The Patchwork Essay

During my career, on more than one occasion, someone would marvel at my ability to generate six cartoons a week (I never said they were six good cartoons because not all of them were) and I would answer that it’s harder to think of one cartoon idea a week than six.

100% true and here’s why:

When you’re only generating one cartoon idea a week you don’t spend much time thinking about cartoons and when you do think about them it’s hard to get your brain working in the right direction. It’s like having to build a bicycle every time you want to ride one. Whenever I come back from a vacation that first cartoon comes slowly and I have to remind myself that (at least theoretically) I know how to do this.

But when you’re thinking of six ideas a week you’re always thinking of cartoons—your bicycle tires are already inflated and ready to go—and the same goes for writing.

I generate a lot of ideas (once again, they’re not all good ideas, I mean just look at that crappy bicycle metaphor I came up with) and some turn into full essays and some don’t, but I save those unused bits and pieces because you never know when one will come in handy and I just now realized I’m acting like my mother.

She’s a hoarder and semi-recently complained about what a mess her house is (a mess she created) so I said why don’t we go through some of these boxes and see what can be thrown away.

The first piece of paper I picked up was a pink slip for a 1925 Ford.

Since in my entire lifetime I have never seen a 1925 Ford on the premises I said we could at least throw away that pink slip, but my mom said no, she’d have to look at it first and then offered me the latest installment in her never-ending series of complaints about her increasingly bad vision.

OK.

So we can’t throw anything away until you look at it and you can’t look at it; I believe Joseph Heller got an entire book out of this.

In an effort to not be like my mother (and those insurance ads about people turning into their parents are disturbingly accurate) I’m going to look at my literary equivalent of 1925 Ford pink slips and either throw them away or use them and we’ll start with…

Transgender Athletes

I started this one when people were losing their minds over transgender athletes here in Missouri which made me wonder how common trans-athletes are and turns out a child’s athletic career being ruined by having to compete against a transgender athlete is about as common as a child being gored by a unicorn.

Charlie Baker, President of the NCAA, semi-recently said he was aware of fewer than 10 active NCAA athletes who identify as transgender and according to an article written in September of 2023, since 2012 only nine transgender boys and four transgender girls were approved to play sports in the state of Missouri (so a whopping 1.18 per year) and according to the Godless Communists at the ACLU in 2023 only two trans athletes in Kansas were affected by a bill to stop them from playing sports.

So the odds that your child will have to compete against a superior trans-athlete are about the same as your child being struck by a meteor or eaten by an Albino Bengal Tiger or winning the state lottery and the fact that a whole bunch of people buy state lottery tickets indicates we’re not all that great at math and will continue to freak out about trans-athletes.

And while we’re not on the subject, but loitering in the immediate vicinity:

The odds that your child is going to play baseball in the Big Leagues or football in the NFL or Mafia-organized poker in the NBA are extremely low, so our kids should play sports:

A. Because sports are fun even though overly-serious parents and coaches try to take the fun out of it.

B. To learn valuable lessons like teamwork and discipline and maybe finding something in common with people who are different than them.

Transgender athletes are not a big problem in this country, lack of tolerance is.

The Government That Governs Least

We’re currently enjoying the kind of weather patterns that got Dorothy to Oz and I noticed that when a flood or hurricane or tornado strikes, I never read any stories about Republicans turning down help from the government which led to the following bit.

Henry David Thoreau (seen here proving neck beards also looked shitty in the mid-1800s) is apparently incorrectly credited with the phrase:

“That government is best which governs least.”

I say incorrectly because maybe it was said by Thomas Jefferson or John Locke or Ravi Shankar in-between sets at the Bollywood Bowl, assuming there is one of those and if there’s not, they need to get right on it, ask for some tax breaks and build that thing.

But for 100% sure the Greek poet Hesiod or the Roman comic dramatist Plautus (apparently these guys were constantly stealing each other’s material) said something like:

“Moderation in all things.”

Not to be outdone in the saying-witty-shit department, Oscar Wilde said: “Everything in moderation, including, moderation” although maybe Horace Porter or Petronius said it first.

