusing that a Trooper in Maine stopped a woman going 110 mph and discovered that she had a laptop open on the passenger seat and had been watching an episode of the Gilmore Girls.
You should maintain some discipline behind the wheel. I was once on Storrow Drive in Boston when this came on my player. It fit the pace perfectly, but maybe that’s not an ideal situation:
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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