There is no such thing as a free lunch, part 549

Recently, on Zach Weinersmith's SMBC:

The embedded comment in the original comic (you'll have to click the link above to see for yourself) is, "The front part of my gas powered car is also emission free."

It's not quite as bleak as Mr. Weinersmith portrays it. Yet, if you consult the Wikipedia entry for Lithium-Ion battery, you will find (as of 2/23/22, internal links and footnotes removed):

Extraction of lithium, nickel, and cobalt, manufacture of solvents, and mining byproducts present significant environmental and health hazards. Lithium extraction can be fatal to aquatic life due to water pollution. It is known to cause surface water contamination, drinking water contamination, respiratory problems, ecosystem degradation and landscape damage. It also leads to unsustainable water consumption in arid regions (1.9 million liters per ton of lithium). Massive byproduct generation of lithium extraction also presents unsolved problems, such as large amounts of magnesium and lime waste.

Lithium mining takes place in North and South America, Asia, South Africa, Australia, and China.

Cobalt for Li-ion batteries is largely mined in the Congo....

The linked Wikipedia article also notes, "Cobalt sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo is often mined by workers using hand tools with few safety precautions, resulting in frequent injuries and deaths. Pollution from these mines has exposed people to toxic chemicals that health officials believe to cause birth defects and breathing difficulties. Human rights activists have alleged, and investigative journalism reported confirmation, that child labor is used in these mines" (internal links and footnotes omitted).

I'm not suggesting that you ditch your Tesla, if you have one, or don sackcloth and ashes for the sin of driving a Prius.

EVs provide still another illustration, if one were really still needed, that there is nothing perfect in this very imperfect human world. The issue is whether EVs are better, on balance, for the world generally, and for the environment in particular, than gasoline-guzzling vehicles. I suspect that the scales tip, at least slightly, in favor of EVs, particularly when one considers the horrors that pertrodollars (or petroeuros) have unleashed on the world.

Kids in the Congo may balance the scales differently, I understand.

Which is why the search for 'clean' energy no more ends with EVs than it did with swapping coal for wood.

There's Siri, Alexa, and, at our house, Grampy....

One of my favorite comic strips, Tim Rickard's Brewster Rockit, has noted that our increasingly ubiquitous digital assistants, like Siri and Alexa, are apparently all female, and has asked the question, what if the personal assistant were male instead? Hilarity, or at least some cleverly recycled jokes, followed:

Yesterday's installment poked fun at 'mansplaining':

Mansplaining, for any of you who might not know, is... wait... I'm walking right into that one, aren't I?

Anyway, at the Curmudgeon home, we don't have Siri or Alexa. The whole idea of one of these 'listening' constantly, waiting to be of service, just creeps me out. And Long Suffering Spouse completely agrees with me on this. Besides, she doesn't need Siri or Alexa. She has me.

My wife's relationship with technology (as they used to say on Facebook) is 'complicated.' She must use it every day at school and, usually, long into the night at home (on schoolwork). During the total lockdown phase of our never-ending Pandemic she had to master a host of new apps -- Google Classroom may have been the biggest, but there were several plug-ins that she needed to learn, too. And, for whatever reason, just as in every other trade or profession, apps and programs for teachers are constantly being 'updated' (which usually means 'made worse'). At best, new software means learning new commands and orders of operation because why leave well enough alone?

I think software programmers must have a sadistic streak. Some, anyway.

But my wife copes with these -- not without complaint, mind you, but she copes. And learns. And manages.

However, my wife also can not turn on the TV. If the TV is on, she can not change the channel. And she has no concept of whether a program is on the satellite dish (for the moment, until I get around to it, we remain DirecTV subscribers) or streamed on Roku. And during the height of the Pandemic, when the faithful were not allowed to attend the Mass in person, we watched the services from our home parish via Twitch. Which involves changing plug-ins. Long Suffering Spouse was never going to do that.

So it has become my job to operate the TV. And in the sense that, maybe sometimes, it takes quite a while for me to find a program I am willing to watch, today's Brewster Rockit hits sort of close to home:

Actually, I also had TV operational responsibilities in my youth.

When my folks moved to Boondockia, in the late 60s, the National Football League still blacked out home football games in a team's home market. That meant if the Bears were playing at home, the game would not be broadcast in Chicago. But Rockford had its own TV stations, of the low-powered UHF variety, but still. And Rockford was only a little further from Boondockia than was Chicago, albeit west instead of southeast, and the Rockford stations were permitted to carry all the Bears games, home and away.

As a South Sider, my father grew up a fan of the Chicago Cardinals. The Cardinals left Chicago in the late 1950s (first for St. Louis, later for Arizona). The Bears' owner, George Halas, was widely blamed, among Cardinals fans, for driving their team out of town. I am sure some Chicago football fans transferred their allegiance from the departing Cardinals to the remaining Bears as a matter of course, but my father was not one of these. It took me years to figure out why, but we watched an awful lot of American Football League games back when I was a little kid. (If you even skim the Archives here, you will find many examples of how I've been equally slow on the uptake in a variety of other matters.)

I don't know what ultimately softened my father's attitude toward the Bears. Maybe it was the heroics of ex-Bear George Blanda for the Oakland Raiders. Blanda was still an effective QB for the Raiders well into his 40s, albeit only in limited action, mostly late in games, if Daryle Lamonica was injured or ineffective. Blanda was Tom Brady before Tom Brady was born (although, in his 40s Blanda looked twice as old as Brady does now). On the other hand, Blanda also kicked field goals and extra points. This is something Brady never did. And is unlikely ever to do.

