Either that, or join the clowns.

"I'm not kidding, Neil! Either lose some weight or we have to up the black powder!"

 

The Christmas shoes.

I Ho-Ho-hope you made out well from Santa for Christmas. I did, thanks! I got a skateboard and a G.I. Joe and a pony!

No, actually, but I was very happy to get (among other things) a new pair of L.L. Bean duck shoes, also known as their Rubber Moc Bean Boots.

My wife got me a pair years ago, and they proved exceptionally useful. Easy to slip on for runs outside with the dog; kept my feet dry in all weather except snow that came up over the top of the shoes; and able to handle my strap-on spikes for ice. 

The old pair lasted for years. In fact, I would still be wearing them if not for Izzy the Pup Wonder. 

The Artist at Work

Izzy takes his time about wrecking toys, but is fast as lightning about destroying my shoes. This is pair #3 that he has wasted. Tralfaz got one of my old pairs of boat shoes years ago and ate up the shoelaces (leather pisgetti!), but as you can see, Izzy is truly indiscriminate about how he annihilates the footwear, as long as he annihilates it. Pull up the lining, chomp off the toe--whatever works. 

I have to be careful to keep my new shoes out of his reach. 

On a similar note, I got my wife a new rug for the family room. I was lucky to get a duplicate of the rug that's in there now. Why? Because Izzy is slowly destroying the one that's there now, and she's quite fond of it. 

We think that maybe he smells our late dog Nipper on it. But more likely he just likes to chew anything that doesn't chew him first. Last night he destroyed a tube of Aquaphor while no one was looking.

The plan is to not put the new rug down until Izzy is older, wiser, more obedient, and has had his little surgery. We hope that by then he'll be less inclined to ruin things.

🎅🥾🤶👢🎄👞

P.S.: Biggest surprise of the day -- my wife, a longtime defender of circus peanuts, got a bag in her stocking. She triple-dog dared me to try one. And... I liked it. I've spent years hating on the circus peanut but I liked it. I'm so ashamed. 

I will; not, however, eat candy corn. For those waxy, tasteless nubs, my mouth is a bridge too far.  

P.P.S.: If you're wondering how I wrapped a 5x7' rug, I didn't. It's still rolled up, wrapped in plastic, hiding in the cellar. I wrapped a picture of it from the Web site. 

E for Effort. And Elephants.

The attempt to revive the public's interest in circuses with Parker & Pestoff's Parachuting Instant Circus was doing
all right until Hurricane Isaias scattered the squad over three Louisiana parishes.

I'd like to see his credentials.

Cutting loose.

"I know she's tired of show biz, but I hate to see her go -- she's the best magician's assistant I've ever seen!"

Auditions.

"Yes, okay, it's a one-trick pony, but come on!"

All the world loves a clown?

I have to say I was sorry to hear that Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey is (are?) hanging it up. Seems like a sad ending to a great chapter of Americana. The warning signs were there. Locally, the Big Apple Circus went bankrupt last fall and is selling off its assets.

When I was a kid we went to see Ringling Brothers Barnum Bailey Pierce Fenner & Ziggy at Madison Square Garden and the place was jammed. I think it was a weeknight, too. I guess crowds like that just don't come anymore. I guess people just don't like circuses anymore.

We know that people are down on animal acts. The campaigns against circus animal acts were never going to stop. If Ringling Brothers et al had nothing but a flea circus, PETA would be mounting a "Save the Fleas" campaign.

The trapeze artists and other death-defying acrobats can always find work, I guess. Cirque du Soleil and stuff. Those acts are amazing to see in person. However, I don't know that you get the same effect looking at them on a stage as you do under the big top or in stadium, where the vast three-dimensional space in which they play makes them look so small and yet mighty, fragile, fast, and graceful. They'll all land on their feet.

Another part of the circus experience that's very hard hit, though, is the midway. I think that's been dying off, though. Who needs a freak show when you have YouTube?

The saddest story in the whole thing to me was that of Kristen Michelle Wilson, the first female ringmaster in the 146-year history of Ringling Brothers. The circus said she would be "inspiring and empowering children everywhere to follow their dreams." Days later they might have added, "Straight to the unemployment office."

So that's very sad. But won't someone think of the clowns?

Worse for the circus than the animal acts, I think, is that we have become an anticlown nation. They used to be beloved makers of fun. Now we think the very worst of them.

I admit that I too have done my bit to wound the Clown-American community. I'd like to say that some of my best friends are clowns, but even there, my friends would not take that as a compliment.

There was a time when clowns were seen as happy, fun, or at least nice, like Emmett Kelly and Bozo -- and children were expected to like them and did. But starting decades ago, concerns about what those chuckleworthy chaps were thinking under that makeup made us start worrying about what they were really up to.

