Friday Funnies #1

I'm starting a new feature, "Friday Funnies," in which I skip the political stuff. Given the crisis we're in, I'm way too often compelled to focus on editorial cartoons at the expense of funny non-political stuff. 

Friday Funnies will be freed from the same-day rule I normally apply to strips, so you may see something here that had been overwhelmed by the day's politics earlier in the week.

And I start with a single panel from Vintage Rip Kirby, not because this new adventure is particularly compelling but because it's just a wonderful Desmond moment.

Though the fact that John Prentice (this being from 1958, well after Alex Raymond's demise) is basing his villain on Boris Karloff is also amusing and I wonder what Boris thought?

 

And as long as we're on non-comical comics, Judge Parker continues to clean up loose ends from the previous management, as Neddy heads off to California and is finding that her act doesn't play very well there.

There is a sort of "Princess and the Pauper" element at work, given that her backstory rewards her with a generous inheritance.

I might have simply consigned her to oblivion, like Chuck in "Happy Days," but Marciuliano and Manley seem determined to make all the pieces fit and also brought back the movie star/recording artist/whateverthehellshewas to torment her.

I don't know if all this housekeeping is a good move, but it's certainly a fascinating one and I'll salute their determination even if it isn't the route I might have taken.

Hey, I'll admit that I was always too quick to hit the Superzapper. 

 

And also on the topic of "Californy is the place you ought to be," the sporatic Tru-Life adventures of John Wilcox have him currently out on the West Coast at the helm of the LA Free Press, and I purposely cropped this to leave a teaser that should get you to read the whole thing.

We occasionally saw the Freep in Indiana, more often than we saw the much closer Chicago Seed or, for that matter, the Berkeley Barb, the Boston Phoenix or any number of underground papers. But I'll admit I'm less interested in the birth of the Underground Press than in its demise, which I put squarely on the shoulders of Jann Wenner and the Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone basically came along and vacuumed up all the record ads and strangled the local papers as part of the growth of the national Over-the-Counterculture, and the best that can be said is that, in its early years, it also had some good writing.

Tucked in with the ass-kissing music reviews that kept those advertiser dollars coming.

That's not political, though. Just a comment on the homogenization of everything under the emerging preppy elite.

Okay, it's political. Sue me.

But I'll cross-examine you and establish that you once thought Bukowski was from Manchester, England, England.

 

 
Big Nate came up with a brilliant plan earlier this week, and then, today, we got a reminder that Lincoln Peirce is an actual certified teacher and is familiar with school politics psychology.

 

And another psychology-based gag, this one from Pros and Cons. I only encountered the professional level of theoretically-good-pragmatically-disastrous professional advice during my divorce, but there's no lack of similar suggestions available in the popular press for far less than $150 an hour.

 

In The Bleachers toys with the Grammar Nazis I was just ridiculing here Wednesday, who hate to hear sportscasters talk about "mental errors" because, they insist, there's no other kind.

This is because most Grammar Nazis are not athletically gifted. There are, of course, both mental and physical errors. 

A mental error in football is letting a receiver get past you because you assume that the safety will cover, when you were in a formation in which his responsibility is on the opposite side of the field.

A physical error is failing to time your leap correctly in order to swat away the ball.

Another mental error is forgetting to limp as you return to the bench, and failing to stay on the other end from Coach.

 

Tank McNamara comments on the second-most-popular sport in the world after futbol, and a scandal that has had much of the Eastern hemisphere in total meltdown. 

Meanwhile, Gaylord Perry is in the Baseball Hall of Fame here, while, as these fans point out, football coaches are evaluated on Super Bowl rings, not how their teams won them.

No further discussion, please. We're not doing politics today.

 

Today's Buckets is wonderful, and should appeal to more than hardcore skeptics.

I'm a softcore skeptic, not in the Irish acceptance of fairy folk -- "I don't believe in them, but they're there" -- but more in the semi-skepticism a friend recounted of a Deep South buddy in Vietnam speaking of ghosts: "I don't believes in them, but, then again, I don't disbelieves in them, neither."

Back when Paul McCartney was dead, a group of girls in the coffeehouse got in touch with him via Ouija board, mostly when Kay was on the planchette, and he dispatched some unremarkable advice, like that wearing silver would ward off evil spirits, which had a lot more to do with trivia lodged in your subconscious than advice from dead people, especially ones who weren't actually dead after all.

But "Paul" also warned "Beware a friend with a limp," which was laughed off for several days, until Kay's much-bigger-than-she-was boyfriend came into the coffeehouse very drunk, having stepped on a broken bottle and been stitched up at the ER.

When it began to bleed again, Kay helped him out to his car, he stumbled against her, and she broke one of those crucial little bones in your foot that are nearly impossible to fix. 

Which probably proves something. Or possibly nothing.

But, golly, strange things happen in this world.

(Oh, go ahead -- the earworm's already implanted anyway.)

Comments

[phred]

I don't believe in the Evil Eye, but I think the Evil Eye believes in me.
--Trad

[Kip W]

Before Paul died, my sisters (two years and four years older than me—the oldest was already somewhere else) became convinced through the rumor mill that the Beatles had put clues on and in their albums (chiefly Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt Pepper's) which, when deciphered correctly, would lead the discerning fans to the proper time and location at which they would be picked up (by helicopter, I think they said) and taken off to some wondrous island that the Beatles apparently had where said fans would be free to confer and hobnob with the Fab Four in some kind of magical mystery tour. They expended some amount of mental processing time to the problem, aided by their like-minded friends.

Then it faded, and its memory was wiped out by the enormity of the likelihood that Paul had done died, and the very same clues that had been pondered assiduously before were now proof of McCartney's untimely demise. (See also the Batman story where "Saul Cartwright" of some other fab foursome is strongly rumored… er, rumoured… to be dead, and the Caped Crusader deciphers the clues and finds out the stunning truth behind it all, which I won't spoil.)

Such clue recycling is not new. I remember seeing a very old book of the prophecies of Nostradamus, and the quatrain that proves conclusively that he predicted the death of JFK in vague terms that only became obvious in hindsight used to prove conclusively that he was aware of the future (now past) death of some beloved duke or prince in a European province I can't bring to mind just now.

[Mike Peterson]

I went on WNDU, which was a for-real radio station operating from our campus, as the "eminent Paulologist" who took the most extreme of the clues to cobble together the explanation that Paul had had his brains sucked out at a stop light by a giant bee. I don't remember how I came up with it, but we had a phone call immediately after the show from a furious mother whose children were running around the house screaming that Paul had been eaten by a giant bee.

By golly, we did fake news better than these snot-nosed young'uns today.