As usual, I can’t separate politics from humor, and Private Eye doesn’t often try. Here’s the cover of their latest issue, and I was already sick of the memes based on that photo, so their playing with it amuses me.
There’s also an AI animation of the scene, in which Zelenskyy stands up and flattens Trump. It’s so well done that I suppose it’s Russian, since they do the best fake videos, but I was sorry to have seen it posted by a cartoonist.
I’m against artists cutting their own throats by circulating AI, but I’m also against posting fakery because there’s enough deliberate lying and propaganda out there without increasing the volume.
Yesterday’s rumor was that Amazon would start including tariff amounts on orders. Everybody went nuts, wondering that Bezos was turning against his master, and the White House reacted with fury and then Amazon spokescritters explained that it was a proposal in one sector of his empire and it wasn’t happening anyway.
Which is too bad, given that Trump brags about how much he’s raised with tariffs, and it would undermine his insistence that other countries are paying them.
I haven’t had a chance to see last night’s interview, but I’ve seen enough clips that I expect to have some thoughts soon about interviewing a fabulist.
Onward.
This could just be a play on the empty speculation around any illness, the silliest example of which is people tracing their food poisoning back to a restaurant, no matter how long ago they ate there, rather than place the blame on their own not-so-spotless kitchen.
But with a Secretary of Health and Human Services who hasn’t got enough training to even qualify as a quack, we naturally think of the current measles outbreak, which is a triumph of a couple of decades of paranoid conspiracy theories, not just his three months in power.
His elevation to the office is, however, a parallel outcome of that arrogant foolishness.
At the moment, we’ve got three times the measles cases we had in all of last year, so it’s all coming into focus at the same time, and the thinking that brought Brainworm Bobby to the big time is the same thinking that gave misguided parents motivation to place infectious children in classrooms.
As that linked article says, Canada and Mexico are also having measles outbreaks, so it’s not an entirely US phenomenon, but I’m always embarrassed when I realize how much of our garish low-brow culture is popping up in other countries.
In Malaysia, they had to explain that Laverne and Shirley were insane or the TV show wouldn’t make sense to audiences there. The problem is that it made sense to audiences here.
If our thinking on measles makes sense to anyone else, there’s your international outbreak.
I’m glad to see Coverly include blood in this, because there are places that will serve a Shirley Temple (or “Roy Rogers”) without the splash of grenadine and a maraschino cherry, which is just ginger ale and shouldn’t delight anyone.
There are places that even put the cherry on a little plastic sword, which makes the drink that much better and would be particularly appropriate in a “Blood of Shirley Temple’s Enemies.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’m dubious about Simonelli saying the schools teach on-line stuff instead of reading, but David Finkle is an active teacher and his complaints roughly align with what I’ve heard, including college instructors saying that they’re seeing freshmen who, having been taught with passages, have never read a book.
My own experience is skewed by having worked with kids who wanted to be journalists and so were a self-selected group of avid readers, but a few years ago, the editorial cartoonist convention happened to coincide with an appearance by Dav Pilkey, author/cartoonist of the Captain Underpants series of books, and here’s the crowd he attracted.
You can argue that Captain Underpants isn’t Great Expectations, but then again how many eight- and nine-year-olds were plowing through Dickens a generation ago, or even several generations ago?
Finkle is right that the quest for test scores has seriously damaged the concept of reading for pleasure. I know a teacher who was ordered — not instructed but ordered — to abandon her free-reading sessions so her students could do practice tests instead.
The call for relevant reading materials widens the gulf between the books that teachers and librarians recommend and assign and the books that kids actually want to read, not just Captain Underpants but Hunger Games and Harry Potter.
When my son was teaching fifth grade, he had his kids recommend books for him to read. It greatly broadened his background, and I’d suggest not only that other teachers should do this, but maybe also the admissions staffs of colleges that enroll illiterate applicants.
I’m assuming that one of the Mastroiannis saw some good Samaritan changing a tire for somebody, but it happens all the time and pretty much always has, at least out here in the sticks.
A few years ago, I stopped for someone on the Interstate with a smoking car that turned into a fire, and by the time I had them out of the car and safe on the shoulder, there were half a dozen people — mostly volunteer firefighters — taking control of the scene, and my mother had a similar experience when she slid into a ditch in a snowstorm.
Apparently Lincoln never said “If you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will,” but it’s true anyway, and it’s also true that if you look for the good, you’ll find that, too.
Though, according to Matthew, Jesus did say “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
Seek the good, and try to be the good, but keep your head on a swivel.
I said that.
First Dog joins in the celebration of Valerie the Dachsund’s rescue and also wonders how much of a favor anybody was doing her.
He’s not a hit-and-run commentator, either, and had already alerted us to Valerie’s plight, if that’s what it was.
