Let's lead off with this Rhymes with Orange, a cartoon so funny it took two talented cartoonists to pull it off!
(Hilary Price is generous about sharing credit for an idea, by the way. Not every cartoonist is this forthcoming.)
It sent me first into memories of my own kids, who were very well-behaved in stores, which then reminded me that the reason for that was that I charted shopping trips by the times of day when they were generally most sociable.
Kids who need naps or have low blood sugar are not likely to sit in a cart cheerfully, and you don't have to make the "oh, just this once" error very many times to figure that out.
Or at least you shouldn't have to.
I'm sympathetic to working parents who don't have the flexibility to schedule shopping trips for advantageous moments, but it isn't rocket science to keep some graham crackers in the glove compartment as a mood elevator for when you need to pick up your tired, hungry kid on the way home from work and also stop at the store.
There's also a difference between grabbing a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread and doing a full-out shopping trip. Unless you're working two jobs, you can probably choose when to spend 40 minutes going up and down the aisles.
And I'm completely intolerant of people who won't stop to soothe a fussy kid, or who allow a full-blown tantrum to continue unchecked. True, sometimes you simply can't get things under control, but that's when you select the option on the right above, not the one on the left.
This brings us to the actual gag, which is the on-line shopping element.
I think screaming kids would genuinely improve the experience of on-line shopping and make it more realistic. Maybe you could even have other on-line shoppers' kids break into hysterics, as an autoplay feature with no mute control.
I'm a little less clear on how -- for the benefit of those who schedule their errands to avoid screaming children -- you could replicate the "grocery shopping at midnight" experience on-line, that weird warehousey feeling of being one of six people in a cold store the size of a football field, with echoey Muzak unsoftened by human sound mufflers.
They could at least set it up so that, when you went to check out, you had to click around the site to get someone's attention.
However, I don't shop online in order to avoid human contact. That would be misanthropic and antisocial.
I shop online as an alternative to driving an hour and a half to a larger town with bigger stores.
I stream movies online in order to avoid human contact.
Speaking of unnecessary interactions
Rabbits Against Magic reminds me that I wish Facebook had email-style filters.
You are supposed to be able to block game invitations and announcements (it's not infallible), but it would indeed be cool to set a filter for words like "shocking" and phrases like "what happened next," or images from people whom you want to continue to follow but who insist on changing their profile pic every three days.
I don't suppose there'd be a way to filter selfies for quality and frequency, but I sometimes have to restrain the urge to comment "Wow! Your big fat face looks exactly the same with a tiny bit of the Grand Canyon in a corner of the background as it did two days ago with a tiny bit of Mount Rushmore in a corner of the background!"
I did recently unfollow someone after clicking on his page to confirm that, indeed, he had posted nothing over the past several months but fresh selfies.
I've also screened out people who simply repost those ghastly Photoshopped landscapes of places from the Magical Land of DayGlo.
But there are a lot of people who, for reasons of kinship or business, you can't simply dump. They're the on-line equivalent of the relative whom you enjoy having over for holidays until the topic of X comes up, as it inevitably does.
In any case, Rabbits hit me today just as I was bemoaning the birth of yet another "I've been challenged" fad, in which people are required to post a mass quantity of crap they wouldn't have otherwise.
Apparently there isn't enough chaff on Facebook to begin with.
I enjoy Throwback Thursday. I like seeing old pics. But much of the charm of TBT is that it's one picture, once a week.
Kind of the opposite of "November Is Post A Dozen Things A Day Month!"
And speaking of things I'd set that filter for
New Adventures of Queen Victoria touches on something I alluded to yesterday: The anti-science of the left.
You can scroll down if you'd like to relive the rant. It was a pretty good rant.
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