This saying-witty-stuff-field seems to be filled with a bunch of plagiarists and reminds me of one of my favorite Woody Allen stories that happened before his personal life made us all go “Eeeewwww.”

Back at the beginning of his career Woody worked for a service where he wrote witty one-liners and celebrities would pay the service and if they said something one of the writers wrote for them and it got into a newspaper, the writer got paid for his work.

Woody was starting to have some success in other areas and was spending less time writing witty one liners for other people to say, but then Arthur Murray – the dance studio guy and service client – ran into Woody somewhere and wanted to know:

“Just what the hell has happened to my sense of humor?”

Which is a pretty good line for someone who had to pay other people to write pretty good lines for him.

So where were we?

Oh, yeah—whoever said the crap about governing least is governing best is wrong unless you’re OK with 10-year-old coal miners and turns out, some people are.

Child Labor

I started this one when people who wanted to hire children to work in their businesses were trying to get child labor laws changed.

As previously discussed (which makes it sound like I actually let you get a word in edgewise) some businesses want to roll back child labor laws to increase the number of exploitable workers available.

Now here’s a story from the ABC News that says a Labor Department investigation of McDonald’s franchises in Kentucky found 300 children working illegally, including two 10-year-olds.

According to the Labor Department, the children were preparing and distributing food orders, cleaning the store, working at the drive-thru window, working a register and one child was allowed to operate a deep fryer – which I wouldn’t want to do at any age because there’s too much hot grease involved – and the children sometimes worked as late as 2 AM, but were not paid.

A franchise owner-operator said the two 10-year-olds were visiting a parent who worked there and the kids weren’t employees, which (hold on, let me do the math) only leaves 298 unexplained child workers.

I’d be the first one to admit there are times government is overbearing and makes our lives more difficult, but some of the people who whine about government regulations whine because those government regulations prevent them from doing stuff like putting children in charge of deep fryers or sending them into coal mines.

And if government isn’t there to stop them, recent history has shown they’ll do it.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/minors-found-working-mcdonalds-franchisees-labor-department/story?id=99053558

Reading the News Online

I launched this literary boat because these days I get a lot of information online and some websites have a ton of pop-up ads that block what I’m trying to see and if I close the ad I get a message “Why this ad?” and they’ll just replace it with a different ad, like the problem is the product, not the fact that I can’t see what drew me to the website in the first place.

As I believe I’ve complained about before (which is a safe bet because I’ve reached an age where I’ve complained about pretty much everything before and if my 100-year-old mother is any indication, I’ve got decades of complaining in front of me) I prefer to read a print edition of the news because if I’m reading on-line and pause in one place too long, the more sophisticated websites tend to throw an ad in my face.

That’s because the internet mistakenly believes the best way to keep me reading (so they can show me more ads) is to give me more of what I’ve already shown an interest in, so it’s currently showing me ads for a pair of shoes I looked up on the internet and bought last summer.

At this moment in time the thing I’m least likely to buy in the whole wide world is that pair of shoes because I’ve already got them.

But in this most recent case of commercial stupidity, the ad showed me six pairs of the shoes I already own, but in six different colors – “You already own the blue pair, wouldn’t you like a pair in black? How about brown?” – and when I ignored the ad too long, the shoe images started pulsing and vibrating so it was like trying to read a newspaper while an attention-starved two-year-old screamed:

“LOOK AT ME!!! LOOK AT ME!!! LOOK AT ME!!!”

We’re being told that eventually there won’t be paper and ink versions of our local newspapers and we’ll have no choice but to get our news online which means more irritating ads being shoved in our faces while we try to inform ourselves.

Making your product annoying and difficult to use isn’t much of a game plan, but neither was giving away your product on the internet which is how newspapers got into this mess in the first place.

Today’s Lesson

Apparently, when I started this I didn’t have much of a game plan either because I’ve got no ending except to say stop worrying about unicorn gorings, don’t hire any 10-year-olds to operate your deep fryer and hold onto those 1925 Ford pink slips because you never know when they’ll come in handy.

P.S. If you liked this we’re both in luck because I just checked and I’ve got 40 more pages of 1925 Ford pink slips.

I am my mother’s son.