Mutts has it right

So just yesterday I was talking about being good for a reward as opposed to being good for its own sake and was using cats and dogs  as an example, and opening my newspaper in the evening I came across this from the beloved comic strip Mutts.  They have the cats (did either dawg look up the Rock Cats?  I'm disappointed that I got no feedback from that) and the dogs reversed , but it contains a valuable insight.  Henceforth when in the course of a good deed (a frequent happening among the Stonians) some biddy (it's always a biddy) nags that we are only doing it for some reward we can reply, "Why Madam, I am good for nothing,"

You know in Grimm's Fairy Tales you don't always get those happy endings, and the tales we are familiar with are prettified versions of the real tales.  Maybe back then people were more into the truth, the straight truth, and nothing but the truth rather than today's feel-good (the good guys get a banana split and the bad guys get a lump of coal upside the head) movies.  The feel-good movie of the year they trumpet themselves and I give them a wide berth.  Maybe this is what makes people cynical, they do good deeds expecting to be rewarded and when that doesn't happen they get bitter, you know like those people who get cancer and wonder why since they have been good all their lives.

I'm a bit of a scholar (I've read a couple books) about the Kingfish, Huey Long.  His populism was somewhere between righty and lefty,  He challenged FDR from the left in 1933.  But he was pretty corrupt and quite the despot at home.  And of course he is the inspiration for that great movie All the King's Men, which is inspired by the even greater Robert Penn Warren book of the same name.  Allow me to quote:  Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something  This is what Huey tells the narrator, a good government type reporter when he wants him to dig up the dirt on some highly esteemed honorable man so that he can bend him to his will, and of course it turns out that there is something.

Speaking of good deeds, I want to thank Old Dog for not posting a link of Trump's golden crown being disrupted.  In a moment of bored weakness I might have clicked on it and been scarred all weekend.


There was a lot of licentiousness going on before the Sexual Revolution.  Those Romans were pretty licentious.  It was the Christians who were prudes and the Christians picked it up from the Jews who were a troublesome backwater tribe back in the day of The Empire.  The reason priests were not allowed to marry was not because of prudery, it was so that they wouldn't pass their realms on to their offspring and develop their own fiefdom free of the pope, much the same reason that the Turks didn't allow the Janissaries to marry.

There have been more studies about sex than you can shake a stick at.  The Kinsey Report comes immediately to mind.  As always there were flaws and it turns out that Kinsey himself was a little kinky, but he was honest.  It was a little early, but I think it was part of the impetus for The Sexual Revolution as was the invention of the pill and that 60's vibe.  There was the free love movement before that, and wiki has an informative article on it which might be a better use of computer research time than googling "Trump's hair in the wind."

I get tired of this ranting about regulations, like they are all devious chains robbing us of our liberty.  They keep us from eating and drinking poisons, and before Trump they kept the nearby factory from dumping its crap where it could leach into the water and poison you.  There are probably too many of them and raging about a particular one with good grounds is fine, but to rail at the whole idea of regulations is, well, Trumpist.