A Blog of the Ridiculous and Sublime, by Mark Sackler
“I like the word indolence. It makes my laziness seem classy.”–Bern Williams
http://www.savagechickens.com click image for more Olympics for the Lazy
In case you were wondering where I’ve been lately…
Stay tuned for a reblog of my guest post on The Blog of Funny Names (tomorrow) and a new BLAHS award that will let readers pick the winner (later in the week).
Happy 2013.
“It was my biggest blunder.”–Albert Einstein on his cosmological constant concept.
You have to love ‘ol Albert. It’s not that he admitted he was wrong. It’s that he turned out to be wrong about being wrong. In other words, the cosmological constant turned out not to be such a big blunder after all. He thought that there must be a force in the universe that counteracts gravity and prevents a static universe from contracting on itself. In 1917 he dubbed it the cosmological constant. Then came Hubble’s discovery in the 1920’s that the universe is expanding, which was closely followed by the big bang theory (the actual theory, not the TV show), and out the window went Einstein’s constant. But then, in 1998, it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and–bingo!–the cosmological constant, now referred to as dark energy, was reborn.
So what the hell does this have to do with the current equation? It’s also a constant, and it might turn out that it is as slippery and elusive as dark energy. The difference though, is that this one describes contraction, not expansion; more specifically, the contraction of media attention over time as pertains to inane celebrity behavior. I call it:
In plain English: the intensity of the media attention is proportionate to the inverse of the time since the story’s emergence to national (or international) attention, squared. So when Lindsay Lohan gets arrested–yet again–the media attention four days after the story will be 1/16th of what it was when the story broke. [Are you are wondering why this equation just doesn’t use an equal sign instead of a proportional to sign? It beats me. But one immutable rule of these posts is to always use the coolest looking symbol possible.]“If people think nature is their friend, then they don’t need an enemy.”–Kurt Vonnegut
Image credit: CartoonStock.com. Used by permission
Clearly, anyone who took the brunt of Sandy can identify with that quote. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, tsunamis. Nature packs plenty of punches. Wait, you mean it’s organic foods and natural remedies you embrace? OK, I’ll counter with hemlock, radon, arsenic, curare. Good grief, there are easily as many natural ways on this earth to kill us as their are to enhance us. And most of the rest of the universe would kill us in an instant. Sure, there is plenty of beauty and benefit in nature. But anyone who hasn’t grasped the implications of the second law of thermodynamics hasn’t a clue what nature really is–or how amazing it can be.
Image Credit: Doug Savage. Click for link.
If Sandy wasn’t enough, no sooner did our power come back then, in succession over the next few days, one of my two office desktop PCs died, followed by the monitor for the other one, followed by my cable modem. Then the icing on the cake was my business phone land line going dead. If it wasn’t for broken technology, I’d have no technology at all. At the rate this is going, I will soon be sending emails via pony express.
“When in doubt, kill cute things.”–
Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine creator
This is Stephan Pastis
This is Stephan Pastis on Drugs
More than once in these pages, I have asserted an aversion to thinking “inside the box.” But I must admit, I’m an amateur at thinking outside the box compared to Pearl’s Before Swine cartoonist Stephan Pastis. His thinking, as implied by his daily comic strips, is somewhere between “outside the box” and completely sick. You might deem it closer to the latter; he almost certainly does. What else can you say about a guy who draws himself into his own strips, usually representing himself as being abused by his own characters? He even draws outside the box literally. In one strip–which I unfortunately could not find a reproduction of online–he depicts two of his characters sitting on the bottom border of the last panel, feet dangling down from it, derisively tossing sunflower seeds at the strip below them on the comics page. His characters know they are in a comic strip, and they milk it for all its worth.
The regular characters are anthropomorphic animals that go by the names of their species. Pig. Rat. Goat. Zebra. Here is a rundown.
Rat–The nastiest, most cynical and self-centered comic strip personage this side of Lucy van Pelt. Rat is egotistical, superior, overbearing and mean. He gains amusement at the expense of everyone and everything that isn’t him. But his primary target is his roommate, Pig.
If you can’t figure out why I like this particular strip, you haven’t been paying attention to this blog. (Click for larger image)
Pig–Simple-minded and literal to a fault, Pig is the polar opposite of Rat. That he lives with Rat, and puts up with constant verbal and physical abuse from him, is the source of many of the strip’s jokes. Pig most reminds me of Gracie Allen.
