CSotD: Cartoon Carnival
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I’m not sure there are any nurses these days who still tell kids a shot isn’t going to hurt. I know my son the nurse is quite honest about it, explaining that, yes, it’s going to hurt, but only for a minute and it’s really important.
I also know that when I told him about a friend who ran a critical care unit in a pediatric hospital, he didn’t want to approach the guy for a job because while he enjoyed working with kids, he didn’t like having to deal with their parents. That’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to admit, but he’d had enough experiences with people who introduced anxiety in their kids and sometimes directly interfered with treatment.
Which squares with my journalistic suspicion that, when a photographer is assigned to cover a vaccination clinic, there are a lot of editors who don’t want a picture of a kid maybe wincing a little. The assignment is to get a screamer. This helps spread the impression that shots hurt a lot and you should be terrified, and my other suspicion is that a lot of screamers have been prepped by parents who assure them that they shouldn’t be scared although Mommy and Daddy certainly would be.
My own attitude towards parenting says kids are okay until somebody messes them up and yes I know there are exceptions. Anyone with more than one kid knows that.
But lying to them doesn’t help. It’s gonna hurt, but not too much, and it matters, regardless of what the screwball heading Health and Human Services may tell you.
Case in point is my current dog, who doesn’t like going to the vet, which my previous dogs have mostly loved. I say “mostly” because I did have one who buried his head in my armpit while he was being examined. But, as with kids, however they feel about it varies greatly and so isn’t necessarily a result of my input and attitude.
Most breeds are predictable, though individuals vary, so genetics matter but are only one factor. The problem for adopters is that the dog has become a member of the family before you get the DNA results back, by which time you’ve probably figured things out anyway.
BTW, that’s not where dogs wear their name tags.
I wrestled (very badly) in high school, which adds to my puzzlement over the appeal of professional wrestling. It’s clearly not a real sport, or at least no more of a sport than gymnastics, in which every move is also pre-planned. The puzzling part is trying to figure out what fans think they’re watching, but, then again, I’ve seen what else they watch on TV and I’ve also seen who they vote for. Mysteries abound.
If you ask a pro wrestler if the matches are fixed, his response will be that he could hurt you, which no doubt he could, given his size and physical conditioning. But I like the premise here which is that they live in a universe in which everything is bogus.
Ah, don’t we all?
Brewster Rockit doesn’t pretend to take place in a real universe, but its humor comes from applying real-world behavior to a fantasy setting. This sequence ran before questions were raised in public about the dangers of AI, but I think it captures the response to danger.
Facebook is filled with videos of morons being tossed around by bison, and you’d think all those on-line examples would teach people not to try to pet the fuzzy cows or take selfies with them, but you’d be wrong.
Prickly City is more of a political cartoon than a humor strip, and it was originally sold as a balance piece to Doonesbury. But Doonesbury is in reruns and Prickly City, under Marshall Ramsay, has gotten off its high horse. It tends to go for the Will Rogers-style plain-folks philosophy, but Will Rogers was very popular.
Still, it’s less about analysis than about loyalties. People watch politics the same way they watch pro-wrestling, as a stylized play in which good people and bad people meet, and you’re supposed to boo the villains and cheer for the heroes, however you differentiate them, and whatever they do.
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
Depending on who you ask. We’ve got people who believe in Jewish Space Lasers and toxic chemtrails, which would qualify as “doing something” about the weather if it were not a delusional combination of scientific ignorance and totally bat-guano paranoid lunacy.
We’re not that far from party-based meteorology, though, these days, if a station broadcast the Democratic weather prediction, they might expect a visit from the FCC.
We need fair and balanced weather predictions to match our fair and balanced news coverage.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy, but, on the other hand, it’s government policy to hear from the heroes and bar the villains from being allowed to report fake news.
This is funny, but, on the other hand, it does seem like a lot of political dissenters are leaving the hidebound news organizations and setting up their own Substacks and other online forums. There is a sort of samizdat world of independent reporting and opinionating happening.
It seems as if the nightly network news has become a way to catch up on things you heard about three days ago in far more detail, but you do have to curate your collection, since it’s all out there from every point of view.
But keep an eye on the networks, since Dear Leader has decided to stop handing out officially approved statements to certain news organizations, which will force them to either kowtow and beg forgiveness or else to rely on leaks and shoe leather to find out what’s going on.
This could turn out to be extremely interesting for our democracy.
I hadn’t give Doc Ock a lot of thought since, I dunno, 1965 or so, but I gather the Marvel gang has given him a great deal of thought indeed.
Then again, Annable’s version suggests maybe we need to take one more whack at telling his story.
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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