A Covid Fever Image vs Unintentional Zane & Kudoclasm

 December 31, 2023

   Oh, look what a Covid fever has begat.

Daily Revised Whip Out:

"Lucy Mulhall In The Sky With Diamonds"

The Funny Thing About Comedy

"It's the heart of comedy to hold two opposing truths, one the piety of fictitious benevolence, the other the troubling doubts that trail along."

—Adam Flippin' Gopnik, in the New Yorker

   Meanwhile, "unintentional zane" can be hilarious when taken out of context.

Actual Fruit Label from the 1930s

KUDOCLASM

(from the ancient Greek, kudos

plus cataclysm, to break down)

A cascading crisis of self-doubt

"A warning to Icarus, as he stretched out his wings for the first time: 'Don't fly too near the sun, nor the sea. One will melt the wax, and the other weigh down the feathers. Keep to the middle course.' . . Sometimes you have no idea what to think about yourself, feeling somehow better than everybody but not good enough for anybody. Which is actually when you're at your most precarious, feeling overdue for a correction. . . Something throws you off-balance, and you slip into a spiraling self-doubt—picking apart your wings, trying to figure out if your feathers are still attached.. . .you may love your job but begin to question if it's worth all the time it has cost. you, knowing how easily your role could be refilled, your legacy tossed in a box. . .You begin to wonder if you've spent your entire life buoyed by airy delusions, coasting along on unearned confidence.. . .maybe your self-mythology is no different than any other mythology. It's a story that changes in the telling, evolving over time. whatever resonates will stay, and what doesn't will fall away. To pick away at the literal truth is to miss the point of it, miss the joy of it. So go ahead and build your myth. Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true, whether or not the facts agree. Keep to the middle course. Steal bits of wax and feathers discarded by others, better fliers. Let the sun rise and fall. Let the waves pound themselves to mist, again and again. Your task is not to be flawless. Your task is to fly."

—John Koenig, "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows"

   Personally I feel pretty good about the year, but I don't feel so hot about where our country seems to be going.

"At the end of 2023, the country bounces along like Custer on the way to the Little Big Horn: So far, so good. The regimental band plays 'Garryowen.'"

—Lance Morrow in the Wall Street Journal