CSotD: Humor, Now With Extra Kvetching
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There was a time, back before lattes and such were a thing, when Dunkin’ Donuts had the best coffee. Later, McDonald’s caught up, mostly I think because they told franchisees not to keep pouring the old stuff back into the fresh carafes.
Now, as Siegel points out, you can overpay for all sorts of fancy brews, but IMHO it seems hard to find a regular cuppa joe at a reasonable price, and my question is, has Dunkin’ Donuts coffee gone downhill, or are we just spoiled by the expensive stuff?
Though back in my reporter/editor days, I got a call from a guy who had put his son’s sneakers on the table, next to a large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, before bed. Overnight, the lithium battery in one of the blinking shoes decided to burn down the house, but the fire melted the foam cup and the coffee extinguished the blaze.
So DD coffee may not taste as good as it used to, but it still works as a fire extinguisher.
A cynical take from Deflocked, for which I’d like to see a little documentation. Our co-op has a round-up program that’s given about a million dollars to local non-profits.
Though I’ve seen people buy $14.13 worth of groceries and round up to $15, while others spend $143.98 and won’t part with those two cents. If you ask some people to drop a dime into a bucket, they’ll find all sorts of reasons they just can’t.
The usual excuse for not rounding up is that the store will get a tax break for it, which is not true, but miserly people don’t require real excuses.
And here’s one of those people who won’t round up those two cents.
Tom Toro spurs a grim memory. I was coming back from a conference a few years ago and there was Keith Knight in the boarding lounge, so we sat and chatted and then ended up sitting together on the plane.
Which would have been great, except that some jackass had tried to ram an oversized bag into the bin and it got jammed. They couldn’t take off with the bin open, nor could they get the bag out, so they had to call in the mechanics.
Who took over an hour to show up, then got the bag out in 15 seconds, but by that time Keith and I had run out of things to talk about and if you’ve met either of us you know how surprising that is. However, we just sat and read and worried about making our next connections.
I wrote a children’s series of mythological stories we called “Tales of Ancient Rome,” and I got a frantic call from a paper in Massachusetts that was running it, because they had a furious Greek reader picketing the building and threatening to lead a boycott, and he’d called in the local Orthodox priest as an ally.
Seems we’d observed in the teaching guide that the Romans had borrowed their myths from the Greeks, but it didn’t say so in the stories as they appeared in the paper. And two weeks later, I got a similar call from the New York Daily News for the same reason.
So we changed the name of the series to “Tales of the Ancient World.” Didn’t change the Latin names back to the Greek names, but apparently that didn’t matter. However, I am puzzled and a little jealous that nobody seems to have weighed in on the non-Hellenic casting of the movie. (Yet.)
Here’s another “You laugh, but …” cartoon. The New College in Sarasota was taken over a few years ago, at the behest of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and recast itself as a right-wing bastion. This upset a number of alumni who had graduated from it when it was a place of open inquiry, and they’ve been saying so.
So the school is in the process of disbanding its alumni association, in order to encourage “meaningful alumni participation, lifelong learning, student engagement, philanthropy, and community building, while strengthening coordination between alumni leaders and Foundation staff in support of the college’s mission.”
Maybe I spent too many years translating corporate bafflegab, or maybe I’m reacting to having turned away from my own alma mater when it took a slitch to the right, but I find this hilarious. At least my school didn’t veer so far from its previous mission that it had to ditch its alumni association to find a little peace.
The New School is officially designated Florida’s “residential liberal arts honors college,” and unofficially designated as a place young people apparently go to learn how to STFU and obey. Who’da thunk it?
It is not necessary for AI to post false praise of itself. A study at Columbia indicated that a lot of people prefer AI-written fiction to the human kind. This article has some explanations of why that might be, but I have my own theory, which is that, as Theodore Sturgeon observed nearly 70 years ago, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
Always has been, and, in Ulysses, which was not crap, Molly Bloom was an avid fan of the work of Paul de Cock, which was best-selling crap, as was the famously bad writing of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Publishers like books that sell, and they aren’t concerned with literary quality.
There is also a tendency to praise what is praised, and while I’d like to have been a fly on the wall at Flaubert’s salon, I think most book clubs and writers’ groups tend to confirm rather than innovate, and that MFA programs focus on proven style. Every once in a while someone comes up with A Confederacy of Dunces or The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, but such books are published almost by accident.
If we’d had AI a century ago, it would have been trained on de Cock and Bulwer-Lytton and you’d be hard-pressed to tell the AI versions from the real thing, but I think feeding it Ulysses or At Swim Two Birds might have caused it to break down.
One trend I’ve been seeing online is AI analysis of songs. Here’s an illiterate, soulless examination of a very human song.
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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