CSotD: Healthy attitudes
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It's entirely possible that Dave Blazek was inspired by the same thing that made me laugh at today's Loose Parts: Those sanitary wipes at the grocery store, which keep you from getting bubonic plague from touching a shopping cart.
My solution is that, when the cart wranglers get a train of carts together, they should shove them through an autoclave that would be like a carwash, except that it would heat the carts up to kill all the germs and bugs.
The problem being that you'd lose work time because employees would have to put "sanitized for your protection" slips across each one. Which may be why motels no longer put those slips on toilet seats: They decided catering to the paranoid was pointlessly expensive.
Besides, given that the original Typhoid Mary was a cook, it has occurred to me to wonder, wouldn't it be ironic if she'd been the motel maid who put the "sanitized for your protection" bands on toilet seats?
Anyway, it's my considered opinion that people who are afraid of grocery cart contamination should wear gloves, which would also protect them against all the disease lurking on the packages and cans in the store.
Plus, if someone would start posting "Wear gloves or die of infection" warnings on Facebook, we could get a better sense of who falls for that sort of thing just by looking around.
Safety first, people.
Fay's mom would be first in line to buy gloves not only for herself but for her poor daughter, as seen in today's Luann.
Presumably, Luann will now do a little more to help liberate Fay from the helicopter.
Camp Lord O' the Flies used to get kids with all sorts of parentally-diagnosed issues, but the fact that it was an eight-week overnight experience provided enough time to overcome most of these phantom disabilities.
As misguided and unattainable as was the director's dream of teaching kids to box so they could go home and beat up the school bully, there was a part of the mission that worked: Simply teaching them that they were not as fragile as their mothers thought they were helped them overcome a different, more pernicious style of bullying.
We had one kid who earnestly explained that his mother said he was allergic to carbohydrates.
It's entirely possible that his mother had him on some forerunner of the Atkins Diet, but, in any case, the counselors told him that he couldn't possibly be allergic to all carbohydrates or he'd have been long since dead of starvation.
He also earnestly explained one day in track that he had "French eyes," which the counselor told him was about weeping at sad movies and not about crying because you had been ordered to attempt the high jump.
The good thing was that, while he underwent a little mockery for all his sensitivities, he wasn't particularly bullied over them. His self-proclaimed foibles were mostly just ignored and by the end of the summer, he was acting like a regular kid.
This is not to underplay genuine health issues like peanut allergies or diabetes, by the way. But you don't get any of those things from touching shopping carts, nor is every case of diarrhea a case of food poisoning or allergies or intolerances.
Sometimes it's just a case of the runs.
Meanwhile, among the grownups
Ann Telnaes on the White House flunkeys.
I have to feel a little for General Kelly, who was apparently fed some unresearched bullshit about Rep. Frederica Wilson and thus induced to make himself look like a liar in front of the cameras.
Then again, nobody forced him to condemn her for listening in on a private conversation and then say he knew what was said because he was listening in.
Note that Colin Powell was also fed some bullshit, in his case about weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist.
First, maybe these guys should do a little fact-checking before getting in front of the microphones.
And, second, it's a damn good reason why, despite what we are told by The Nation's Most Annoying Honor Student, we should indeed question and debate decorated four-star generals.
Especially ones who got those decorations in wars we wouldn't have been sucked into in the first place, if somebody had questioned and debated some other four-star White House flunkeys.
And, by the way, Arkansas was, indeed, part of the cattle industry in the Good Old Days, so an Arkansas native might well borrow that Texas expression about "all hat and no cattle."
But don't tell us that's what y'all say "down South."
It's what they say "out West," in the part of Arkansas that butts up against Texas.
TNMAHS needs a regular compass as well as a moral one.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Well, well, well, look who's bellying up to the bar and scarfing down the free lunch?
As we say down South or maybe in the Midwest or possibly up here in the Northeast or in outer space or some damn place, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
And, as both Toles and Cole point out, we used to say that at budget hearings, until the Republicans took charge, and, if that gives you what we in France call "deja vu," I submit this David Horsey cartoon from 2001.
You remember 2001 — That was when Bill Clinton, a dusty ol' cowpuncher from the same town as TNMAHS, had just left office with what down South we call "a budget surplus."
Not to worry, however.
This new, improved GOP budget may have a $1.5 trillion deficit, but it would be far worse if they hadn't been responsible legislators and cut a trillion from Medicare and a half-trillion from Medicaid.
As Wiley Miller notes, it's not like Healthcare won't exist anymore.
It just means that, as we say down South, you can't get there from here.
Patriotic Americans wouldn't want to.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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