But while Blanda may have had something to do with my father's change of heart, my best guess it was the move to Boondockia that sealed the deal. I think my father may have felt he was finally getting his own back on Halas a little bit by bringing in the Rockford signal of the Bears' home games into our den. And we got that signal with me, holding the antenna on the TV set in some awkward pose, or holding the antenna detached from the set in an even more contorted pose. The picture, what I could see of it, was at best a bit snowy, even on sunny days. It was a good thing the Bears wore navy blue uniform shirts during home games.

So maybe my youthful TV operation is not entirely comprable -- I don't have to get out of my recliner now, for one thing -- but the point is, I am used to operating the TV on command.

But these are not the limits of my duties as an older, male Alexa.

We will be watching a movie and Long Suffering Spouse will remark, "That actress was in something else we like. Look her up." Mind you, my wife's phone is next to her at all times and, if she is not on her computer, she is probably on her iPad. But I must be the one to look it up. And report.

Or she will be doing schoolwork. She'll look up and say, "Hey, have we heard from Middle Son this week? Text him and find out how he is doing." I always include her on the group chat lest she think I have failed to carry out her command and, also, so she will have the response she is looking for immediately, without the middleman.

When she is through correcting, Long Suffering Spouse has to assign grades. "So, there's 26 points on this quiz," she'll tell me. "What's 18 out of 26?" I promise you that she has calculators on her phone, her iPad, and her computer, but I have to perform the calculation. "69%," I will report (in case you were wondering).

I have many advantages over Alexa or Siri. Nothing I hear is getting beyond the room we're sitting in, at least not by accident. Who knows who might be listening at Apple or Google? And Long Suffering Spouse does not have to worry about getting weird ads on her phone just because she asks a question. That's now my problem.

"Curmudgeon," Long Suffering Spouse said to me recently, tossing me the label from a skein of yarn (she'd been making scarves for the grandchildren). "Order me three more of these. Same color."

I obliged, of course. And had the softest, fluffiest popup ads ever, for about a month....

Masked confusion

In his most recent Sunday strip, Stephan Pastis engaged in sorta-kinda wishful thinking. Yes, Lucy pulled the ball away, as always, but, right now, in the U.S. at least, nobody is seriously saying that the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

New reported infections have reached record levels, hospitalizations are soaring, ICU beds are scarce -- it's gotten very old. It's like Groundhog's Day every day... except the calendar advances and we're all Bill Murray. I remember when we used to chuckle acidly when we asked whether the "two weeks to flatten the curve" were up yet. It may have still been amusing two months in. We're coming up on two years now of these miserable two weeks.

Until recently, anyway, the Curmudgeon family has fared remarkably well during this time. During the initial phase of the lockdown, Long Suffering Spouse (who, as you will recall, is a teacher) learned the intricacies of Google Classroom and a bunch of other related stuff. However, as the Spanish teacher, she was not required to conduct regular classes during the Spring of 2020 (the focus then was on keeping the kids going on math, English, and history). While Long Suffering Spouse did all sorts of school-related work during that time, she did have more time on her hands than she was used to.

Then, one gloomy Saturday in April -- on or about April 4 is my best guess but, of course, all the days were really the same when most everyone took the lockdown seriously -- we saw a story on the news about masks.

I know it must be hard to recollect, now, nearly two years later, but there was a time when the public health authorities were not all persuaded about the utility of masks. In fact, some authorities -- recognized authorities I'm talking here, not YouTube or TikTok crazies -- were concerned that constantly wearing masks might endanger the health of the persons wearing the masks! And, besides, they argued then, there was no certainty that wearing a mask would ward off a COVID-19 infection.

Of course, at that time -- and remember, please, I'm talking about nearly two years ago now -- there was some serious dispute as to whether Covid could be contracted from the air. It turns out -- I remember looking this up, and I had a lot of time, at that time, to look things up -- that medicine generally has (had? by now hopefully had?) a knee-jerk prejudice against believing in airborne viruses. So... droplets? Sure. Contaminated bananas at the grocery? Wipe everything down before putting anything away. It doesn't matter if I don't have all the details right here; I'm confident I have the gist of it.

Health care professionals should wear masks -- that was the original position -- but the rest of us either did not need them or, even if we did, should not wear them because PPP, like toilet paper, was a scarce commodity. It was our patriotic duty not to wear masks. Save them for the doctors and nurses and EMTs!

And that's why, that gloomy April Saturday nearly two years ago, it came as a bit of a surprise when the TV news advised the CDC had decided that mask-wearing might not be such a bad idea for everyone after all. However, since PPP was still scarce as hen's teeth, we the people should go online and find patterns for cloth masks. Thus advised, Long Suffering Spouse immediately got up and got out the sewing machine. And started making masks. Lots of masks. For us. For the kids. For the grandkids.

Her early models had long ties, kind of like the surgical masks on old TV doctor shows. Mask down, I was Ben Casey (I'd leave the bottom string tied up around my neck). Mask up, I was fixin' to rob the 3:10 stage from Dodge City. (Throw down that chest with the railroad payroll money!)

