Comic Strip of the Day.com

Comics that were specifically intended for me

It's April 15, which means little on weekends and less on Patriots Day, but taxes and Easter are sharing the comics pages today and you still can't do better on the subject of taxes than this Shoe from 1979.

An opinion that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I'm a writer of opinions.

 

And speaking of personal prejudices, the fact that I was raised Catholic often informs my appreciation of Heart of the City, and I remember Good Friday services as being deeply penitent and very, very long.

I wasn't necessarily able to distinguish "penitent" from "morbid," but I was sure able to understand "very, very long," though, as a tiny youngster required to kneel up straight in the pew for three hours, I did not realize how much worse it was to be an adolescent altar boy walking the Stations with the priest.

Those frequent photos of young GIs and palace guards fainting in military formations? Altar boys did that, too, only nobody ever took pictures of it.

Anybody who had whipped out a camera in church on Good Friday would have been flashed straight to Hell before you could say "Have mercy on us."

The emphasis on Christ's sacrifice pervaded Catholic culture beyond Holy Week, and Pat Oliphant captured the penitent/morbid Catholic thingie back in 2004, when Mel Gibson brought his arch-conservative RC viewpoint to the big screen in The Passion of the Christ, which was criticized in a relatively positive review as "the New Testament rendered as a snuff film."

Pervasive, yes: As that critic writes,

(T)his is a hero's narrative and here, as in the director's other films, heroism amounts to little more than a willingness to absorb violence, embrace it even.

Heart is lucky: Mrs. Angelini and Mel Gibson and I grew up in the world of Sister Dolorosa, and were carefully taught that faith requires suffering and if you don't have some, boy jayzuz, I'll give yez plenty.

I'm not sure there was intended to be a direct theological connection between having to kneel through three hours of Good Friday guilt and chocolate bunnies on Easter Sunday, but, as Heart notes, at least there was a happy ending.

Though, when it comes to that, not only was Advent a lot more fun than Lent, but the payoff was also way better.

And if my young experience weren't confusing enough, I had two great-aunts who were teaching nuns and were extraordinarily bright and kind and remembered warmly by their students. By contrast, my long-dead first grade teacher was still a legend of sadism in the teacher's lounge at St. Mary's a half-century later, not that anybody had bothered to intervene at the time. 

Holidays/Holy Days, as Dean suggests, can be pretty weird.

 

Meanwhile, back in the friendly skies ...

I think the United thing has pretty much played out, but I like Drew Sheneman's take.

People are saying, "I'll never fly United again!" but there just aren't that many choices these days, thanks to the mergers and monopolistic Wall Streetism that has become normal.

Perhaps it's because I mostly fly on business, but I find myself choosing flights by when they leave and whether the layovers make the connections possible and when they arrive and then I factor in ticket price, and only rarely -- perhaps never -- do I pay any attention to what's painted on the side of the plane. 

The days of prefering Frontier over Continental or Eastern over TWA are long gone, and, as Sheneman suggests, they can pretty much do whatever they want.

We're about one more merger away from this:

However, Bill Day managed to get one final good topical gag out of it:

But that's it. Move on. The topic is played out.

Don't worry: It's not like stupid things won't keep happening.

 

Speaking of flying

Once again, a comic speaks to me personally: Today's Medium Large explains why I will never, ever move again.

I've got a three-room apartment, utilities included and a good landlady, for $675 a month. My retirement plan, we being of roughly the same age, is to die before she does. I live in perpetual fear that she and her husband will decide to sell out and head for Arizona or Florida, but they're both natives, so it's thankfully not too likely.

Of course, given his supersonic flying ability, Clark could commute the Daily Planet gig from Ma and Pa Kent's farm, but then Lois would wonder where he lived and why he never brings her over to his apartment to test his X-ray vision on her garments.

And speaking of the difficulty of maintaining a secret identity, while I suppose maybe the leading paper in Metropolis pays well as journalism goes, most young reporters have to have roommates, and that rich sonofabitch Bruce Wayne doesn't worry about money, so who you gonna partner up with? 

"If you see all my clothes hanging on the doorknob, don't open it."

 

Let him climb the rigging like his pappy used to do:

I always assumed that Popeye's calves were as overdeveloped as his forearms, but this vintage Thimble Theater from November 3, 1930, shows that -- duh -- sailors wear bell-bottom trousers.

Which I knew, but hadn't applied to this particular sailor.

Castor Oyl had better lock up his daughter.

 

And also this:

A final example of comics that hit personally: I just got through yet one more massive quarrel with the printer and am still trying to deal with the random joys of Windows 10, so today's Carpe Diem got not only a laff but earned you all a second video treat:

(There. And I hope that makes up for my having posted this yesterday.)

 

Rants

Thank you, Darrin Bell.

Today's Candorville makes the point, now that every editorial cartoonist has done a "Trump kills Big Bird and Elmo" cartoon, that Sesame Street hasn't been a PBS or CPB production for a couple of years now.

This isn't to say that public broadcasting shouldn't be in the budget. But if you're going to comment on an issue -- particularly if commenting on issues is your profession -- you should do your homework.

Downton Abbey is at risk. Not Sesame Street.

Well, neither of them directly. Like Sesame Street, Downton Abbey is simply rebroadcast on PBS, not produced there.

There is an argument to be made that what is at risk is the ability of small children whose parents can't afford the upper levels of cable to access Sesame Street.

I'm not sure you'd get as much sympathy with a cartoon showing adults who can only afford cheap chardonnay and Laughing Cow in place of brie lamenting the fact that they can't get Downton Abbey over the air anymore.

And the good thing about Sesame Street over-the-air reruns is that the fact that it was on HBO earlier doesn't matter; it's relatively timeless.

