I start each day here with a relatively clean slate, but it's impossible not to anticipate things a bit.
Sometimes it's as direct as a cartoon posted late in the day to which my response is, "Well, it's gonna take a lot tomorrow morning to push THAT one off the page."
And sometimes it's less specific.
I came out of yesterday's grim, epic rant thinking, "Man, I hope somebody posts something cheerful and silly and lite ("light" being too weighty) tomorrow."
Thank goodness for today's Rhymes With Orange.
It didn't just make me laugh, it made me giggle, and giggles are a good thing.
My only commentary being to ask if anybody without either a doctorate in zoology or an intense interest in preserving Algonquin languages ever actually calls those things "opossums," besides cartoonists who don't want to get a lot of letters about proper terminology?
Could be one of those written/verbal things, where you write "opossum" but say "possum."
Perhaps sometime when I'm thinking about things, that will be one of the things I think about.
Not today.
Oh, hello ... Newman
I'm always pleased to see Kim's dog, Newman, enter the scene because he began as an inconvenience and has wormed his way into her heart. As a dog lover, this pleases me, and as a comics lover, I like to see characters evolve, and the Kim/Newman relationship is emblematic of how Between Friends operates.
Plus, as a telecommuter, I have to admit that my three-dimensional acquaintances are about 85% dog people, because that's who I meet when I go on break, but if you come here often you already know that and, besides, it sounds a lot more pathetic than it is.
I think.
Then again, I'm trying not to think, so never mind.
Here's what you're missing by working at home, Kim.
Jelly donuts and paranoia.
Real Life Adventures suggests the only way to survive in the current workplace: Set your priorities.
And for those of you who work in offices, here's a suggestion for next April 1: Come in early and pile a whole lot of empty cardboard boxes outside the HR office.
How your fellow workers will laugh when you tell them it was just a gag!
At one place I worked, we had a board in the breakroom with headshots of all the employees, grouped by department, with their names. It was very nice to be able to put names with the faces of people you ran into regularly, and I thought it was a great idea.
Except that the publisher's secretary was a model of efficiency and was also in charge of the board, so there was a wisecrack that the first thing you should do when you got to work in the morning was to go by the breakroom and make sure your picture was still there.
And that was back before things got really nasty.
If you do the thing with the cardboard boxes, you should probably also spring for some jelly donuts.
Teach Your Children Well
I love little Sedgewick, the one-percenter kid in Monty. Today's reminds me of a guy I knew in college back in 1967.
His dad was a prominent physician of some sort back in Southern California and Sonny Boy was a freshman and a rebel.
Around October, he wrote to his dad and said, "Dad, I've started taking speed to study."
And his dad wrote back and said, "You know, during World War II, they used to give amphetamines to the bomber pilots to keep them awake and alert on long-range missions."
A few weeks later, he wrote to his dad and said, "Dad, I've started smoking marijuana."
And his dad wrote back and said, "You know, there's a lot of evidence that marijuana is not nearly as harmful as alcohol."
So then he wrote to his dad and said, "Dad, I've started tripping on acid."
And his dad wrote back and said, "You know, when lysergic acid was first formulated, it was given to women as a treatment for menopause, and, in medieval Europe, there were periodic outbreaks of ergotism from a mold ..."
The guy dropped out. A couple of years later, somebody ran into him in the airport at Dallas, where he was in saffron robes, selling flowers.
Good luck, Sedgewick.
Oh. Well, sorry.
A disquieting cartoon from Madam & Eve.
Not that I have any particular opinions from this distance about Julius Malema and the Economic Freedom Fighters. I leave that for my SA friends to deal with and comment about.
No, what bothers me about today's M&E is the idea that people in South Africa have even heard of Black Friday, much less had it crammed down their throats to the extent that they feature it in cartoons.
But I looked it up and our cultural hegemony apparently has no bounds. "Black Friday," a big shopping day after a Thursday that only Yanks consider a holiday, has become a global phenomenon.
It was humiliating enough when it became clear that people around the world were wondering who shot JR.
And that turned out to be more than just embarrassing.
"Dallas" was specifically mentioned at the time in articles about how Anwar Sadat wanted to bring television into remote Egyptian villages as an educational tool, but had to add some entertainment to get people to gather around the village TV and learn to grow tomatoes in brackish water.
The unintended consequence being that the rural kids all said to hell with growing tomatoes and took off for Cairo so they could have the lush green lawns, big houses and luxurious automobiles they saw on TV.
Or live at the city dump under salvaged pieces of corrugated tin, as it might possibly turn out.
Sadat was killed in the first phase of the Islamist uprisings, and I've always wondered if JR Ewing were somehow complicit in this tragic creation of failed dreams.
And here's the thing I'd think about, if I were thinking:
Even great Black Friday sale prices won't put a lot of wide-screen TVs on those mounds of garbage.
McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute,
decided oh, well, what the hell,
and flew into a mountain.
Chief Dan George and Catch-22 references - an excellent column even if there hadn't been any comics.
Posted by: Bob | 12/01/2015 at 07:56 PM