I live in the future and here's how it doesn't work

Consider Hanna-Barbera.

In The Jetsons all the houses are built atop impossibly tall poles, like off-brand Space Needles. Their residents can engage in FTL jaunts in personalized flying saucers anytime they want. The Jetsons have a robot maid.

Yet George Jetson also has a reassuringly mundane job doing some kind of management with Spacely Sprockets, a company that makes―you guessed it―sprockets. Just as Fred Flintstone was a construction worker who happened to use dinosaurs and mastodons as equipment. What Hanna-Barbera was doing, in essence, was to take a very mid-20th-century kind of prosperity and project it as far into both the future and the past as it could plausibly go. 

Of course from the point of view of the actual (to them) future this seems very quaint. Many markers of the 20th century economy―things like department stores and trains full of business computers―have disappeared with nothing much to replace them. The future has been depopulated of its onetime dreams.

Bach on...

 

Bach on vibraphone. Specifically, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." This gentleman whose hands are the only thing we see of him can play it. I suspect Milt Jackson could have as well, given the classical inclinations of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Of course maybe if Bach had lived a couple of centuries later he would have been a jazzman himself. "That cat with a wig can really lay down a groove."

Doggy night

Out the window I just saw a guy walking two dogs at the same time. They were pretty frisky. Seemed excited to be walking on the snowy sidewalk. Sometimes when a person is walking more than one dog you can gather that they're a professional dog walker. Doubt that's the case here since it's pretty deep into the night. An owner not walking the dogs themselves would likely be asleep.

But some people do walk their own dogs pretty late. Not too long ago I was taking out the trash late at night and this lady was walking her little dog down the sidewalk. Bad tempered thing, it yapped and snapped at me even though I was all the way on the side steps of my building. Now I'm doubly sure this lady wasn't a pro dog walker, since after she passed I could still smell weed in the air.

⭐🐍

It can be fun joining your Western Zodiac sign together with your Eastern Zodiac sign to see what kind of hybrid you get. Mine is "bull dog" which is easy to remember.

Anyway, soon starts the Chinese Year of the Snake. There's an anecdote about that.

A race was held to cross a great river, and the order of the animals in the cycle was based upon their order in finishing the race. In this story, the snake compensated for not being the best swimmer by hitching a hidden ride on the Horse's hoof. When the horse was about to cross the finish line, the snake jumped out, scaring the horse, and thus edging it out for sixth place.

I guess you could call this cheating. I probably would. But it's also kind of ballsy. If you're a snake there's a certain risk inherent in freaking out a horse.

Put off

Late last week I saw a flier pasted up at a bus shelter. For a political group. It talked about countering Trump, but that's not the big thing. At the end it said something like, "Please mask. Masks will be provided."

They'll be provided. That's nice.

Is the left suicidal? Because that's where this new model citizen―the kind of person who can't think of anything worse than spreading germs―comes from. And outside of that everyone else has moved on. It's as much of a drag on outreach and organizing as the whole idpol thing, of which it's probably an outgrowth.

D'oh!

Who was Homer? The question will almost certainly never be answered, and might in fact be unanswerable. It's hard to imagine any documents or remains turning up that will even provide a list of candidates. From our perspective Iron Age Greece was a long time ago. Long, long, loooooong time. If things weren't properly recorded there's not much we can do about it now.

Which in a way makes it even more incredible that the Iliad and Odyssey have survived all this time and inspired so many. Whoever he, she, or they (as in multiple people) were, the author could scarcely have dreamed that their work would survive multiple collapses and rebuildings of civilization.

It's been a long long gag

Due to a number of consolidations, nearly all newspaper syndicated comics can be found on one of two websites: Comics Kingdom and GoComics. GoComics is the online presence of the Andrews McMeel Universal syndicate. It posts the daily newspaper comics on the same page as all the syndicate's political cartoonists, as well as what are essentially webcomics never intended to be printed anywhere. 

Someone a while ago apparently decided to troll them on this. Thus comedy writer John Scully created The Comic Strip That Has a Finale Every Day. Yes, you can check the archives. No you won't see anything different.

Despite the "every day" in the title Scully apparently stopped adding technically new strips last January. Either he got tired of the joke or GoComics finally put their foot down on what they were willing to pay for.