Like Victor Borge routines, pop music collections from the Sixties and Simon and Garfunkel's concert in Central Park.

I mean, if, when you're fundraising, you showcase a comedian who died nearly 20 years ago and a concert from nearly 40 years ago and music that is half a century old, why not simply show Sesame Street reruns from Back in the Day?

I know, I know.

Kermit would probably demand massive residuals.

I wish that were a joke.

 

About that same target audience

Baby Blues focuses on little Wren today, and I certainly got the joke, though it seems a bit misplaced with the third child. By that time, Wanda would surely know better than to even ask.

When you hear a CRASH!, you have to go look. When you just hear a conk, a clunk or a bonk, you pause a few moments and, if there is no screaming, don't even acknowledge it, much less ask if it hurt.

That's an eternal truth of parenting.

Here's a technological change:

It used to be that the way to teach a baby to roll over was to lay him on the couch and get on the phone with one of his grandmothers on a corded phone that would not allow you to leap in and scoop him up before he rolled over, fell off the couch and began to howl.

Worked best if the grandmother listening in was your in-law and not your own mom.

Cordless phones sure ruined that.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Pooch Cafe)

(The Buckets)

The letter carrier in Pooch Cafe raises a good question but assumes facts not in evidence.

I'll admit my canine acquaintances are skewed, because 90 percent of them hang out at an unfenced, unofficial dog park and are thus well-socialized, relatively well-trained pups who neither fight with each other nor run away very often, though, as noted recently, sometimes there's a smell that requires investigation.

And, as in Buckets, the dogs at the park all know who's packing and who isn't.

Part of it, indeed, is sense of smell, because some people carry exotic treats that get that sort of outsized reaction, but they also learn who the perennial soft-touches are.

There are dogs who run up to greet me at the park, but they know that I never have treats and it's simply social.

Dependable dispensers of doggy cookies get much more of a "What did you bring me?" greeting and sometimes need to be rescued from all the enthusiasm.

We've discussed letter carriers at the park, and one thing our dogs all have in common is that they adore their letter carriers, including my dog who has never seen a carrier come to the door because I've had a PO box since before he was born. 

However, he knows who walks through the neighborhood with treats and will nearly disjoint my arm at the sight of a postal worker.

He even recognizes the little vans they drive and, when he spots one, it's like being with a second-grader who sees an ice cream truck.

However, I have something of an answer to the question the mailman (sic) asks, and it has to do with the bureaucrats of the USPS who have, as part of their goals, driving their employees crazy.

In addition to periodically following carriers around and writing them up for things like not efficiently cutting across a lawn despite the carrier knowing that this particular homeowner feels protective about the grass, they make up rules that, at least in our ZIP Code, include forbidding employees from carrying dog treats. (A rule more honored in the breach.)

They do, however, outfit them with pepper spray.

I guess, theoretically, it's better to antagonize a dog than to make him look forward to seeing you.

Perhaps dogs should be outfitted like St. Bernards, only, instead of kegs of rum, they could carry cans of Pepsi around their necks.

I understand it's quite effective in preventing people from spraying you.

 

And speaking of treats ...

I don't normally salute reruns, but Doc and Raider is gearing up for a major storyline and, while that is under construction, Sean Martin has posted, in one long piece, a series he did some time ago on gay marriage etiquette that is wonderful and hilarious.

 

Anne and Goodman

Anne Morse Hambrock gave this day's pensee the title "Sing Sing Sing."

Good choice.

And to circle back to PBS/CPB funding, a question: If you cut the arts so that kids no longer learn to play instruments, will any of them appreciate the concept of a "tight band"?

Because we used to marvel over the tightness of certain rock bands that only had four members.

This much larger orchestra was as tight as one of Gene Krupa's drums.

Would youngsters know that?

 

 

Write offs

The Syria air strike cartoons are coming in, but I'm not seeing a lot of consensus, either in cartoons or in social media.

Joe Heller is one of the few who salutes an actual, as he says, change of heart, which, by the way, I would note might also be indicated by the demotion (and rumored impending firing) of Steve Bannon.

It's hard to tell what's happening in the White House, but it seems possible that someone has finally -- inshallah -- grabbed hold of the tiller.

If so, the air strikes may have been suggested by one of the few grown-ups in the administration, and maybe we'll see a few other signs of change.

Meanwhile, Steve Sack indicates a foiling of Assad's chemical warfare, but without stating exactly how he feels about it, though his art makes it clear that he disapproves of genocide, while the bright red,white and blue of the missile suggests that he approves of the intervention.

And Pat Bagley seems to see it less as a "change of heart" than as one more example of Trump's lack of vision, and a move that will lead to further war.

He doesn't directly contrast the strike with Obama's more cautious "red line" approach, but others have, and, while Bagley may consider it impulsive, they don't.

There are also some new cartoons noting that, if we're so concerned about Syrian genocide, we might let more refugees escape it, most of which I think were drawn earlier and are only appearing now.

As noted yesterday, it's hard to be timely when the system hangs your work up for a few days regardless of current events.

Which I hope is also the reason the Don Rickles Pearly Gates cartoons are beginning to show up, because I really think dead civilians and lethal air strikes are a little more pressing.

On the other hand, the Syrian kids and the old comedian died pretty much at the same time, so maybe I'm misunderestimating other people's sense of perspective.

Keep watching ...

 

... and write when you learn how

Part of appreciating Alex is recognizing that Britain has strict compliance laws for businesses that don't seem to exist in the United States.

We do have rules and a look at them explains why we also have TurboTax. It's not that they're impenetrable but they are complicated enough that to hell with it, let the computer sort it out.