But Long Suffering Spouse soon graduated to models with elastic ear loops. And we ran out of old sheets pretty quick, too. That meant trips -- careful, cautious trips -- to Michael's or JoAnn Fabrics for cloth for masks. In the many, many months since, Long Suffering Spouse has created all sorts of seasonal masks. She needed 'em -- her school was open throughout the 2020-2021 school year and she wore a new mask each day -- and she would fill special orders from the kids and grandkids too (you want unicorns? mermaids? no problem).

I had my one brief shining moment concerning masks during one of these fabric scrounging trips some months back. I saw a bolt of gray fabric with a black and white Dunder Mifflin Paper Company logo. "Grab some of this," I suggested, "the kids will love masks made from this pattern." My wife had no idea what I was talking about -- but she got the fabric and made the masks and the kids did like them. I think one of the kids, or at least an in-law, actually wore The Office mask on a brief trip to his or her actual office. Remember just a couple of months ago... when people were talking about reopening offices?

Anyway, I think it safe enough to say that Long Suffering Spouse has a serious investment in cloth masks. A personal investment.

But the news changed again, just within the past few days. The omicron variant is so contagious that cloth masks alone will no longer suffice. Even if decorated with mermaids, unicorns, or the logo of a fictional paper company. Cloth masks would have to be worn, if at all, with the blue surgical masks. Better yet, according to the latest thinking, we should all start wearing the KN95 masks or their equivalents (the equivalents have similar names but are manufactured in different places) that were in such short supply at the outset of these interminable two weeks.

And then the news advised that all of Chicago's 50 aldermen had been provided with KN95 masks to give away to constituents.

Apparently the supplies of KN95 masks have been replenished. (But... have you noticed? Toilet paper seems to be getting scarce again. On our last two trips to the grocery, before and after Christmas, the shelves that weren't empty in the toilet paper aisle were filled with no-name, off-brand substitutes....)

Anyway, my course was clear. And, if I hadn't figured it out all by myself, Long Suffering Spouse made sure I understood: I was to get myself to the alderman's office posthaste and grab me as many of those masks as I could get. And maybe I could ask, while I was at it, if some of these special masks might be made available to the teachers at my wife's school.

It's good to have a purpose. I've spent most of this global Pandemic as an empty vessel into which stimulus checks might be poured. The checks didn't make up for the costs of groceries I consumed... but it was some contribution anyway.

Anyway, I sent an email to the alderman's office inquiring about the availability of the masks, and while I was at it I asked about masks for the teachers as well. I got a prompt response, too: The alderman had made arrangements to take care of the school.

You could read the email in such a way as to think that maybe I had something to do with that. Long Suffering Spouse thought so, when I forwarded it to her. Her principal may have thought so, too, when Long Suffering Spouse forwarded it to her.

But the truth of the matter is entirely different. The alderman and one of the other teacher's husbands are buddies and the masks came through him.

Ah well.

But I did pick up our household allotment of 10 KN95 masks and Long Suffering Spouse is wearing one of them now. Or maybe one of the ones dropped off at the school. These masks all look alike. No mermaids or unicorns or anything.

I guess we need them. The Covid is all around us. Again. And, unlike past surges, or peaks, the disease has this time hit close to home: Since November, four of my five kids, three of their spouses, and seven of my grandkids have come down with the bug. Only four of my grandkids are old enough to receive vaccinations, but everyone who could has had at least two shots. Most of us (including me) are fully vaxxed and boostered. Thankfully, the virus has made no one in our immediate family seriously ill. My wife attributes this to the vaccinations and the masks. She's probably right. But I don't care as much as I suppose I should: I just want this to be over.

The Perils of Punditry? Knowing when... and how... to hold your fire

Stephan Pastis nails it again in yesterday's installment of Pearls Before Swine (image obtained from GoComics.com).

He does have a platform -- a daily comic strip -- from which to issue Important Pronouncements about the state of the nation and the world and the species. And, of course, from time to time, he does, usually in an amusing way. As he does here.

You beg to differ, perhaps. You will not contest whether the strip is or is not amusing -- what strikes me as funny may leave thee cold -- but, you say, this strip does not make an Important Pronouncement.

But think for a moment: What he is saying here is that, sometimes, at least, it's OK not to be consumed with the Big Issue of the day. Sometimes it's OK not to expound on the same issue that everyone else is expounding (and pounding) upon. (Twitter may devour you for failing to Do Your Duty and foist your Proper Opinion on the rest of the world, but that's another story. And who are the Twitterati to tell us what to speak, and when, anyway?)

Sometimes it's OK just to think about obscure Scrabble words. Or something else that interests you. (I haven't actually checked to see if "crwth" is really in the Scrabble Disctionary. But I remember the rhyme from when I was a child -- The vowels are A, E, I, O, and U/ And sometimes Y or W. Perhaps this is the word where W serves as a vowel. There had to be at least one or it would never have made it into the rhyme... right?)

Fact is, we are all pundits these days, or we can be, with Facebook or Twitter or even Instagram or Tik Tok as our Public Platforms. I was already one among millions when I started this blog... now I may be just one among billions. My opinions are as strongly held as ever -- as Long Suffering Spouse would attest, when she sits with me during the evening news -- but they are mere drops of water in an endless ocean of online opinion.

I am grateful for the reiminder that I am under no obligation to share them all. Neither is Mr. Pastis. Neither are you.

