A Sunday for Fathers

Oddly enough, I forgot to call and wish my father on Father's Day, and I got nothing from my daughter either.

Neither my father nor I will care about this omission.  Life is far greater than formal wishes on a single day. 

My favorite philosopher, Calvin, offers an insight, as he always does, into fatherhood.

Source

Fathers--and mothers too--make mistakes in plenty.  We try our best not to, but we err a lot.  There is, unfortunately, no "undo" ever in parenting.  Thankfully, whatever mistakes my parents made must have been only insignificant; we siblings have turned out alright.

Chances are that as children we made serious mistakes every single day.   Parents overlook most of them.  Sometimes, we also do what Calvin does:

At times, or perhaps lots of times, fathers and mothers can be, ahem, controlling:

They did what they had to do so that we could then enjoy being a kid:

It is not just kids who get to do nothing in the summer; some of us fathers who are on furlough also look forward to the long days of sun and warmth and doing nothing.

Happy Father's Day to me.  Oh, ok, to you too ;)

Why real life beats television shows? Calvin explains :)

What don't qualify as gifts on Mother's Day?

I woke up recalling, for whatever reasons that only a shrink can uncover, the phenomenally funny Calvin and Hobbes strip about Calvin getting his mother a card.  Breakfast, coffee, and newspaper, and everything else later, I tracked down that strip with a simple Google search:

Calvin, of course, gave his mother quite some hell; I tracked down one of those too:

 Ah, Calvin!

As freaked out Calvin's mother was, well, contemporary mothers are getting used to the freaking reality conveyed in the cartoon below:

Pansies who can't kill. Glad to be one of 'em!

"You must never kill a man, particularly if it means taking his life" ... wait, was that Yogi Berra's wisdom?

Speaking of the "moral imperative," Ron Rosenbaum wrote about the Kantian imperative in Catch-22:

There's a scene in the World War II novel when some officer or other reproves the novel's anti-hero, Capt. Yossarian, for trying to escape another of the ever-escalating number of dangerous bombing missions he's ordered to fly.

"Suppose everybody on our side felt that way," the officer demands, echoing Kant's imperative—that one should decide how to act by envisioning the consequences if everyone else acted that way. It's a maxim much beloved by parents. Mine, anyway.

So, if everybody else acted that way? "Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way," Yossarian says.

Beautiful! It was one of the reasons I fell madly in love with the novel.

We pansy liberals read Catch-22, watch Woody Allen, and are anti-war and anti-killing.  May our tribe increase! 

Hey, we have the biggest weapon of all: Calvin :)

Who is ready for some football?

Good ol' Charlie Brown:

And the devilish Calvin :)

When Calvin and Hobbes met Swami and Friends

Oh, Bill Watterson, you have messed up my life, twice; first by creating this little devilish character, and then by abruptly walking away from it all!

And then, listen to Calvin opine on the opiate of the masses:

I have lots of memories of my childhood. There was no Calvin and Hobbes in it.  Instead, I had Swami and his friends in Malgudi.

Swami had none of Calvin's crazy aspects.  Swami's adventures were all I could relate to--given the very similar cultural background in which I grew up.  Years later, here in the US, I bought myself a copy of Swami and Friends.  It is now a treasured book along with various Calvin and Hobbes collections.

Oh, yes, I read the usual Enid Blyton books, the Hardy Boys, and even Nancy Drew.  But, as much as I enjoyed them, I couldn't quite relate to those characters and the settings.  Even the foods they ate.  I remember my sister and I once tried to figure out what the ham and bacon were all about.  These appeared all the time, particularly in the Enid Blyton books.  We figured it was from pigs.  But, what then was the difference between ham and bacon.  There is a limit to imagining foods of a different culture, particularly in those primitive days before the internet, before the television, and when telephones were rare.  So, I figured out a solution to the puzzle: bacon and ham had to be something like idly and dosai, which are from the same ingredients but look and taste different from each other.

With Swami and his friends, there was no need to imagine the foods they ate.  Because I ate the same kind of foods. Like Swami, I too hoped to have a good cricket game every single day.  Swami's grandmother reminded me a lot of my own grandmothers.  I mean, I could absolutely relate to this fictional kid in a fictional town.  The pains and pleasures of his were mine as well. His Malgudi was my Neyveli, plus Sengottai, plus Pattamadai.  It was neat.  He just didn't seem to have the girl problem that I had though :)

But all those were when I was a kid.  I don't recall reading any RK Narayan books in the five-plus years between high school and coming to America.  I came to America, and was in comic character heaven, with Calvin becoming my favorite. Turned out it was great timing--the syndicated comic strip began in 1985, and I arrived here in 1987.  It was a different culture now, with different foods, and different games.  But, both at the surface level of the joke, and at the deeper issues, I could easily relate to Calvin.

Now, I am much older--way older than Calvin's dad in the comic strips.  But, whenever I read the old strips, I find that it is Calvin that I still relate to and not to the father.  I feel sorry for the parents, but Calvin rules because he gets me.

The best thing now: when I read Swami and Friends, I can still relate to Swami.  A couple of years ago, I found an Enid Blyton book, and I can relate to the Famous Five too and their favorite drink is mine too--ginger beer.  How lucky am I to be able to a whole bunch of characters from across so many different cultures and eras!

Comic books are much too grim :)

There ain't any Monday blues as long as there is good ol' Calvin and Hobbes :)

Cartoons of the day: Calvin's anti-war questions

No, not John Calvin, but the one who walks around with Hobbes.  No, not that Hobbes either :)

If only Watterson hadn't retired!  Oh well ....

So, why war all the time?

Well,  there is more to it:

Yep, stupid!

Football: offside versus ineligible receiver :)

It seems like every game has its own quirky rules.  American football has plenty of those.  Cricket is nothing but one quirky rule after another.  Which is why Calvin developing his own rules for playing baseball with Hobbes was all the more hilarious.

Here is John Cleese explaining football's soccer's offside rule:

Ineligible receiver downfield? click here

Quote of the day

From Calvin--no, not the theologian, but the comic character:

Physical education is what you learn from having your face in someone's armpit right before lunch

:)
Well, it might as well be from the sixteenth-century theologian because the cartoonist, Bill Watterson, named the character that original "Calvinist"

Subsidies and bailouts explained by Calvin and Hobbes!

I joke with my students that everything we need to understand in this world is right there in Calvin and Hobbes comics. Of course, I do use some of them in my classes--particularly Calvin's comments on school and education, and we know he had quite some views :-)

Thanks to Mankiw's post linking up to a Calvin piece, we now can explain why GM or any other business needs a government bailout! What a brain that Bill Watterson had; if only he had not abruptly called it quits :-(

(click on the image for a larger and clearer one)