Christmas Light Chicken
I received in the mail yesterday a copy of the New Yorker Complete Book of Cartoons. The book has two CDs with every cartoon published in the New Yorker from 1924 to 2004. I bought the paperback version and this book weighs a lot. If I want to keep reading the book in bed I will need to sit up in order to avoid organ damage. Last night, I read the first decade while on my back. Thankfully, I have abs of steel and blankets to support the weight of this tome but even my fabulous abs could not support this book for more than 30 minutes. Also, the book is huge - we will need a bigger coffee table for it. Entertainment and exercise in one volume.
Whenever I get around to it, my next comic strip music video will feature Ed Crankshaft, using Isaac Hayes' Theme to Shaft. That Ed Crankshaft is one bad mother - Shut your mouth - I'm only talking about 'Shaft. I don't know what surprises me more - the Crankshaft household having that many hair dryers or Ed Crankshaft not owning a high powered heat blower.
According to Mary Worth and Me the song is Waiting for a Star to Fall by Boy Meets Girl. It's a song from the 1980's that receives very little air play - thankfully. Go to Mary Worth and Me if you feel like hearing it. Fortunately, that blog has some other fine lounge music. I'm surprised that Karen Moy is aware of anything from the 1980's. Then again, she could be close to my age and Drew and Vera could be written as people in their late 30's. Shudder.
In twenty years, Snoop Dogg's Sensual Seduction (more likely, a white person's cover of the song), will make it to the Junction Cafe jukebox.
Vera - enough with the purple! A purple Michelin Man coat, a purple blazer and a purple skirt? Angling for an appearance on What Not to Wear - the comic strip edition? Vera, you're too young for the Red Hat Society, so please stop dressing like them.
This comic strip reflect part of my job. Paperless office - not as long as we have people that cannot stare at a monitor for too long.
A comic peeve: inappropriate aging of characters. Is there a law mandating that every comic parent be of boomer age even if they are too old to be parents of the children in the comic? I estimate that the children in Soup to Nutz are between the ages of 8 and 12. Let's assume that the parents were 12 during the Cuban Missile Crisis - born in 1950. Wikipedia claims that the duck and cover was taught into the 1980's - but I'm going to go by my experience and assume that the parents went to elementary school in the 1950's and early 1960's. Both parents would be in their late 50's and would have had their first born in their late 40's. It is possible that the parents went to one of those schools that still taught duck and cover in the 1980's. The odd parental aging thing also appears in Curtis. The Duncans in Zits are of boomer age but their sons are in college and high school - a more realistic age.
I want to get this joke. Someone attempt to explain.
About the title of this blog entry - we, the next door neighbors and the neighbors across the street appear to be playing Christmas Light chicken. None of us has taken down our lights yet. If our lights stay up then there will be no nagging - the neighbors have taken down their lights, why don't you take down ours? The next door neighbor has the most elaborate set up with animated reindeer. Ours is the simplest - lights draped in a tree. The lights along our front walkway have been brought in and I put the Christmas trees up last Saturday.
4 comments:
I'm 45--some say the tail end of the boomer generation (I buy this sort of, as the youngest of 4 kids; I don't count my friends who were the oldest in their families but the same age as me in this though and I know that doesn't make sense, but it's what I've got). Anyway, I do remember being taught to duck under the desks in the late 60s early 70s. Somewhere in there, though, they changed from bomb drills (what the hell was that desk going to do against an Atom Bomb, I ask you? they were made of plywood, not lead!) to earthquake drills (made more sense in So. Cal than it would most anywhere else). Anyway, my kids are in the 9 to 14 age range, so, it is possible by this lengthy stretch of logic for a boomer such as myself to have a kid that age.
Phew!
I'm so ashamed to admit that I recognized the song in MW right away (I can name that bad piece of crap 80s song in one note). I am so, so depressed by this fact....
I don't think I stated the comic peeve very well. I finally figured it out while driving to the gym. It is the dissonance between characters who do not age and the parents of the characters dating themselves thus implying that the rest of time moves forward. Blondie and Dagwood are the parents of two teenagers. The comic is 75 years old. It would cause some dissonance if Blondie and Dagwood referred to say going to Woodstock in their teen years or speakeasies and the Charleston (Blondie started out as a flapper). It's comic creators trying to remain timeless but yet making specific dated references.
re: GPS. I think that the sink is overflowing because the water cannot swirl clock-wise OR counter clock-wise. It doesn't make a lick of sense.
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