Not that I have to figure out how to apportion the expenses of renting a skybox at the Super Bowl in order to entertain clients while simultaneously thrilling my family.

But I hope the IRS doesn't mind if I put airport fast food on a single credit card and don't otherwise document each burger.

I'm filing my taxes today and I have zero expectation of being audited, partially because I'm small fry and partially because we've completely gutted the IRS, cutting staff to a level where you can pretty much write off anything you want without anyone seeing any red flags, however blatant.

This is apparently not the situation in Britain.

However, issues of privacy are front and center in this country, particularly with the recent decision to cancel a regulation that hadn't yet gone into force which, had it been permitted to take effect, would have prevented ISPs from selling your data like on-line sites do.

Forcing us all to use DuckDuckGo as our home page.

Even Glenn McCoy -- a dependable fan of free markets -- drew a cartoon decrying this loss of (potential) privacy.

But I like the approach of Alex's client to foil electronic monitors by going analog.

I'm sticking by my belief -- shared, by the by, with Edward Snowden -- that collecting everything is pretty much the same as collecting nothing, and that the only sensible way to monitor data is to identify narrower targets.

And the other half of sensible monitoring is to avoid having nitwits evaluate the data that you pick out.

I still have to laugh over the Senator who, in grilling Hillary Clinton, was appalled that she had not been aware of a private email exchange between two mid-level State Department employees, because, of course, one of the duties of the Secretary of State is to read each and every piece of email in the entire 68,000-employee department.

But Alex is right in that written communications can be much more private, which suggests a crackpot tin foil theory that I'd like to see "Fox and Friends" pick up on.

Something else that has been rattling around social media lately is that kids (allegedly) can no longer write or read cursive, despite some states which have passed laws requiring cursive be taught.

Which might prompt some to say that we don't need more laws telling teachers what to teach and that maybe, if there weren't so many other things that little tiny kids are legally required to do in first grade, cursive would still be on their list of subjects, along with coloring and reading "Dick and Jane" and basically learning how to be in school.

But here's my theory: The reason we no longer teach kids cursive is because we can't monitor people's thoughts if they put them on paper.

Getting rid of cursive is a gummint black helicopter trilateral plot to force the next generation to do everything electronically so Big Brother can track them.

Now, if we can convince "Fox and Friends," and maybe a few talkshow hosts, of the validity of this theory, that would get it right to the top and we'd start pulling federal funding from any states that don't teach cursive.

I think it was Tennyson or maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay who wrote:

Write on, baby, write on, baby
Write on, baby, write on, baby
I could pick your face out in an FBI file
You may look pretty but I can't say the same for your mind

Same poet, anyway, who wrote "Have you seen Big Brother, baby, standing in the shadows?"

Teach Your Children Well

Nothing, alas, ever turns out to be quite as cool as you thought it was going to be, Keefe.

Except Yellowstone, but nothing in daily life. 

However, what is cool is that cartoonists like Keith Knight have introduced being a dad as a normal, interesting, challenging but, again, normal part of life. Your kids may occasionally be frustrating, but they are kids and it's to be expected.

Not that the Katzenjammer Kids weren't funny, but that was a century or so ago and the daily grind of comics in which kids are presented as a constant annoyance is not funny. It's just tired, as tired as the wife with messed-up hair and a detached steering wheel in her hand.

And double credit for inviting the Lizard Lady to your kids' party instead of a clown. Maybe triple credit.

You may not get them to Yellowstone for awhile, but you can bring some wonder and mental stimulation into their lives and maybe that's even better, since it teaches them that thinking is normal and fun. Plus, when you do get to take them to Yellowstone, they'll be pumped for it.

And I like today's strip because it reminds me of when I used to take my very young boys to their Ranger Rick Club meetings at the local nature center. Not only was it interesting to watch the presentations, but while they were coloring pictures of nature or whatever, I could wander around and look at the various animals and exhibits myself.

Or talk to the naturalists, one of whom told me a story about being in a classroom with a corn snake draped around her neck while her partner was in the back of the room.

Something startled the snake, who reacted as constrictors do, which made it very difficult for her to call out to her partner who was distracted by something at the moment but did look up and notice her eyes popping out of her head in time to come to the front of the room and help deconstrict the constrictor.

I really like snakes, but Lizard Ladies should probably travel in pairs.

 

And, speaking of raising smart kids, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reminds us that not only should we all know some of these little brain-teaser/folk tales to pass along, but we should also teach our kids to listen and think before responding to offers.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(F-Minus)

(Flying McCoys)

One way to freshen up tired marital tropes is to project them onto other settings.

I feel pretty good about my relationship with the dog, because the few times he's escaped for a self-guided tour of the neighborhood, it's just been (A) to play with the kids next door, (B) to raid the cat food in the bowl on the stoop next door or (C) to sit on the landlord's porch at the front of the house and watch the world go by.

Well, unless you count the times he's scented something while we were at the park and gone to check it out. Hounds, in particular, have a mercury switch in their heads, such that, when the nose tilts down, the ears and brain shut off and shouting at them to come back is pointless.

One time he disappeared into the neighboring trees and apparently tracked a scent to the loading dock of the nearby caterer, which I surmised from the fact that he came trotting back with a bagel in his mouth.

At least it wasn't a tray of shrimp.

As for the cat at the bar, I really like turning the universally-accepted good thing of having nine lives into a curse; it's the kind of flip that not only cracked me up this morning but will now lodge in my brain whenever I hear about cats and their nine lives.

Along with the ending of "Notes To You," of course.

 

Tolerant as I try to be, I'm among the many who would condemn the young lovers in today's Off the Mark.

Including this guy, who is a role model and so should be listened to and I'd point out that he's only 28, so you can't just say that traditional toppings are for old farts.

