2006.04.30
If the world hates you, remember it hated me first.
Cartoon Weirdess of the Moment
Yesterday I was at Ksenia's folks' house and her youngish brother was watching Boomerang, this channel with lots of old cartoons. I got to see snippets of
Yogi's Ark Lark, the oddest, most vaguely sacrilegious mainstream cartoon I've seen in a long while.
"Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, joined by Magilla Gorilla, Wally Gator, Quick Draw McGraw and others, help Cap'n Noah in his quest to rid the world of environmental dangers while travelling around in a flying ark."Modern cartoon casts and religious archetypes are kind of a weird combination...it reminded me of that folded out Disney mugbox a girlfriend of mine had as highschool locker decoration, where a stylized Mickey arm and glove seemed to have clear and obvious stigmata...I thought "Mickey Christ" was a bit much then too.
Those Hanna-Barbarians!
Blue Law of the Moment
This morning I thought to pop into Trader Joe's to pick up a bit of beer for a BBQ later, since I was in the neighborhood. I thought that the statewide prohibition on booze sales on Sunday, not just modified to allow sales after noon...
I just don't get it. For better or worse, we live in a convenience society. While in general we probably have more convenience than is good for us, arbitrary restrictions on that convenience need a good explanation, and paying homage to one particular religous tradition (as opposed to Jewish, Moslem, or I guess Seventh-Day Adventists) isn't sufficient. (I hate the counter-argument that goes like "c'mon, can't you give it a rest and give up the booze for one day/half-a-day?" Well, unless you have a good explanation for what that day should be, no. A similar argument, I guess, Hi Bill, is sometimes made for liquor store workers...and while I have sympathy for workers, it's not clear why that kind of worker should be singled out.)
I dunno. Maybe as an extremist moderate I should support what sounds like a not completely barking mad compromise between people to whom the restriction is symbolically important and...well, nearly everyone else. And the Wikipedia entry on Blue Laws claims that "the ubiquitous 'weekend' is also a result of blue laws", so maybe historically there's something to it. (Ever since seeing some bumper stickers pointing out the role Organized Labor has had in weekends and the 40-hour workweek, I'm kind of... I dunno, nervous about the alternate universe where that never happened.)