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Comic
2374 comics.
I went back to, I think, the 3rd ever Hubris strip for the police officer. Turns out, I didn’t name him. Feel free to suggest a name for this venerable character who first appeared here in November of 2010.
I’m thinking we call him “Friday”. As in “Happy Friday the 13th.” Which is today, isn’t it?
Clif Bars in sauce. There’s an idea for you. Macadamia Nut White Chocolate Clif with Dijon… Peanut Butter with BBQ sauce.
There’s a best selling cookbook in this one.
Have you seen those things? The pocketknives that can no longer fit in your pocket? You start off thinking “Oh, that’d be great, having everything you could ever need, there in your pocket”, but then once you’ve messed up the right front pocket of every pair of pants you own, you start thinking,”Maybe I could do without the fork.” because, let’s face it, you don’t use the fork more than once a month, right? And have you tried eating with the spoon on those pocketknives? You get soup all over the thing, and then the leather hook won’t open any more, and you always seem to bend a thumbnail back while you’re trying to get the can opener pulled out, which is stupid because you were trying to get the screwdriver bottle opener out anyhow. Plus, once it’s been in your pocket for a month or two, you pull a lint ball out of the back of the knife that’d frighten anything with a sense of what’s naturally supposed to exist on earth. I dunno. I finally went back to a single blade pocketknife, and occasionally I’ll grab one of the little multi-tools I’ve accumulated over the years. I carry that around for a month or two until I realize I haven’t used IT either the whole time, and just give it all a miss.
But those Mega-Ultra-Scout Knives with the LED flashlights and awl punches and the grooved corkscrew all made of surgical steel… ohhhh, I might have to get another one of those one day…
I think some of us here realize that I don’t work in an Outdoor Store.
“So where else does he get these true-sounding stories of not-quite-smart people?” I imagine I hear from off-stage.
In this particular case, I was (You may not be surprised to discover) standing next to a dog. My dog.
Roscoe (the name of my dog) is about a hundred and fifteen pounds of dog. During the summers, he occasionally wears a cute little backpack wherein he carries stuff that’ll help if he, like he did just before I bought the pack, discovers that he really needs a dish of water really, really fast to recover from too much sun. And when I say “cute little backpack”, I mean, of course, “Saddlebags.”
Now, the scene should be set. Me. Dog. Saddlebags. Oh, Dogpark. Yes, we’re in the park. With people. I forgot to mention that there were people. And there were.
So this guy is standing there, looking at Roscoe’s cool saddlebags, and… you know what? You can guess the rest.
He asks about the handle and then asks how the hell I’m gonna carry Roscoe around by that handle. And the world went deadly quiet. while we waited on the answer to occur to ol’ Skippy standing there.
I assume this guy is thinking maybe he needs a saddlebag dog backpack because he’s going to carry around his dog, which is much more of the fluppy-wuppy dust mop variety than any real dog, the sort of which has not become so far removed from a gray wolf by countless generations of what can only be called ritualized animal abuse that it’s not any sort of self-respecting dog any more. …There may need to be more of that sentence. It’s late, my tummy hurts, and subclauses… subclauses are hard.
Anyway, I did what you would have done in the situation. I stood straight up, looked the guy RIGHT in the eye and said…
“The handle is for when I carry the backpack instead of the dog carrying it.”
And he said, (I kid you not!)
“Oh. …Yeah.”
On the other hand, I talked to this one guy who had a life jacket for his li’l Chihuahua. It had a handle on it too. They used to use the handle to lift the little dog out of the river and back into their canoe, or more entertainingly, lift him out of the canoe in order to chuck him into the river when he was ready to swim. They weren’t being mean to him (Don’t be mean to animals. D.B.A.D.) ’cause the dog thought it was great. And the idea of a little goggle-eyed curling stone is funny to me.
Heard this one when I was first learning to kayak. I took my spanking new boat to a very nice park in the area. Paddled around (helplessly trying to hold a straight line) until I got near a bank where a few people were fishing. One old guy there told this story to me because I was in a kayak. I’ve put it down as near as I remember it. Though, I’ve been listening to science podcasts and I’m a storyteller, so I’m admitting right now that due to the inexactitude of memory and my own tendency to punch things up, this isn’t word-for-word what the guy said, this is just what I came away with.
I would like to point out that “Skimo” was actually a term he DID use. And it’s a rotten, rude word to use, if I understand right. And if you’re firing up right now to explain a lot of anthropology and sociology to me and tell me that the native peoples around Greenland are not eskimos, or even Esquimeaux, then don’t bother. I’m just relating what the old navy dude said, and he said Eskimos. I wasn’t going to correct his story and make it all politically correct or anthropologically correct or anything else. Not the point.
The point is that he thought the damn boats rolled themselves over.