However, pizza has truly fallen victim to the dread issue of Kidz in the Kitchen, which is to say that, to get a good pizza, you have to go to a hole-in-the-wall place in an Italian neighborhood where the pizzamaker is an old guy from Naples.

If you go to a chain where all the cooks are high school and college students, you are doomed to get a bad pie. I'd rather have a few cigar ashes fall on it from the old guy than some of the frat house inspirations that are not only served up by the Kidz but purchased by their same-age customers.

Though not JJ. And he's undeniably cool.

I'm not being a snob. You can put pineapple and ham on a crust, but that isn't pizza. Pizza is very diverse, and there are variations all up and down the Boot, but one thing it ain't is Hawaiian. 

At least when people make a sandwich with a flour tortilla instead of Wonder Bread, they have the integrity to call it a "wrap" and not a "burrito."

Though apparently, judging from the phenomenon of "breakfast burritos," this integrity kicks in around 10:30 am.

I don't dislike breakfast burritos, but they aren't burritos. They're breakfast wraps.

You should eat whatever you like, of course, and, while you shouldn't culturally appropriate the names of ethnic foods, you can create whatever combinations you prefer.

For instance, when I go to an Indian restaurant, I'll ask for a mini-baguette, rather than traditional Indian bread, and there's nothing wrong with that.

After all, half a loaf is better than naan.

 

Now here's the only cooking video you'll ever need:

i>

Plus the required Canadian content:

 

My ongoing search for irrelevance

It is as if cartoonists were conspiring to see who could touch off my most off-topic rant.

We'll start with what is not only the best 'toon of the day, but surely the least intended to set me off, this Cartoon Movement piece by Moroccan cartoonist Jalal Hajir on Brexit and the now-approved Scottish referendum.

The cartoon brilliantly recalls the rivalry between Celts and sassenachs by putting Theresa May in chain mail with British heraldry, and using Mel Gibson's unforgettable portrayal of William Wallace to represent Scottish nationalism.

Mel Gibson's unforgettable, ridiculous, ahistoric, overwrought cheesy portrayal of William Wallace, who never would have painted his face that late in history nor worn a kilt that early in history and whose lady love in the movie was barely born at the time and whose appearance raised the important question of how he could be clean shaven and have hair so teased and tangled?

I mean, even if they hadn't invented combs, they obviously had razors. 

Which is far from Hajir's point, but he reminded me that I wrote something I can no longer find, back when the 1995 Oscars happened, in which I described Gibson's big hair and grimy face as making him look like a Texas Cowboys cheerleader given an exploding cigar.

I went on to point out that, while its history was completely cattywumpus, the movie was authentic by Hollywood standards because everyone was covered with mud.

And that this rule even applies in Westerns, which take place in what is largely desert country where, historically, having enough rain to create mud would have been a marvel, but where, in good Westerns -- the ones that win awards -- everyone is up to their ankles in perpetual slop.

And I suggested that the reason "Braveheart" beat out "Babe" for Best Picture was that they washed the pig.

It was an epic rant. Nothing at all to do with Brexit or this cartoon.

But rants are not scored by relevance.

 

So here's the cover of the New Yorker, which Michael Cavna discusses with NYer art editor Francoise Mouly in his column, and which is animated for tablets and such, and which sparks yet another irrelevant musing which, as it happens, also concerns a movie set in the Middle Ages with very little historical accuracy.

Artist Malika Favre explains that the cover depicts her final impressions before undergoing anesthesia at five or six years old.

My own experience going under differs, but what this does evoke is waking up in the hospital this summer, not just post-surgically but repeatedly over several days as I was still somewhat doped up.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock is a teaching hospital, so that I would regularly be gently wakened to find myself surrounded by medical students on rounds, faces, as in Favre's cover, of young women, these in long white lab coats, whose voices would come to me through an opiod-induced haze of slight echoes.

And much as I respected them and liked them and was in no condition to think bad thoughts, it did occur to me that I had perhaps been transported to Castle Anthrax.

Which isn't terribly noble, but I blame the drugs and would add -- upon sober reflection -- that, if you think medicine is dominated by old white men, you must be wonderfully healthy, because I spent most of the past summer in and out of the hospital and now return weekly for regular non-interesting medical care, and I see damn few white men of any age except for other patients.

And, by the way, the men who did the most to save my life were immigrants.

Aided by a fair number of Muslims.

And a phalanx of bright young women in white lab coats. 

So, Mr. President: I know which part of my thinking is pure fantasy.

Wake up, pal.

 

And then there are the damned leggings, as seen in this Clay Jones cartoon and as yakked about all over the Intertubes.

This is such a steaming pile of bad reporting and stupid thinking and nonsensical piling on that Snopes and Fact Checker and an army of eager deconstruction workers couldn't straighten it out.

It doesn't help that the original report came from a busybody who tweeted her outrage without bothering to find out what was going on, and that it was then picked up by clickbait vendors who dashed off their own faux-journalistic versions of what they thought they heard somewhere.

Which is that three or one or two ten-year-olds or 'tweens or teenagers were kicked off a plane and we hate United those sexist bastards.

Though apparently the two teens actually involved were flying on the company's tab and understood the policy and complied and life would have gone on uninterrupted if the acronym MYOB were not so outdated.

Meanwhile, what I really want to know is how many of the people attacking United for having a company dress code are the same people who complain about the people sitting next to them on the plane not meeting their own impeccable standards?

I agree with Jones that the increasing compaction of passengers is a bigger issue, but then that leads to the observation that the seats today only recline about two inches, which is barely enough to take the weight off your spine but certainly doesn't stop compulsive whiners from bawling about it.