That does not mean we should not speak our minds. But we can pick and choose our shots. Maybe even -- and I know this is crazy -- but maybe even when we're not shouting into the void... we might actually be able to listen?

Do you know where your children and grandchildren are getting their news?

The headline sounds rather like those grim and accusatory later-night TV announcements of my youth: "It's 10:30 p.m. [curfew]. Do you know where your children are?"

You're here online... looking for something, presumably... so you are a step ahead of so many of our fellow citizens who consume news only from television.

You have perhaps already noticed... and rebelled against... your being funnelled into tribal groups in ways that surpass anything that poor, crazy Howard Beale imagined in the eerily (and presumably unintentionally) prophetic movie Network. Fox News... OAN... MSNBC... CNN... the demons on one network are the plaster saints on another. Shades of gray are ignored and overlooked. Matt Taibbi has written extensively, and persuasively, on this subject (see, in particular, Taibbi's book, "Hate, Inc."

The modern political and media landscape reminds me of the child's game, Mad-libs, where random nouns and verbs and adjectives are inserted into unseen sentences (unseen until all the blanks have been filled in, that is) to alleged comic effect. In my real life I get emails from all sides of the political spectrum. They are typically chock-full of overwrought, hysterical, the-sky-is-falling rhetoric -- it seems that only the proper nouns differ -- Pelosi is used in this one, Trump is used in that one, and so on. But the sentences are otherwise the same. They could be written by the same person. For all I know, they may be. I'd accuse that hypothetical person of being a Russian... but then I'd be stooping to the same level, wouldn't I?

Anyway, some people go trustingly into tribes. You, reading here, are resisting the siren call of one side or the other. (Here, you're in a no-tribe zone. Not because I'm so rational or anything; it's just that neither side would have me.)

It seems that a lot of people resist being placed into tribes. Many folks, apparently, have simply lost trust in the media, doubting everything they read or hear or see. Chaos ensues.

Our kids and grandkids never had trust in the media to lose. We may have become disillusioned with the 'dead tree media' and or the 'MSM' but our young people never paid attention to either. They get their news... if they get it at all... online. I remember my Oldest Son's snide remark while visiting one day, seeing the Sunday Tribune on the couch in the living room: "Look at that!" he said, feigning astonishment. "They've put the Internet on paper so old people can read it!"

Long Suffering Spouse, a middle school Spanish teacher, always asks her students for names of people important to them so that she can incorporate the names in games or skits teaching conversational skills. Some years ago, the names suggested for these lists moved from sports figures (though admittedly there are still some every year) or TV stars to YouTube or Instagram or, increasingly, TikTok "influencers." I know, because she brings home her list every year and makes me Google the names.

Every now and then some weisenheimer will try and get a porn star included on this list -- or nominate some persons whose views are wholly inappropriate in my wife's Catholic school. I'm not talking about these.

What this tells me is that people still crave information and knowledge of the world beyond their immediate circle. But, increasingly, they are seeking that information and knowledge from sources we never heard of and could not imagine.

Weird stuff follows. Because reporting what those crazy young people are up to -- especially if it's done in a snide and superior tone -- has a long-standing tradition in this country. An online outfit called Distractify published a list of school challenges allegedly making the rounds on Tik Tok. The article claims that Tik Tok users are challenging school kids to perform these tasks (and post their results) during the 2021-22 school year:

September: Vandalize school bathrooms

October: Smack a staff member

November: Kiss your friend’s girlfriend at school

December: Deck the halls and show your balls

January: Jab a breast

February: Mess up school signs

March: Make a mess in the courtyard or cafeteria

April: “Grab some eggz” (another stealing challenge)

May: Ditch day

June: Flip off in the front office

July: Spray a neighbor’s fence

It is my duty to report that Internet debunker Snopes.com found little or no evidence to support the contention that these 'challenges' are indeed making the rounds. (The linked post deals specifically with the October 'smack a teacher' challenge.) On the other hand, there were considerable media reports of school bathroom vandalism during September... even some relatively minor damage to a couple of the bathrooms at my wife's school... and the Tik Tok challenge was cited as an inspiration.

I don't know what's really going on with or on (Chinese-owned) Tik Tok. But I have come to realize that it has outsized importance among our kids and grandkids. That concerns me.

When I was a kid I listened to music that my parents did not like. But we watched the same newscasts, read the same newspapers (there were lots more of them, then). We even watched a lot of the same TV shows. We may have drawn different conclusions from what we read, or saw, and, of course, we often did -- but we were starting with the same raw material. We grown-ups dither now about the gaps among us, locked in our 'silos' or tribes, to the point where we do not seem to notice that there is also a gap between old and young -- and it's not just about music any more. It's about everything... and that frightens me more. Because we are not using the same raw materials to develop our own, unique world views.

Which brings me, at last, back to the Candorville comic (by Darrin Bell) at the top of this post. Long Suffering Spouse, for example, would not 'get' this. Even though one of the kids in her homeroom last year had 5,000 followers on Tik Tok. I think it's pretty funny. Funny... and a little scary, too.

Frivolous Friday: Potpourri edition

"Potpourri." That's a French word. It means "no organized theme."

Which fits right in with Second Effort generally, doesn't it?

