Remember being a kid, and being sure that if you just tried ONE more time, you could do that flip the right way and land in the pool in the posture that would make people admire you forever?
No? Me neither.
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Comic
2374 comics.
Did you have a nice Talk Like A Pirate Day?
Aye Did.
I’ve been listening to an audiobook on economics while working today.
I don’t think I’ll write anything you’d like to read tonight. My brain is so dry right now, you could pack it with new stereo equipment to absorb moisture in the box.
Any human pastime gets complicated.
Sometimes, you have to do something about it. The Geneva Convention, Anti-trust laws, Bicycle lanes… you get the idea.
Take Football, for instance. It used to be a bunch of guys horsing around in thick jerseys for the honor of… whatever team they made up to play whatever other team some other neighborhood formed. Then they’d go eat and drink and bleed on one another at the pub. Now? There’s lots of rules that have to be obeyed and a lot of people who don’t even like football lobbying for safety reforms and lawsuits and heaven knows what else.
So. Unicycle Jousting. There’s not a lot of rules yet, so there’s a lot of room for the sport to grow in unexpected directions. Right? I’m right, right?
It starts with a lance, but you add a boxing glove. Safety first, y’know. Well, there’s no rule against it, so what if you set your boxing glove on fire? The other guy’s not expecting it the first time, so you win! Trouble is, next match the other guy sets his glove on fire, too, and it’s not ’til your turn’s over that you notice the guys after you are riding in with extinguishers in their off-hands. Then the various kinds of sprayings happen…
Eventually, the sport of Unicycle Jousting is in the news every night because some family is suing one of the leagues over perfectly normal injuries that some professional athlete has sustained while playing the game! I mean, who expects the Prime Center Jouster for the Anaheim Unicorns to have both eyes and no tracheotomy scars? Really! And he has always worn his regulation helmet- at least ever since they made the regulation about helmets- so what’s a little early-onset stupidity if the guy has earned fifteen million dollars over a (lengthy, really) seven season career?
What we really need to concern ourselves with is the little guy. The collector who has the autographed 2019 lance glove used by the Washington Chupacabras’ Crispin Ausperger in the first world championship and has been keeping it in a vacuum-sealed pouch in a bank deposit box until it accrued enough value to put his daughter through college, or the bookie who illegally runs betting on the Large MidWest Conference college unicycle jousting games! Those people have families, both legal and on the side, to support! How do we balance their well-being against the well-being of professional athletes with cauterized puncture wounds to their lungs? It’s a tough game.
See?
Any human pastime gets complicated.
There are lots of things unicycles can do. Function as a platform for a heavy two-handed swing is NOT one them. Something to do with Isaac Newton or one of those guys.
I’ve never jousted on my unicycle, and I don’t plan to… but I imagine that unicycle jousting has got to be an interesting spectator sport, akin to watching people in those giant plastic sumo suits slap into one another.
I like gags like this. Even when I had blood clots in my leg and had to walk from the car to the emergency room entrance, I didn’t circle looking for something close.
I really enjoy Bill Bryson’s take on it. In at least two of his books he mentions a family friend who drives a mile to a gym to run on a treadmill. When asked why she didn’t run to the gym and back and do two miles less on the treadmill, she said that the treadmill keeps track of her calories burned, duh!
I’ve got this book signing and cartoon class thing this weekend. It’s kind of exciting. I’ll have both the Hubris books and two Buckets books for sale at the bookstore, and the class ought to be a hoot.
I’ll be thinking of you guys. I wish you all could be there.
Mostly because you seem to know more about this comic strip than I do, pretty often. But partly because I think we all ought to hang out together. That’d be COOL!
Okay, so in the movie version of the OutdoorFest, who will play Cthula?
Go.
I apologize to everyone who hasn’t yet received their Patreon goodies. I’m stupidly, incredibly behind on everything in my life, but I did a hell of a lot to catch up this weekend, so… Those of you who’ve signed up in the last few months will finally get the stuff, plus a little extra, ’cause I owe ya, and I’m an idiot for letting it get this far behind. Hang tight, and forgive this lost soul.
(tugs forelock and bows.)