I suspect the loudest of them fly first class where the seats still recline measureably.

They are wise enough not to mention that, since who would sympathize with them then?

Or, put another way, they keep their asses covered, despite how leggings enthusiasts feel about doing that.

 

Wait -- what?

Did today's Luann just slip one past the editorial goalie?

I don't mean that Pru is a lesbian; we've known that for months.

I mean that last exchange. 

I'd add a "That's what she said," except I think that is what she said.

 

Now here's your moment of blue leggings:

CSotD welcomes opposing viewpoints from responsible spokespersons whose eyes are up here:

 

The Coming of Wisdom with Time

Today's Speed Bump acknowledges what we've all observed recently, although I'm not finding much greater need to avoid bringing up politics than in the past.

Granted, I purged my social media of trolls and the heartless during the run up to the election, in keeping with my well-established "Archie Bunker Rule," which originally said that nobody who would not be welcome through the door is welcome through the TV but has been amended to include computer screens.

Yes, we all have that uncle whom we dearly love but in front of whom we do not raise certain topics.

But you're not him and we can disagree, but, if you can't behave, you're gone.

Besides, it's never been polite to pipe up in public places around people whose politics you do not know, and, if you want to carve out an exception for "bearing witness" remember that, if it proves fruitless, you may have to shake the dust of that place from your sandals. 

So don't incautiously "bear witness" any place that you need to be very often.

On the other hand, I'm finding it less and less parlous to discuss politics as more and more people leap out of the non-deplorable half of the Trump basket.

It's more a case of whether it has become tiresome.

But, as Pat Byrnes' cartoon at the New Yorker daily site suggests, it's become tiresome, but it's also become unavoidable.

Abbie Hoffman used to laugh at politicos who, in the Sixties, would greet any joke or any conversation about personal interests with "Where's your social consciousness?" because we do have lives, or, at least, those of us with lives have lives.

However, that was back when you could, at least to some extent, temporarily put aside concern about Vietnam and pollution, at least long enough to roll a joint and perhaps a partner.

That is, we were already knee deep in Vietnam and already couldn't see from one side of the Monongahela Valley to the other. The issues weren't going anywhere.

But we certainly didn't put them aside indefinitely, and, today, not only are the changes more sweepingly existential, but, so far, we've only experienced a few actual plagues.

There's time to avoid the others, if we don't sit back and just assume that Pharaoh will eventually give in.

Jen Sorensen offers a handy conversational guide.

I don't know that they'll make the exchanges any more productive, but they'd make them quite a bit more amusing, and that isn't a totally vain goal.

One of the gentler ways of handling a bar room blowhard is to deflate him, and if the quiet pushbacks of Sam and Norm won't keep Cliffie in check, you bring in Carla to rough him up a little.

We could use more of that constructive, insistent mockery -- either kind or tough -- and refusing to deny democracy and the sovereignty of the people is a pretty good starting point.

 

Youth is not wasted

(Frazz)

(Mr. Fitz)

Wisdom is not a bad goal in life, and, if growing old is not an unalloyed pleasure, growing wise is not to be despised.

As Frazz notes, you'll collect a bruise or two along the road anyway, even though, as Mr. Fitz's young friend suggests, growing wiser is not as much fun as getting your learner's permit.

Still, Yeats acknowledged the end of folly as a consolation:

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

By contrast, even as a young man, Solomon was wise enough to know what to ask for:

    In Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.
    And Solomon said, Thou hast shewed unto thy servant David my father great mercy, according as he walked before thee in truth, and in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart with thee; and thou hast kept for him this great kindness, that thou hast given him a son to sit on his throne, as it is this day.
    And now, O Lord my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of David my father: and I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in.
    And thy servant is in the midst of thy people which thou hast chosen, a great people, that cannot be numbered nor counted for multitude.
    Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?
    And the speech pleased the Lord, that Solomon had asked this thing.
    And God said unto him, Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life; neither hast asked riches for thyself, nor hast asked the life of thine enemies; but hast asked for thyself understanding to discern judgment; 
    Behold, I have done according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee.
    And I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches, and honour: so that there shall not be any among the kings like unto thee all thy days.
    And if thou wilt walk in my ways, to keep my statutes and my commandments, as thy father David did walk, then I will lengthen thy days.
    And Solomon awoke; and, behold, it was a dream. And he came to Jerusalem, and stood before the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and offered up burnt offerings, and offered peace offerings, and made a feast to all his servants.

Though, as Anne and God notes, there are fewer public inducements to wish for charitable wisdom than for personal riches.

 

Now here's your moment of constructive fury:

 

Reading for meaning

Poor Carmen, the conservative half of the Prickly City duo, has been undergoing a dark night of the soul since even before the elections, in the course of which Scott Stantis brought in a sympathetic Bernie Sanders character and Carmen wound up working for Gary Johnson.

Last week, she and Winslow, the liberal coyote, compared the current tribalism of our political scene to "Lord of the Flies," and today she begins an attempt to lower the heat without lowering her standards.

Tough mission.

 
Over in Rudy Park, the talk-show hosting curmudgeon Sadie is less sympathetic to the idea of reconciliation, and her sharp response uses the "Meals on Wheels" controversey as much to rag on people who voted against their own interests as to address the actual topic of the budget.

I'm more aligned with Carmen and Winslow in that it's time to put away the pointy sticks and sit down to figure our way, if not off this desert island, at least to a way of co-existing until rescue arrives.

I have a friend who, as an avowed anti-socialist, insists that "Lord of the Flies" is a treatise on the evils of socialism.

I, having spent several summers at an eight-week boys' camp, insist that it is a reflection on human nature.

