CSotD: Tuesday Miscellany
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Largely unrelated cartoons today as I clean out my cache, starting with a colorful Odyssey piece by Hajjaj. I’m about done with Odyssey references but that doesn’t mean a particularly apt piece won’t still catch my eye.
A cartoonist would have to come up with something astoundingly brilliant for yet another Wooden Horse cartoon to appeal to me, but that reminds me that I should apologize for having stated that the Horse doesn’t appear in either of Homer’s epics. I’m reading Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey and found that the Phaeacian harper did mention it, somewhat in passing.
Wilson’s translation is worth your time. It’s the version upon which the movie was based, although so loosely that she’s criticized Christopher Nolan for missing the point, though she does concede that his film’s good fun anyway.
As for Hajjaj’s take, I’d say it suggests he’s actually read the Odyssey and I enjoyed following his modern commuter home through the updated hazards of the trip. The epic has some serious thought behind it, but it’s also fun and exciting, which is why people still read it nearly 3,000 years later.
My first exposure to Homer, and to mythology in general, was Padraig Colum’s children’s versions, and I like that the MacMillan Company referred to it as being “presented by Willy Pogany” rather than just illustrated by him, because Pogany’s work very much stuck in my tiny head at six or so when the book was being read to me.
There have been several dire predictions from economists and market analysts of a coming collapse of the growing AI industry and Katauskas puts it into a cartoon format: It’s certainly growing and, as she says, producing vast quantities of slop, but not necessarily in a way that repays anybody’s investment.
There are valid uses for AI, and maybe, if we’re lucky, it will narrow down to those things, but at the moment it’s everywhere. I was trying to do some online shopping the other day and an AI shopping assistant popped up, obscuring a third of the screen and asking me how it could help. It was like going into a store on a whim but having some pushy sales clerk suddenly attached to your side, because there was no little X to click on that would make the damn thing disappear.
As for the economics, I’m not sure it’s all going to crash, because the point of vulture capitalism is to swap stock, not to produce anything in particular. As long as there’s somebody who thinks they can make money, you’ll be able to sell out when you realize it’s a money pit, and while individuals will be ruined along the way, it could self-perpetuate for some time.
Though it would be nice for the rest of the economy if they’d do their swapping in crypto. Artificial intelligence should be financed with artificial money, don’t you think?
Ramirez blames the wildfires in Europe on their devotion to ecology, and I guess the fact that only the Finns spend their weekends raking the forests. Or something.
It’s hard to figure out his point, because we’ve got wildfires in a couple of Western states here, and some of them are blue and some are red and I don’t see a pattern between where the fires break out and who is sitting in the governor’s office. Meanwhile, Canada is a very large country in which most of the people live along its southern border. A lot of what’s left is wilderness and I promise you there’s far too much of it to rake. Or to not rake. Or whatever the solution is supposed to be.
Dear Leader seems to think that imposing tariffs on Canada will cause them to stop having wildfires, or at least will incentivize them to stop letting prevailing winds cross the international border, but I don’t know. Dropping out of the Paris Accords doesn’t seem to have kept our own forests from burning.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Speaking of Dear Leader, he reportedly napped through some of the speeches at yesterday’s press conference in which he and RFK Jr and some other administration types announced new policies on children’s vaccinations.
Doctors contacted for responses were against the idea of breaking up the MMR shot into three separate shots for measles, mumps and rubella, in part because the idea that the combined vaccine is dangerous is nonsense, and in part because it means three visits, which will cost parents more and subject kids to more needles.
That was hardly the only misinformation being peddled at the news conference, and experts were also gobsmacked that Trump and Kennedy continued to flog the long-refuted theory that vaccines can cause autism.
Despite the number of times the alleged autism connection has been disproven, you’ll never convince the True Believers, and it’s now harder because the bogus information has become official government policy.
Still, you would think the president would be laughed out of the room over his claim — and I am not making this up — “I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination where it looks like the size of a bottle of soda, poured into a little child’s body.”
First of all, any parent who had been in the room when their child got vaccinated would have noticed a hypodermic needle that held 12 ounces, and, second, that quantity of anything takes nearly three hours to infuse with a drip.
But I reckon he could shoot somebody up with a 12-ounce vaccine in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. The whole world is watching, and Herbert may snicker from 9,764 miles away in Sidney …
…but Britain is closer, and with a war already in progress in Europe and another rumored to be in the making, Banx can only hope these generals are correct and that the US doesn’t have enough weaponry left to undertake any more international mischief.
Though as Herbert suggests, he may be building up enough enemies right here in his own country. We’ll find out November 3, and the turnout will tell us as much as about ourselves and our futures as we’ll learn from the final votes.
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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