Goat–If pig is Gracie Allen, then Goat is George Burns. Intellectual and reflective, he is the perfect straight man to Rat and Goat. It is, as you can see from the strip above and the one below, a toss-up as to what exasperates him more: Rat’s arrogance or Pig’s naivety.
Goat is a man after this blogger’s heart. Pig, not so much. (Click to see enlarged image)
Zebra–A neighbor of Pig and Rat, Zebra is a man on a mission. And that mission is? To avoid being eaten by his next door neighbors, the crocodiles of Zeeba Zeeba Eata fraternity. This is not too big a problem, because the Crocs, though scheming and conniving, are incompetent, downright dumb, and they also talk funny. Unlike the other characters in the strip, some of these crocs actually have names. Most frequently, that name is Bob. Either there have been several crocs named Bob or Pastis has killed Bob more times than South Park has killed Kenny. A typical interaction between Zebra and his neighbors below.
This one reads like it was written for this blog! (click for larger image)
Guard Duck–I’m a bit reluctant to admit it, but this is my favorite Pearls character. Rat and Pig wanted to buy a guard dog to protect their house. They couldn’t afford one, so they bought a guard duck instead. What they got turned out to be a cross between Elmer Fudd and Rambo. I’m a peace-loving kind of guy, but GD is so over the top I just have to laugh. A lot.
Stephan Pastis–Yes, Pastis is a character in his own strip. He interacts with the other characters, fights with them and, most often, is abused by them. The last scenario–abuse–most frequently occurs in the last panel following an agonizing pun.
Ouch!! (Click for larger image)
Add to all this a variety of running gags which sometimes include characters from other popular comic strips (Pastis is particularly fond of poking fun at Cathy and Family Circus), and you get the idea. He used to be a lawyer; now he is completely nuts. He seemed to have two options in life when he decided to leave the legal profession: Looney Toons, or the loony bin. He could still go either way, but I’m glad he chose the former.
(Click for larger image)
If Pearls Before Swine does not appear in your local newspaper, you can follow it online on GoComics or Yahoo Comics. Pastis also has a WordPress blog. A typically sick post example is here.
All cartoons in this post ©2012 Stephan Pastis; Pastis portrait photo from Wikipedia; all other content in this post ©2012 Mark Sackler
“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”–Harlan Ellison
Credit: Doug Savage. Click image for link.
Wow. He got that right. The latter seems particularly abundant these days; on a Monday morning during election season I have no patience for it. What is dumber, the idiot political wonks who put out all the attack ads, or the few remaining idiot voters who actually pay attention to them? I’ll vote for the genius who promises to start the work week on Tuesday! (I’m not in education or government or banking–I have to work on Columbus Day.) Check out my Google search terms post for more on stupidity. 🙂
“How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?”–Woody Allen
(c) 2012 Matthias Giesen. Used by permission. Click image for link.
Physically, I am now back in Connecticut. Mentally, I am still on vacation in Dubai. My circadian rhythms? MIA–but probably floating somewhere north of Saturn and west of Alpha Centauri. The time difference is 8 hours and we partied way too late every night for old farts of our pre-digital generation. (We didn’t chose Dubai to vacation, it chose us. More on that some other time; now back to my day job.)
“Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.”– Albert Einstein
Copyright cartoonstock.com. Used by permission.
Hmmm. Ol’ Albert may have known more about everyday life then he is commonly given credit for. After 34-years, my wife still hasn’t learned this lesson. She is still trying to change me. I keep telling her to leave me alone as I am a finished product; I couldn’t possibly get any worse.
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.” Douglas Adams
Image Credit: Cartoon Stock.com. Used by permission.
Whomever said originally that Murphy was an optimist was at least hinting at this. But this blog is about cutting to the chase, cutting out the crap, and stating the obvious (or the “should be obvious”) as directly as humanly possible. After all, it is Einstein who said one should make things as simple as possible. So for all the countless corollaries, addenda and sub-clauses to the infamous milieu of Murphy, I do not believe anyone has ever stated this obvious notion so directly.
I'm not the most interesting man in the world, but I might have the most cluttered mind.
The Millennium Conjectures™ 