Let's start in with this Wizard of Id strip from May 28 (all comics here obtained from Yahoo! Comics unless otherwise indicated):

This is a pet peeve of mine -- judging by some of the things my wife (a teacher) has picked up at schools or seminars, educators seriously believe that kids don't have to memorize things (like facts) anymore because Google has all the answers.

But -- and this is a huge but -- search engines know all the answers only, only, only if you know the right questions and if you know how to sort the wheat from the chaff in the results provided.

While we're on the subject of teachers, though, Grand Avenue (by Steve Breen and Mike Thompson) has been doing a series this week on the end of the school year. This one struck me as very funny:

My wife would probably disagree. She gave her 6th graders tests yesterday. They complained bitterly. How can you give us tests now, they protested, don't you know we get out of school next week?

One parent, lobbying (I guess) for her son to get a second retake of a test he'd bombed already twice, seemed to be making a similar argument. Long Suffering Spouse had to remind the parent that, next year, when her son goes to high school, his last class will be a final exam. The kid's mother is an intelligent, educated woman; surely she remembers this. The good news, I suppose, is that the mother is concerned about her son's grade. The bad news, however, is that her son stopped caring around the time he took his high school placement test. In January. And his grades reflect this. It isn't just this one test that has brought down his grade.

Sticking with schools, this Grand Avenue strip struck me as all too true:

But, as apprehensive as parents may be about the kids coming home for the summer, it does not compare to the relief that teachers feel at being rid of the little monsters, er, darlings for the summer. (See discussion above.)

We switch now to the terrible world of telemarketing. I do feel sorry for telemarketers. I do. They have horrible jobs and people mostly answer their calls just to scream at them. Still, there's humor even in this, as the following Duplex comic, by Glenn McCoy, from May 28, shows:

I've spent a lot of time here crowing about being a grandfather -- and I truly do love the gig. I mean it when I tell people it's the best club I've ever joined. Even so, this F Minus comic, by Tony Carrillo, from April 18, strikes me as all too true:

I lack the discerning eye of all those (in my family, it's the womenfolk) who can gaze at a newborn infant for 10 seconds and pronounce authoritatively that 'the baby has her father's eyes' or 'she has her mother's ears' or 'she has her Aunt Tessie's tushie.' No! I don't believe it. Newborn babies look remarkably like Winston Churchill or Richard J. Daley. Eventually, as they grow, they will resemble this relative or that one -- but sometimes, at least it seems to me, for only a little while because, with another growth spurt, they then resemble someone else entirely.

But that's my opinion only. The weight of authority is clearly against me on this one. I guess.

I enjoy reading the comics -- lots of comics -- every day. For amusement. For entertainment. For laughs. But sometimes... well, sometimes it seems the comics are used as a place for the artists to work out their own issues.

Recovering lawyer (and one of my favorites) Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine, may be going through some sort of rough patch and working it out right in front of us in our daily papers. At least if this May 23 Pearls strip is any indication:

This week, Stephan invents a little kid from down the street, a precocious 2nd grader named Libby, who turns out to be able to draw rings around the artistically-challenged Mr. Pastis (he's such a terrible artist that he's only syndicated in about a gazillion newspapers). Today's installment brings together his domestic issues, his insecurities about his artistic skills, and his concerns about how long there will be a gazillion papers to carry his work (and keep him from having to return to the practice of law):

I hope Mr. Pastis feels better soon. I hope his domestic issues are resolved satisfactorily. But, although it's a little dark for me to say it, right now, I'm sort of enjoying his pain.

Wow, that came out badly.

But not as badly, I'm afraid, as things turned out for Dorothy in this truly dark, (*ahem*) Wicked re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz in this May 28 Bizarro strip by Dan Piraro (this one was obtained from the Chicago Tribune Comics Kingdom):

------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE 6/7/14: This is so cool! Pardon me, while I gush like a teenager, but "Libby" in this week's Pearls episodes was none other than Bill Watterson. Yes, that Bill Watterson. The man who drew Calvin and Hobbes. The J.D. Salinger of cartooning. The recluse. Mr. Pastis kept the secret all week, but, he says, now the story can be told. Wow....

Frivolous Friday, biker bar edition

Bizarro Comic by Dan Piraro, obtained from Chicago Tribune Comics Kingdom.

Obtained from the Chicago Tribune, even though the comic itself runs in the Chicago Sun-Times. Ah, well.

You should be getting a full-fledged rant this morning about the latest outbreak of chaos in the Curmudgeon home, and how the unplanned activities of yesterday evening prevented me from getting to any of the things I was supposed to do last night. I also have a good post in mind about Long Suffering Spouse grading papers until 2:30 Thursday morning and identifying a number of really, really feeble attempts at plagiarism. That ought to be amusing.

And that's what you should be getting here.

Except that I didn't do any of the things I was supposed to do last night. So I have to do them now. And there are other things that must be done this morning as well because I won't be here this afternoon either. That might (or might not) turn into a post on this blog.

Have I whetted your appetite yet?

No?

I was afraid of that.

Curmudgeon takes stock at the end of a very long week

Luann comic, by Greg Evans, obtained from Yahoo! Comics.

If you saw last Saturday's post, you know why this comic struck home with me.

I'm still angry about what happened. How could I have let myself deteriorate to such an extent?