Maybe it all began with Pagliacci, Toscanini's tragic and murderous clown story, famous since its 1892 premiere. What was going on behind that greasepaint, eh? Irony! Then there was the scheming Scaramouche of the 1921 Rafael Sabatini novel, plotting his revenge behind his powdered visage.

Next thing you know, clowns were turning bad. Really bad.

There was the Joker, based on the jester playing card; homicidal maniac, archfoe of Batman. Pennywise, the evil clown figure of Stephen King's It. There was the horrid Krusty the Clown of The Simpsons. There was Twisty the Clown from American Horror Story. There were even Killer Klowns from Outer Space, thought to be one of the worst movies ever made by no less an authority than my father, who usually didn't review movies. And there was Stucco the clown.

Well, no, Stucco from Rob Harrell's late strip "Big Top" is a nice clown, but even he seems less human than the animals around him. Like clowns were some weird alien species.

I'm just saying it's been really hard for all the nice clowns out there, with evil clown sightings and grown men and women suffering from coulrophobia. Look at Party City -- the majority of men's clown costumes are evil clowns, not sweet, fun clowns.

People blame the animal acts for killing the circus, but I'm telling you, it was clown terror that did the circus in, and it was creative folks who loved to have funny, friendly characters be evil that made everyone scared of clowns.

What are the nice clowns supposed to do now, huh?

---

P.S.: I mentioned to Mr. Philbin that this would be today's topic of disquisition, and he remarked that it seemed like a suspicious coincidence that it would run on Inauguration Day. I deny this accusation, because when you deal with politics, every day is evil clown day.

Superpants.

You are probably not aware of this, but a lot of pixels are being spilled on the question of Superman's pants. Specifically, briefs or no briefs?

Really, this is kind of a big deal. For about sixty years, Superman was always seen with those little red tights outside his pants, as rendered in this early Joe Shuster drawing. 

But in the more recent comics, as in the recent films, you'll be more likely to see him sans briefs.

Sometimes with a turtleneck, too.

It may be stupid, but it's almost an unsolvable conundrum for the folks at DC. Comics are full of these kinds of things now.

On the one hand, it's fun to change the look of a well-known character, to help keep it fresh. On the other hand, it's a well-known, trademarked character. You can't dump on success.

Various sources, including this pretty good article on Medium.com, explain that the whole tights-outside-pants thing, nearly universal in comics' Golden Age; that in the Victorian era, acrobats and the like wore tights like that, to show that the hero was athletic.

Courtesy of Pinterest's stupid site.

And thus for generations American boys put their tighty whities over their pants and were instantly transformed into heroes!

Why did the circus athletes wear those tights? It's a good question, since they often don't anymore, preferring long spandex pants. Circopedia (of course there's a Circopedia) tells us that the one-piece leotard was invented by Jules Léotard, a French trapeze acrobat who obviously would have found the form-fitting outfit useful for not getting tangled up and dying while flying about. (Instead he died of infection at 32.)

The non-tight tights would preserve some modesty. 

So Superman's throwback pants were a reference to athletes who don't dress like that anymore, but everyone expects him to have the pants. Now what?

Beats me. Comic books have other problems. The main ones are continuity and the passage of time. In the sixties, when DC rebooted a lot of its heroes (only a few like Bats and Supes had been chugging along), it was resolved that the old heroes from the 1940s had been on a parallel Earth. That worked great until the 1980s, when the obvious passage of time began to be an issue again; I recall that Superboy stories were suddenly set in the early 1960s, even though that same Superman (not the Earth-2 Superman---if you aren't familiar with this, don't even think about it) had clearly been around since then. Since then repeated attempts have been made to reboot everything all over again, so we'd now have Batman meeting Superman and the Joker and everybody for the first time, except that that has its own problems---for example, they wanted to keep Dick Grayson as a grown-up called Nightwing, but if Batman was a new hero again, how could this be? And yet they didn't want to reprise Grayson's Robin years. (Not when there were other Robins, whose stories fans loved and didn't want to see just disappear down the continuity hole.)

When I tell you the latest mishegoss centers around Kid Flash... let's just walk away slowly.

These things don't tend to be a problem with other heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel or Hopalong Cassidy, whose adventures are tied to a very specific era in the past, or Hercules, whose adventures took place in a sort of timeless, pre-technological era. And none of them, not even Herc, have racked up the history that someone like Green Lantern has. (Don't ask which Green Lantern.) (Please.)

There are other problems with comics today, but let's leave that for another time. Suffice it to say, Superman's pants are not that big a deal in the scheme of things. I suspect, though, that even if DC manages to get us to forget about the briefs, advertisements and sitcoms will continue to show underwear on the outside as part of a kid's superhero outfit for decades to come. Although they have to have the cape and maybe a mask too. Otherwise it's just exhibitionism.