Thursday very, very short takes

For a comic strip that appears to be written by a law firm (Weingarten, Weingarten and Clark), Barney & Clyde has really been on a roll lately.

And my mind is more like a sieve in the traditional sense of the phrase, so don't look for any extended rants today, but I'm keeping this definition and will be using it without attribution.

Possibly before this posting has quite ended.

 

And a curse upon Rick Stromoski because I almost made it all the way through 2016 without laughing at a zombie joke. I'm not sure if Soup to Nutz specializes in stupid brilliance or brilliant stupidity, but this qualifies either way.

Still, he could have held it until January so I could keep my record clean.

 

On the other hand, if anything were going to trigger a rant today, it would be Deflocked.

I cannot tell you how much I despise Elf on the Shelf, which, at its more innocent, is a symptom of parental obsession. Do you realize that, to make this ghastly concept work, you're supposed to move the thing around and pretend it ran back to the North Pole to nark the kids out?

Just hang some damn tinsel and let the kids create their own memories. If you have to have something every day, get an Advent calendar and not one with candy. Just nice little pictures. Your kids will provide their own sweetness.

The real rant, however, would be more on this specific gag, about how Elf on the Shelf elevates the magical "He knows if you've been bad or good" concept to frightening Orwellian levels.

Though it's good practice for a world in which their school lockers are searched without warrants or probable cause and their every step is tracked by surveillance cameras.

See what I mean? Almost got into a pair of rants right there.

 

And as a dog owner, I could really go off on Watson today. People with their alleged, soi-disant "service dogs" are everywhere all of a sudden, and, as someone whose corporate-mascot-dogs had to be carefully sequestered on classroom visits because of kids with allergies, I wonder when that cause for concern evaporated?

And, boy, if I were going to rant, it would sure include the "Hey, look what an exotic service animal I have!" crowd as well. Failure to be able to get over yourself is an inability, not a disability. 

And maybe I'd top it off with another rant about what a damn insult this latest fad is to the genuine service dogs and the people who genuinely need them.

The benefit of the gluten-free fad to actual celiac sufferers is that they get more foods to choose from, but I see this swinging in the other direction and triggering restrictions on the real service dogs and their people.

I like Watson's self-imposed restrictions. Good dog!

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Jimmy Margulies)

(Chan Lowe)

You can go back to the non-rant at Deflocked for my non-rant here, because there's a similar distinction between allowing someone to preserve an innocent fiction and cynically persuading them to hand you the keys to the country.

The chief difference being that I'm a lot more certain that Virginia eventually figured it out than I am about those other folks eventually seeing the light. (Feeling deprived? Go back two days for my full "Allegory of the Cave" rant.)

 

Swiftian, rock-solid truth

I don't often agree with Dana Summers, but I liked his cartoon referencing the Donald's decision to cancel the new Air Force One.

I saw it as a commentary on a president-elect who doesn't bother with intel briefings or other such claptrap and certainly wouldn't take the time for a tour of the current presidential airplane to hear explanations for all its advanced features before deciding ... okay, cancel the rant.

But I liked the low-tech plane for a low-info president.

However, other comments on his Facebook page showed that his fans saw it as a compliment for a thrifty president's no-frills approach, which it may have been.

And which doesn't trigger a rant because Swift encapsulated it already: Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

And the Rock Man said: The thing is, you see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear. You dig?

But this sets a challenge for cartoonists: If people are interpreting your work over that spectrum, you probably needed to be more specific.

Or, to go back to Oblio for a second quote, "A point in every direction is the same as no point at all."

You dig?

 
At Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling is considerably more explicit.

There's probably a happy medium somewhere.

 

Now here's a snippet from Dave Kellett's longer piece at Sheldon about not knowing who anybody is. 

I have the same problem, which I solve by limiting my three-dimensional social interactions to the dog park, where we all learn the dogs' names before -- or, often, instead of -- learning the people's names. Thus creating dozens of ad hoc service dogs, since I think there is a social-anxiety component to the phenomenon.

I've lost the names of people I've worked next to daily for a decade when it was time for introductions. Not kidding.

I can't use Kellett's solution because I don't have a wife, but I have, in the past, clued in dates and girlfriends, telling them, if I haven't introduced you within 30 seconds, step forward and introduce yourself, because I have no idea who we're talking to.

I'd rather take the hit for poor manners than for having a memory like a sieve.

And not the good kind of memory like a sieve.

 

Want more?

The KFS Archivist has a collection of comic strips from Dec 8, 1941. They don't reference Pearl Harbor, of course, but, gloryosky, they're fun to read!

 

Now here's the sort of thing I'm unable to forget:

 

Comments

[Richard John Marcej]

Mike, as always, I enjoy reading your comments and rants (or non rants) on current comics and subjects. But hell, you really made my day by referencing one of my all time favorite animated TV specials and soundtracks, "The Point".

Now I think I'll pop on my LP copy of Nilsson's work and enjoy it again.

[Mark Jackson]

OK, Ellen and I agree that that Sheldon cartoon hits the target. Either I have a mild case of prosopagnosia or, more likely, my mental sieve just doesn't consider faces and social details worth filing away for late reference.

Ces Marciuliano has pointed out how the new "Christmas tradition" can facilitate an older one: https://mediumlarge.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/krampus-day-1200.jpg

And for 2016 at least this is the only Advent calendar I need: http://www.whiskyfix.com/getmetafile/db8c2cf1-abe3-491d-adb2-bde5eb068481/advent-calender.aspx

[Brent]

There's a certain value in playing with things that can cover the spectrum. Here's one of my facebook posts before the election:

"Trump would be a terrific president. His fantastic plans and amazing speaking skills would not make the US great, but incredible."

[Mike Peterson]

He is indeed amazing.