Mind you, I'm not sufficiently motivated yet to do anything about my evident physical decline -- I'm still in the hand-wringing stage -- and, besides, things are too hectic at home for me to take on some sort of conditioning venture. And what would I do anyway? The Chicago Marathon takes place this weekend and thousands of people, many of them older than me, are going to run 26.2 miles. I can't run 26.2 feet.

The good news is that I can bend my legs again without any pain. It only took several days.

Younger Daughter has already called this morning. Whatever is lurking in the fireplace chimney, just above the (thankfully) closed flue, is active again this morning -- not quite dead yet, apparently. Long Suffering Spouse heard it first. It's hard to describe my wife as she hears something alive and amiss: She gets entirely rigid, achingly alert, and waves of tension, maybe like sonar waves, emanate from the vicinity of her head and shoulders. But she was soon satisfied that, whatever it is, it isn't coming in the house anytime soon. Thus, we were able to leave the house and go to work today.

Younger Daughter was not mollified in the least when I related this to her. Long Suffering Spouse predicted how she'd be. "This is unacceptable," she told me. "Call someone to get that thing out of the chimney -- and be here when they get here," she demanded. I suggested she turn on the TV instead so she couldn't hear it. "I had the TV on," she said.

Of course, Younger Daughter's frayed nerves never had a chance to stop twanging: The Beast in the Chimney arrived Wednesday morning. Yesterday afternoon a giant wasp got into the house. (These things happen as we transition from Summer to Fall.) She used about 18 gallons of wasp spray in an effort to dispatch the creature -- she must have missed badly for some time -- and then couldn't find the wasp's carcass. "This is unacceptable," she told me yesterday afternoon. I suggested that, if the dead wasp had fallen to the floor, her baby would find it for her. Just keep an eye on the kid, I said.

Younger Daughter didn't like that one little bit.

Youngest Son is expected home sometime today. He has a week-long Fall break; he has graciously agreed to spend at least parts of three days of that with us. He has to go back to school early next week because he has to begin winterizing the baseball field. It's been gorgeous in the greater Chicago area the last couple of weeks -- but the one certainty about Midwest weather is that, now we're in October, Winter may begin at any moment. There's no transition required.

Long Suffering Spouse had a brutal week at school. She had an evaluation scheduled for yesterday and her principal is using a new method this year requiring the kind of detailed lesson plan that education majors don't have to write in their most paper-intense class. She's been up late every night this week stressing about the evaluation -- and trying to keep up with everything else she has to do. And then she had to schedule a conference with a problem student as well; that was supposed to take place at the end of the day yesterday.

The parent meeting did take place -- but the evaluation didn't. The principal had gotten behind. When Long Suffering Spouse found her later in the afternoon (giving her the lesson-plan-on-steroids) the principal was surprised. "Why didn't you send someone to get me?" she asked. "I figured you must have had someone in your office or that something else had come up," my wife said. Leafing through the massive lesson plan, the principal said, "Well, thank you for being so considerate." She promised to drop by some other time, assuring my wife that she needn't do another of these lesson plans.

My wife is not happy. "She's going to drop in on me unannounced and I'm going to look totally unprepared." I tried to reassure her -- she's always prepared -- but she wasn't buying.

We'll see how things go today. Fortunately, she has Monday off. Courts are closed Monday, too.

And I actually had some legal work to do this week. I'd tell you about some of that, too, except I still have legal work to do and the morning is getting away from me. Again.

The more contact numbers one has, the harder one is to reach

Click to enlarge or follow link below to original cartoon.

In a post earlier this month I mentioned in passing that the more contact numbers someone has, the harder they are to get hold of (I'll have to remember to include this in my next installment of Curmudgeon's Laws). Anyway, it appears that one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd, has noticed the same thing.

Naturally, I only understand half the references here, but I'm pretty sure I'm interpreting this correctly....

Everything I need to know I get from the comics, part 4,796

From the comic Bliss, by Harry Bliss; image obtained from the Chicago Tribune Comics Kingdom.

OK, I'm on deadline on a project and I don't have time to blog. But I still have to read the comics. And this one made me laugh.

Sometimes dreams do come true....

New Facebook privacy setting?

Obtained from FAIL Blog:

I've been too busy of late to craft any further snark about the revelations that the NSA is monitoring your grandmother's calls to QVC in the interest of foiling international terrorism, but Zach Weiner had a good take on the issue yesterday on SMBC (Mr. Weiner's language is more pungent than that usually employed here, but I ask your indulgence on this occasion):

I like Mr. Weiner's point about the "exchange rate."

I bet most kids today would flunk this test

Chuckle Bros. comic by Brian and Ron Boychuk, obtained from GoComics.

Oh, sure, we old folks think this comic funny because, after all, who can't copy words when the words are written out right in front of you?

The answer, I'm sorry to say, is today's kids. I'm going by what I see from my wife's junior high classes, so perhaps your kids' or grandkids' school is different. But I don't think so. My wife teaches at a private (Catholic) grade school where the students are from middle class backgrounds. According to their standardized test scores, just like the children of fictional Lake Wobegon, the kids at my wife's school are all (or almost all) above average.

And today's kids seem incapable of copying a word when it's written right in front of them.  My wife has showed me test paper after test paper proving this.

Why?

Part of it, I believe, is that teaching methods seem to have changed: When we were kids, we were expected to copy stuff off the board. Accuracy was compulsory; sloppiness was a punishable offense. We were forced to do this time and again in the primary grades, and the teacher actually looked at what we copied. Neatness counted. And graded us very harshly if we didn't copy correctly.  Thus, we learned -- we were required to learn -- how to do this.

