It's A Gift
As this past Christmas proved once again, Men often buy shitty gifts for Women because we think they could really use a nice first basemen’s mitt or a tool belt or a complete set of socket wrenches and that being the case, smart Men always save their gift receipts so Women can return our shitty gifts and get what they really wanted:
A day away from their overly-needy families while getting shit-faced at a shopping mall.
Meanwhile…
According to an ABC website article about exit polls, in this last election 55% of men voted for Donald Trump while just 45% of women voted for him — a 10-point gender gap—and in 2020 the Trump gender gap was 11 points and in 2016 it was also 11 points, a gender-gap-voting trend that led to the above cartoon.
When trying to answer the age old question “What do women really want?” 55% of Men seem to think the answer is: “A sexist president who has a history of insulting, denigrating and sexually assaulting women.”
Apparently 55% of women would rather have a first basemen’s mitt.
According to pretty much everybody, since Elon Musk bought Twitter it’s lost about 80% of its value and if you read Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter it’s pretty clear he didn’t actually understand how Twitter worked before he started changing things and firing people.
Generally speaking, Elon behaved like a Petulant Child King (he’d tell people to be honest with him and then fire them if they were) and made a series of devastatingly bad decisions, so it’s hilarious (assuming you find things like the Hindenburg Disaster, the San Francisco Earthquake and the sinking of the Titanic humorous) that Donald Trump thinks Elon Musk will make government more efficient.
Elon will probably want to fire a bunch of people which is what he did at Twitter, only to discover those fired people actually did things that needed doing.
Just in case you’re interested and want to feel smarter than Richest Man in the World, here’s a timeline of Elon Musk’s bad decisions:
According to a story by the Associated Press, Donald Trump’s plan for Mass Deportations is pretty much impossible because while 1.4 million immigrants face deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) only has 6,000 officers monitoring noncitizens, finding and removing them.
So that’s going to be a tough ho to row all the way back to Cuba.
(And now let’s take a moment to appreciate all the work that went into that tortured pun and try not to think about the fact that to make the pun work the deported immigrant had to be a Cuban prostitute when in reality pretty much every obvious immigrant I have ever encountered is hard at work reroofing houses in a suburb or making beds in a hotel or serving food in a restaurant…y’know, the crappy jobs the rest of us don’t want to do.)
Anyway…
Over a recent 12-month period ICE deported over 270,000 people (the most in a decade) so at that record-setting rate it would still take over five years to deport 1.4 million people and that’s assuming that group of 1.4 million doesn’t grow in the meantime.
Also…
Trump’s making a big deal about removing immigrants who are a danger to the community, but critics of his mass deportation plan say that’s already been the policy for a long long time so there’s really nothing new about it, although Donald Trump would like you to think there is.
So if Trump really can’t do what he’s promising to do (like saying he’s going to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it) he’s grandstanding which led to the cartoon you just saw.
And if you want some idea of how long Republicans have been blowing their Let’s-Blame-The-Immigrants Dog Whistle: I save cartoon ideas I never got around to using because History Repeats Itself Repeatedly so you never know when and old idea will become current again and this previously unused cartoon idea was originally about George W. Bush.
Apparently drones started appearing over New Jersey and people were freaked out and wondered who was launching them and why they were doing it and just in case you were thinking it was someone’s wife playing with her Christmas gift, New Jersey State Police reported seeing drones 6 feet in diameter which would only be an appropriate Christmas gift if your name was Scott and your dad was Dr. Evil.
One Island Beach State Park police officer reported seeing a swarm of 50 drones come ashore from the ocean so you can see why people might be worried.
In any case…
I used that news story to comment on media members who have an axe to grind and say the same things over and over and get people worked up about some issue and now seems like a really good time to change the subject before you realize that description also applies to me.
The Good Ol’ Dialogue
The Holidays have goofed up my schedule and I came up one cartoon short this week so I decided to add this bit: with extra days off I’ve been killing time with football games and old movies and one of the old movies I just watched was Ball of Fire.
SPOILER ALERT:
I’m going to talk about the movie’s plot, but it came out in 1941 so you’ve had 83 years to watch it and if you haven’t got that done yet, I really think that’s on you.
Also…
I’m not one of those Old Dudes who thinks everything was better in the Old Days (in fact a million things are better now, like nobody’s gotten polio lately, although Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are working on it) but while watching Old Movies it occurred to me that when they didn’t have CGI or the ability crash cars through skyscrapers or show UFOs blowing up the White House, movies were mainly people talking and if you were going to ask moviegoers to watch people talking for 111 minutes they better say something interesting.
And screenwriters George Hackett and Billy Wilder got the job done.
In Ball of Fire eight professors have secluded themselves for nine years to produce an encyclopedia and one of them – Gary Cooper – is supposed to write about slang so he goes out in the world for the first time in a long time and invites various people who use slang to show up at the Totten Foundation and let him ask questions and one of the people he invites is showgirl (hence the outfit) Barbara Stanwyk.
What the professors don’t know is the District Attorney is trying to serve Barbara with a subpoena and make her testify against her gangster boyfriend, so she wants to hide out in the Foundation and with nothing but hot looks and fast talk, she wraps all of them around her little finger.
Pay attention to Barbara coming on to Gary and her description of her sore throat and her parting line about apples that’s dripping with sexuality and it’s all in our minds because she’s doing it with great dialogue:
Today’s Lesson
Keep the receipts for the gifts you buy, Elon Musk is probably going to cause a lot of trouble before Trump gets tired of him hogging the spotlight and gets rid of him, we don’t have enough ICE officers to deport everyone Trump wants to deport, I could also be considered a drone (depending on your point of view) and every woman in the world could take fashion and dialogue tips from Barbara Stanwyk.
Enjoy the Holidays.
Knowing you suck at gift giving is the first step.
"Red as the Daily Worker and just as sore." Barbara Stanwyk was a real dish, but that dialogue is Billy Wilder through and through. (Auto correct would like me to replace "Stanwyk" with "stinky." I think not.)