If Golding was writing a political parable, he sure clothed it in realism, to the extent that my willingness to compromise is this: He may have been speaking in metaphors, but it's just as valid to read the book as a more literal critique of why we ought not to let adolescent boys -- or those who behave like them -- run things.

And that is a compromise: I refuse to read "Animal Farm" as both a commentary on Stalinism and a description of how farm animals behave without supervision.

To which I would add this: For all the talk about how much our current situation reminds people of "1984," there are reasons to prefer "Lord of the Flies," starting with the fact that Orwell was not a great stylist and, whether or not you feel Golding deserved his Nobel, he certainly cobbled words together better and his book is a better read.

But, on perhaps a less snobbish level, "1984" shows only the end result, which, thank God, we have not reached and may never.

"Lord of the Flies" depicts the slide into barbarism, and, if we haven't killed poor Piggy yet, you can readily find our current spot on the continuum somewhere in the text and project things forward from there.

Basically, Orwell makes for better slogans, but Golding tells a more complete and chilling story.

A large part of the horror of "Lord of the Flies" is that Ralph has a solid moral sense but is eventually overwhelmed by the macho posturings of the bully, Jack, and -- ironically -- his gang of choirboys.

But had Jack's crewe, instead, been the school's rough-and-tumble rugby team, Golding would have tipped his hand too early and ruined the novel. If it were only the obvious bullies who so readily descend to such depths, they wouldn't be nearly as much a threat.

One thing that "Lord of the Flies," "Animal Farm" and "1984" have in common, along with "To Kill a Mockingbird" and other books often assigned as class reading for young people or for town-wide reading projects, is that you cannot possibly misinterpret them.

No reasonable reader could think that Jack is the hero of "Lord of the Flies" or that Winston Smith, indeed, is a reprobate who needs to be reined in for the good of society or that Tom Robinson should have been hanged without a fair trial.

Their value as art, however, is not in posing some abstract-but-universal moral truth but in the ability of the author to craft a story such that the intent is unmistakeable.

That's not necessarily a talent we would always praise.

The same could be said of "The Turner Diaries," and I promise you there are people who feel that that book, and the film "Birth of a Nation" are absolutely correct in their messages, thanks to the craft of their creators.

And, as David Fitzsimmons points out, we are currently led by a man who cannot distinguish truth from fact, fact from nonsense, reporting from propaganda, or journalism from clickbait, and bases his judgment of information on whether it flatters and confirms his worldview.

A worldview gained, one might note, at an all-boys' residential school. And now he's the one holding the conch.

It's not a worldview you can simply reason away.

You cannot simply hand a fan of "The Turner Diaries" a copy of "To Kill A Mockingbird" and expect them to have some grand epiphany, anymore than Ralph could lure the choirboys away from Jack by offering his own plans for self-governance.

Nor, I would add, could a fan of "To Kill A Mockingbird" sit through a screening of "Birth of a Nation" without revulsion.

Which does argue in favor of Carmen's plan to withdraw from the divisiveness, except that it's pretty plain she won't be able to.

As Stantis himself wrote on his blog:

I get many emails and comments telling me that I need to back off from criticizing President Trump and give him a chance. What exactly does that mean? That I should just not comment at all if I disagree with what the president is doing? If so, for how long? A few months? A year? His entire term? That is ridiculous. You can’t sit back and ignore what is wrong in the name of ‘giving him a chance’.

 

While others parse politics, Rick Stromoski goes instead for morality in today's Soup to Nutz, and hits the bull's eye.

It seems naive to banter over how people praise or reject contemporary literature when they are so willing to praise, ignore and misinterpret the classic book they nearly all claim to be the centerpiece of their morality.

 

(Hope you guess my name!)

 

Keeping current

It's not easy to come up with topical cartoons, and poor Tim Eagan gives us a case study of how quickly things can fall apart.

This is brilliant work. It's an excellent predator/prey metaphor and he did a truly great job of melding Putin's face with that of the self-satisfied lion.

Really, really nice work.

And then the son of a bitch agreed to go to the NATO meeting after all.

More frustrating, in my mind, is this multi-panel analytical piece by Ann Telnaes (go here to read the rest), a strong commentary on our health care system and not simply on the Republican's now-failed plan to undermine it.

Eagan's cartoon is about a specific situation that no longer obtains, so it had a short shelf life, but it can also be argued that the cartoon was among the straws that broke the camel's back, and, if Eagan can't claim all the credit for that reversal, he's certainly part of the reaction that caused it.

However, the alleged GOP health care "reform" was only the hook for Telnaes' commentary, and she's among a quiet chorus saying "Let's fix what we have."

Not only does that not change with the demise of RINOcare, but it still matters, perhaps even more now: The Republican plan to "watch Obamacare explode" isn't likely a plan to just "watch" but rather to continue to sabotage it, as they have in those states where it doesn't work because of failure to extend Medicaid or simply to rein in predators.

It's as if, in the 1900s, states had passed laws against opening gas stations so that they could declare the motorcar a failure.

Well, we'll see.

Reform of health care needs to continue, but progressives may be reluctant to push against an already embattled caucus and, besides, with RINOcare off the table, who cares anymore?

Staying relevant is hard.

 

Juxtaposition of the concussions:

Leftfielder Lalo Alcaraz and Centerfielder Nick Anderson bashed heads while going after the same fly ball. And, to make it worse, they're side-by-side alphabetically on the GoComics feed.

The datelines look as if Alcaraz got there first, but they showed up online all but simultaneously -- his apparently late on the 24th, Anderson's apparently in the early hours of the 26th.

So, as ballplayers will know, Lalo only got there "first" in the sense of getting Nick's forehead right in the chops instead of vice-versa.

Alas, there's no system in cartooning by which you can yell "Got it!" and warn your teammates away. 