Today, rote copying (and -- oh, my gosh, memorizing) are looked on as primitive, wrong, even abusive.  Today's kids didn't learn how to copy accurately in the primary grades; and, thus, they can't do so when they reach junior high.

I don't know why this is the current trend; it seems awfully stupid to me.

Imagine an astronaut in a crisis scenario, trying to copy down critical instructions relayed by Mission Control. "Roger that, Houston," the astronaut would say, but the mushy jumble of characters on his or her note pad might not really match up with the information sent up from the ground.

Apollo 13 would have had a very different ending.

Oh, no, the 'modern' educator may say, in a patronizing tone, today's children have technology (when it works) and spell check will correct their spelling (but only if they get reasonably close to the correct spelling -- and spell check can't help a kid know when and how to use 'there' or 'their' or 'your' or 'you're'). And, as near as I can tell, 'modern' teachers say that kids today don't have to memorize anything because they can always look it up on their ever-present 'devices.' (But how do you 'look up' what you never knew? How do you even know you should be looking for it?)

As Blog of Days readers already know, this is Teacher Appreciation Week. It's an especially appropriate time to think about teachers and teaching -- especially good teachers and good teaching.  In that spirit, share this post with a teacher in your life. Am I being unfair to 'modern' teachers? Am I being unfair to today's kids? What do you think? What do the teachers in your life think?

Very abbreiviated Frivolous Friday

For one thing I once again neglected to keep track of several good candidates for this occasional Friday feature. Indeed, this morning, when I tried to pull this together, I could only find a couple, such as this one, Monday's edition of Red & Rover, by Brian Basset.

I thought it was funny, anyway.

Wednesday's installment of Dan Piraro's Bizarro also struck me as funny. (Too little this week has been.)

But I admit I did wonder why this wasn't a comic that Mr. Piraro didn't schedule to appear on a Friday. The artist explains on his blog: "Because that's just what they'd be expecting!"

I should have been able to figure that out all by myself, shouldn't I?

Frivolous Friday and the least likeable first sign of Spring ever

I didn't do a Frivolous Friday last week and, although no one appears to have noticed, and certainly no one complained, I kind of like it and this is my blog.

This Arlo and Janis cartoon (by Jimmy Johnson) from March 14 struck me as funny... and true. The old guy I see in my pictures isn't the virile, mature man who stares back at me in the mirror.

Scott Adams' Dilbert is often thought-provoking. Yesterday's episode, for example, illustrates the very problem I tried to talk about here yesterday -- doing good work isn't good enough, not unless you also Facebook / Tweet / LinkedIn / Instagram and/or Tumblr it, too.

But before you accept that as the new Received Wisdom, however, note who says this is so.

OK, so far, we've had more angst than frivolity. Let me attempt to make amends here, with the March 20 Bizarro comic, by Dan Piraro:

Or... alternatively... our unhappy barfly is in downtown Chicago.

Well, I found it funny.

I conclude this week's brief comic review with today's episode of Vic Lee's Pardon My Planet (trust me, this will provide an almost-smooth transition to the second part of the post promised in today's title):

Yes, ants. Ants are the least likeable first sign of Spring ever, especially when they take over your kitchen. The dishwasher was on last night when we fell asleep watching the TV. Younger Daughter should have run it during the day, but didn't, and, as a result, the sink was full of dishes and pots and bowls that did not fit in the dishwasher before the load was begun.

When Long Suffering Spouse and I awoke, long past the end of the news, neither one of us felt like emptying the dishwasher and reloading it.

This was a mistake.

This morning, I came down to the kitchen to get my wife's prune juice and turn on the coffee. First, I had to turn on a light.

The kitchen counter, and the kitchen sink, were undulating. Undulating, I tell you -- no, this wasn't some sort of '60s acid flashback -- the sink and counter were alive with ants. Little, tiny brown ants like the kind that ate my dessert last year at Easter.

I hate these ants.

I found the bleach spray that my wife uses in areas where food is prepared and dispatched hundreds, nay thousands, of the wee beasties, and wiped them up as best I could. I used paper towels. The kitchen sponges were bulging with ants.

Ick, ick, and double ick.

I still haven't seen a crocus or a rosebud, or a robin on the wing. It's still cold -- it may snow here this weekend -- but Mother Nature has decreed that Spring has sprung.

Frivolous Friday: Not so frivolous edition

Supposedly from a game called "Kleptocracy," posted on Facebook by The Other 98%. If the game really exists, I'd sure like to see it.

And here's a likely use for all the optimistic headlines about surging stock prices and so forth.

Clay Bennett cartoon, originally from the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

I know, I know, class warfare is supposed to be the exclusive domain of the wild-eyed leftists. But sometimes... just sometimes... I think it must be the next "Good War."

Dilbert cartoon, by Scott Adams, from March 4, 2013.  Obtained from Yahoo! Comics.

But, OK, you say, enough. We are reminded often enough of how desperately we are clinging to the underside of the middle class. Even if these examples are humorous, you say, is there nothing else that you found amusing this week and care to share?

Well, today's Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis, is pretty amusing, in a too-close-to-home way.

Even though Rat is probably right about the time savings to be realized from shunning the Internet, I do hope you'll keep coming back here. Cut out the New York Times instead....

