CSotD: Humpday in the Nick of Time
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I don’t know if New York’s lieutenant governor was a Democrat or a Republican in 1920, but here’s a peek into the duties of the office back then. Happy Humpday in the middle of a busy week when I could use a few laughs.
When I was in TV advertising, my sales manager went, not to a financial seminar, but to a tour of a housing development, which is much the same thing except that instead of sitting in a conference room, he got to ride around in a car while the radio kept announcing lot numbers of sites that had been sold. He was much impressed with the sales technique but said that, for all he knew, it was a tape and not actual live-action information. Fortunately, he didn’t try to make us take up a similar approach in sales.
Some years later, when I was a business/consumer reporter, I got a call about a company that promised people a grandfather clock for attending their sales pitch, and it turned out to be cardboard with a super-cheap digital clock on the front. This was back in the days when the attorney general was on the side of the citizens, not the corporations. Perhaps you had to be there.
That might have also been the one where I called their phone company and got their 800 number cut off. I loved bustin’ bad guys.
We used to get phone books in the mail, but then the post office began just stacking them in the lobby so people could take one, but not many people did and finally they disappeared entirely. I’ll bet the post office took a revenue hit over that.
As to giving up your private information, you could get an unlisted number, which I think cost a little more but kept your “data” out of the book and spared you a lot of sales calls, in the days before computerized harassment.
Elder son ran into a phone book sales team. They’d go from city to city, selling ads to local businesses and otherwise sitting in a motel room scarfing down beer and pizza.
This was roughly the same time he came across a young woman selling velvet paintings on the roadside, ‘satiable curiosity being either a hazard or an advantage of having two journalists for parents.
Whether it’s learned or inherited, it gets passed along and, once you get beyond the beatings for childhood curiosity Kipling described, leads to a life of odd and fascinating serendipity.
After all, Kipling also wrote about a journalist encountering the Man Who Would Be King.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Thank goodness sunshine is free, because my arms aren’t long enough to insert coins or, certainly, to swipe a card.
The difference in these two cartoons being that it’s pleasant to gaze at an unspoiled valley, but walking past a panhandler adds to your karmic burden. As the question of our generation goes, how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see?
Speaking of things your kids pick up from you, I was walking down Rue Ste. Catherine in Montreal with my boys and saw a homeless woman sitting against a building with a begging cup. “Tu est faim?” I asked and she nodded, so I went into a nearby Hardee’s and got her a burger, fries and Coke. This was some 30 years ago, but I asked them last night if they remembered. One did, one didn’t, but they agreed that the lesson had been absorbed.
I worry about panhandlers, because we’re running out of people who carry cash anymore. You can fret over what they’ll spend it on, but I think you should worry a lot more about mental illness, drug addiction and other reasons they’re out there.
If you don’t carry cash, you can swipe a card at Hardee’s or write a check to Doctors Without Borders. Or do both.
Speaking of keeping your soul clean, I heartily approve this shrink’s advice. I see cartoonists online who not only put up with trolls in their comments, but even publicize the crank messages they get. Like this fictional basketball player, they’re obsessing over garbage.
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest ye be like him, and there’s also something in the Bible about shaking the dust of inhospitable places from your sandals. The world is full of hassles you can’t avoid; block what you can.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
I read a review of the Odyssey in which the writer described the reunion of Odysseus and his dog, Argo, by saying that the old dog lowered his ears, and I knew exactly the expression he meant. It doesn’t take much to learn to read dogs, because they combine facial expressions and body language, and, if they don’t have a lot of complex thoughts, they are very articulate in expressing the emotions they do feel.
Like human kids, they respond in ways that often reflect how they’re treated, but there’s also instinct involved. My ridgebacks — I’ve had half a dozen — have invariably adored small children, though they never lived with any. But they’ve been happy to be climbed on and dressed up and mauled by youngsters in ways they wouldn’t normally want to be treated.
There was a nursing home that brought in some therapy dogs, and a cocker spaniel climbed up on the lap of an old fellow who remarked “I had a dog.” The attendants were astonished, because he was aphasic and had not spoken a word in all the months he’d been there.
That’ll get you a head tilt.
Different kind of head tilt for this one. There have been a lot of cartoons about explosive diarrhea, which doesn’t surprise me, given the age-old connection between bodily functions and humor, but this one puzzled me, because the contaminated lettuce is grown on the other side of that wall.
And here’s the other part of that headline, which clarifies things a bit.
We’ll close with what this cartoon surely pinged in every Stan Freberg fan who saw it.
(Don’t let unqualified critics get to you!)
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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