At least it was a cool idea. It would be a shame to lose teeth over something lame.

 

Meanwhile ...

Kal makes it look so damn easy. Trump-the-Magician is only so-so, but the expression on that rabbit's face turns a B- into an A+.

There didn't even have to be a rabbit, or we might have seen a bunnytail just disappearing into the wings. The empty hat would have been sufficient.

But you only get a B- for being sufficient.

 

Anatomically Correct:

While I'm praising small touches, Michael de Adder's new "Leadership" cartoon sent me digging through the Recycle Bin for the elephants that ran here yesterday.

Note the anatomical differences: In Horsey's cartoon, a huge, fierce mammoth makes an African elephant -- big and be-tusked as he is -- quake, while, in Varvel's, the clueless analysts also confront an African elephant, which could be scored a "miss" since the legend is Asian, but Asian elephants are far more tractable than their African cousins, so, again, the fiercer elephant is the better choice.

But de Adder goes not just for an Asian elephant -- the small ears and different forehead identify it as such -- but retains its baby hair, making it both absurdly clueless and also anatomically correct for the species upon which a howdah would be mounted. Or, in this case, under which.

Showing GOP leadership on the wrong side of a proud, fierce elephant would greatly undercut the message, just as the other two cartoons would have been blunted by a less than deadly animal.

You shouldn't lose sleep over such things, but neither should you ignore them.

 

Elsewhere in the same universe

Edison Lee weighs in with a non-political political commentary. As noted here before, many strip cartoonists are finding it hard to ignore what's going on, or to just make mild "alternative facts" gags.

This particular strip has never shied away from mixing politics in with its usual social commentary and, in fact, when it launched in 2016 2006,I felt it was a little ham-handed on politics. Since then, the strip has found its legs and, while I'm sure they'll get letters, the commentary is well blended with the strip's established characters and tone.

As for politics on the Funny Pages, you can't stay relevant forever by just stealing pies from windowsills and knocking off top hats with snowballs.

 

Juxtaposition of Technological Change

(Frazz)

(Pajama Diaries)

Frazz muses on the invasive nature of evolving technology and I laughed, but I also took the warning. We ponder the ethics of cloning humans, but there are other things we're capable of that seemed to go unquestioned.

Except by Frazz, and who cares what a janitor thinks? Or a little kid? Right?

But one benefit of new technology is that there's very little reason for crappy pictures of your kids. With good cameras in every phone and the advantage of being able to review and delete and try again, the only excuse for having really crappy pictures of your kids is that once a year they'll take one at school and bludgeon you into buying 100 copies of it.

Those photos of over-groomed, over-posed kids in front of fake backgrounds are as outdated as the old daguerreotypes where everyone had to sit perfectly still for way too long. 

You have to wonder how much of the moment either of them ever really manage to capture.

 

Memories beyond the old photographs:

 

 

Happy Meals

Soup to Nutz offers a grim but funny -- yes, that's possible -- commentary on the search for humane meat.

I do believe in humane treatment of animals, even those destined for the table. What life they have, however short, should not be brutal, at least beyond the facts of life, their fact of life being "You are food."

And that is the fact, for them: "Circle of Life" and all that.

Perhaps I've said this here already, because it's been on my mind recently, but when I was a kid, there was a very common coming-of-age story in children's fiction and on television: The 4H kid who raises a calf, wins a blue ribbon and then has to deal with the reality that the calf is headed for market, and what that means.

There are tears, and there's plenty of sympathy from adults who remember their own coming-of-age, but it's one of those things a farm kid needed to go through. 

Adapting to reality doesn't mean becoming insensitive: Even tough little pioneer girls Laura and Mary Ingalls ran inside and covered their ears when Pa slaughtered the hog.

But "Charlotte's Web" took the opposite tack, and maybe that was a bridge between those old countrified days and modern Sesame Street times: E.B.White, for all his affection for country life, was a transplant from the city, in a century in which the flow was inexorably headed the other direction.

In the old stories, one lesson was that you don't name your food.

You can name the milk cow and you can name the horses or oxen, whichever you have, but you don't name the chickens and, having once made the mistake of naming your 4H project, you learn to refer, thenceforth, to the calf as "the calf."

But the lesson of naming your pig "Wilbur" was not to suck it up and learn about life but to ... well, I don't know. 

White never wrote a sequel, but my guess is that Fern, having never really adapted to farm life, got herself a scholarship to Bryn Mawr and wound up as an editorial assistant somewhere where meat comes in little foam trays covered with Saran Wrap.

I was editing a story this week about the new tiger exhibit at the Denver Zoo, and my 11-year-old reporter wrote that the tigers are happy because they have twice as much space as in their old quarters.

I changed it to "seem more relaxed" because, beyond whether or not he was qualified to psychoanalyze a tiger, I remembered what the director of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo told me years ago, when they had just built a new space for their Siberian tigers.

He noted that Siberian tigers in particular have an enormous range in the wild and that, while it was good to get them on grass and not concrete and to give them a pond and a log to play on, the fact is, if they had what they really wanted, none of the tourists would ever see them, and that this was true of all the animals in the zoo.

That's not a slam on zoos, which not only educate and inspire the public, but do a great deal these days to preserve endangered species.

After all, the fact that we still have bison in the wild is due in large part to a herd that had lived in the Bronx Zoo until it was set free on the plains more than a century ago.

And the Denver Zoo is an active participant in a program in Mongolia centered on a wildlife preserve there.

But the bottom line is that making animals "happy" is quite a different matter, a very complicated, anthropomorphic pursuit about which only pure vegans have standing to comment.