I have this problem, too

Crankshaft comic, by Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayres.  Obtained from this site.

The man I see in the mirror each morning isn't nearly as decrepit as that old guy who always seems to jump in whenever 'my' picture is taken.

Talk about identity theft....

Frivolous Friday: Everything I need to know I get from the comics, part 4,795

Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic had this one a few days back... and it struck me as uncomfortably close to true.

Even casual readers will be able to plot my position on this bell curve. Although... Mr. Weiner, Zach (if you'll pardon the familiarity): I have to take issue with you on the labeling of the horizontal axis of your graph. Retirement? A fiction. A fantasy. A fraud. No more real than crystal skulls with mystic powers... or unicorns. (Well, you are young still; sadly, you'll find out.)

Speaking of unicorns, Wednesday's Bizarro, by Dan Piraro, stuck me as funny. Although I've had an office on the 13th floor of a building before, I've also worked in a number of buildings where there really is no such thing -- the floor immediately above 12 is 14. Since this was the subject of a comic, I guess this must be at least a national phenomenon. Does triskaidekaphobia extend overseas as well? Do office towers in London, Rome or Paris have 13th floors? If the MacArthur Foundation is listening, I'm willing to do field research on this. Starting right now.

Long Suffering Spouse might have appreciated Wednesday's installment of Grand Avenue, by Steve Breen and Mike Thompson, with the principal coming to evaluate the teacher. But my wife, a teacher, doesn't read this blog (or know of it's existence); she doesn't even read the comics. She works too hard. I don't work enough (but I'd still make time to read the comics even if I had more work than I knew what to do with).

I didn't intentionally set out to do a post on comics from Wednesday (although that would be like me, a couple of days late on the uptake); it's just that Wednesday's installment of the ever-sly Brewster Rockit, by Tim Rickard, struck me as the funniest of the week.

I could use a jolt of Dr. Mel's anti-stupidity ray this morning -- if he could just get the settings right.

Look! Up in the sky --

The webcomic Cyanide & Happiness is frequently too crude and raunchy for my taste, but this particular installment made me laugh out loud.

(Hey, look, I can't only do overlong essays here; sometimes I have to switch it up, OK?)

Welcome to Apocalypse Maybe Week at Second Effort!

The world may or may not be ending on Friday.

The U.S. Government says the world absolutely will not end this week, so that makes me nervous.

On the other hand, astronomers have identified no rogue planetoid on a collision course with Earth, so that makes me feel better.

On the other, other hand, as Zay N. Smith noted in his QT column Monday, sometimes potentially deadly asteroids aren't detected until they're pretty darn close at hand:

News Item (December 10): Astronomers discover Asteroid 2012 XE54.
Which passed between Earth and the moon two days later.
News Item (December 13): Astronomers discover Asteroid 2012 XB112.
Which passed between Earth and the moon a day later.
News Item (December 14): Astronomers discover Asteroid 2012 XL134.
Which passed between Earth and the moon during the weekend.

So there's still time for something to turn up.

Now, I'm nervous again....

So I'm going to try looking at the bright side of our perhaps-impending doom.

This picture has been making the rounds among my Facebook acquaintances. Hard to tell whose work it is, but it presumably originated offshore (the temperatures are apparently in Celsius):

The first 10 times I saw this I don't think there was anything on the picture about linking up at any safe house....

Here's another one I saw on Facebook that made me laugh:

I'm trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do if Friday is really the last day. I'm reminded of the confused bartender in the movie version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After Ford Prefect announces that the world is about to end, the bartender asks:

Barman: Shouldn't we all lie on the floor or put paper bags over our heads?
Ford: If you like.
Barman: Will it help?
Ford: Not at all.
[Ford runs out of the pub]
Barman: Last orders, please!

So while I'm not sure yet what to do or how to do it, maybe we'll find out together here on Second Effort as we (imagine big echo chamber basso profundo here) countdown to the End of the World!

Frivolous Friday: Everything I need to know I get from the comics, part 4,794

I saw this David Horsey cartoon on Facebook this morning; here is a link to Mr. Horsey's cartoon and the column he wrote about for the Los Angeles Times, "Campaign 2012: All voters matter, but Ohio voters matter the most."

I am so glad I don't live in Ohio right now.

Meanwhile, over at Pearls Before Swine, recovering lawyer Stephen Pastis has been exploring the comic potential of lemmings leaping to their deaths.

You never envisioned suicidal lemmings as a comic gold mine?

Tim Rickard's Brewster Rockit strip has hapless Brewster debating the evil Dirk Raider again in their long-running campaign for President of the Galaxy.

Fair use, I hope, to pull a few strips from this week's entries. In the first, Brewster is getting coached for the debate.

Unfortunately, the good advice is misunderstood....

The important thing to remember is that this is just a comic strip, having absolutely no similarity to anything that might be going on in real life right about now.

Right?

And, finally, we have this installment of Real Life Adventures, by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich, from earlier this week.

Kind of hard to argue with the father's conclusions here. Which means that, if there were even a molecule of truth to it, TV's awful Ancient Aliens would be about galactic idiots. Who came to Earth long ago to share their distorted "wisdom." Whose lessons we have learned too well (in other words, we're idiots, too). Which gets us back to the very first cartoon in a way, doesn't it?