(By "pure vegans" I mean not those who simply do not eat animal products but those who also only wear clothing made from animals who died hundreds of millions of years ago, in the Plasticine Period.)

Specific to chickens and pork and beef and such, I think we did better when our food was raised on local farms and ranches, before it became centralized in factories, both in terms of how the animals lived before they no longer did, and in terms of how healthful and tasty they may have been when they arrived at the table.

But, again, you have to figure out when you think that line was crossed. It seems that letting cattle run wild across the Texas plains was wonderfully humane, but at some point, if we were going to have cities, we had to round them up, shove them into boxcars and transport them to Chicago to be put into feedlots and then turned into beef to feed those cities.

The operative phrase being "if we were going to have cities."

I don't think we would be able to depopulate the cities in order to end factory farming and I'm not sure it would be a good idea anyway.

We've built up the population of our cities to the point where turning them all loose would simply fill the countryside with city folks who had been raised in cramped, inhumane little apartments where they had to be kept from pecking each other to death and who have, over generations, had all their natural instincts bred out of them.

They'd probably just wander aimlessly around in LL Bean clothes, writing essays about the philosophical wonders of country life for NPR and buying chickens to which they would give names, rendering them inedible.

Not that they'd be making very many new mistakes. Fact is, they're a tradition that goes way back.

 

For instance:

 

 

Too soon old, too late smart

Warming up with the whole "saddest words" thing over at Candorville.

Lemont is moving to Canada to be with his girlfriend in Vancouver, whose name, as far as we know so far, is simply "Vancouver." They met on-line and he's been up there to visit her.

Once.

I'd love to be a romantic, but, boy oh boy, I'm with C-Dog on this one.

Go spend two weeks before you make the big move.

Better yet, take a road trip together. I once took a road trip with a gorgeous, wonderful woman I thought made the sun rise.

By Day Four, we despised each other. Permanently. Until then, I had no idea how small a car could be.

By contrast, a few months later, I took another road trip with a terrific woman and, on the third day, she asked me to drop her off at an airport so she could fly home. When I got back to town, we continued to date, we broke up very reluctantly, I still wonder how things might have turned out if we'd stayed together.

Besides that we wouldn't have taken a lot of road trips, or none that last more than two days. Apparently, getting out on the third day is the charm.

Come to think of it, her subsequent life involved a lot of road trips and I'm talking to places like Nepal and Africa. 

Maybe it was me.

Anyway, I'm not unsympathetic to Lemont, because, I, too, had a perfect girlfriend from Vancouver.

At least, I think she was from Vancouver. She was going to Simon Fraser, anyway.

We only knew each other for about two days, and then I left on a road trip alone and hadn't gone very far before I realized I probably should have learned more about her, like her last name, except I thought she'd still be there when I got back.

I'll admit "I thought she'd still be there" is pretty high on the list of things only a young man would say, but, had I gotten back sooner than six weeks later and had she not been living in a bus, it all might have worked out. 

Well, what the hell. You can't screw things up with a lover you can't even find, so I'm ahead of Lemont on that count.

(But if your name is Glinda and you went to Simon Fraser back when it was shiny and new, drop me an email.)

 

At the other end of time

This morning's Retail hits on the day after my bank sent me a new debit card with a chip, which is a new, much more secure way of tying things up forever at the checkout. 

That's probably not true. I suspect that there is little difference between the time it takes to swipe and enter your PIN and then wait for the thing to say "Approved" and the time it takes to stick your chip card in the reader and wait for the thing to tell you you can pull it out again, but it seems longer.

On the other hand, nothing -- not even people counting out exact change from their coin purses -- takes as long as the person who waits for a final total before even writing the name of the store on the check, then fills out the whole thing because why would you let the cash register fill it out, and then updates their balance.

Well, except for the person who doesn't even take out the checkbook until all the groceries have been checked through.

One of the consolations of growing old is that your annoyance is not ageism.

It's a matter of having been around to recognize that, indeed, "there's no fool like an old fool."

 

Gray Snowflakes

(Loose Parts)

(Rubes)

I was thinking that Norm Feuti was wise to make his check-writing guy middle-aged and not "old" but then Dave Blazek and Leigh Rubin took us into the animal kingdom with this pair.

My response to these cartoons is to laugh, but my response to the overall topic is that I don't get it.

I started graying in my latter teens. Not enough to see at a distance, but enough at the temples to have girls pull back from a slow dance and exclaim "You've got gray hair!"

Never lost a minute's sleep over it, or going bald, which happened considerably later, and I have often been puzzled by the guys whose fragile, vain response seems based on making the situation far worse.

I worked with a newscaster who was known behind his back as "Monsantohead," though he had the excuse of having to go on air.

Which would have been an even better excuse if we'd been in television and not radio.

His toup, however, was as seamless as Sean Connery's, compared to the plastic raccoon worn by one of my publishers.

Fortunately, we never had to worry about him overhearing us joke about it, because his aftershave invariably walked into the room 20 minutes before he did.

And I do not in the least understand Walt Frasier selling hair color for men, because Clyde was the epitome of cool in his day, and it's kind of sad to see him being so silly about it.

The other day, I referenced Julius Erving here and, in looking for links, found out what he looks like now.

I'd be thrilled to rock the gray like Dr. J.

  

An I-told-you-so update:

Yesterday, I said Steve Sack has been on fire lately and apparently I'm not the only one who noticed.

Later that day, we learned that the Overseas Press Club has given him the Thomas Nast Award, which is considered a very cool editorial cartooning honor.

Here's Michael Cavna's write-up, which includes quotes from Sack and runner-up Adam Zyglis.

Zyglis also appears here with some frequency and I might have snagged his current assessment of the Russian connection anyway.

 

 

Now here's your moment of zen