Quino

Happy birthday, yesterday, to my dad. I spent a couple of hours at his house, along with Karin, Samuel, and Daniel. Stephen dropped by, too.

It turns out that my dad shares a birthday with Quino, the famous Argentinian cartoonist who died two years ago. If I had to rank newspaper comics in terms of, I dunno, some combination of intrinsic merit and life-impact, Peanuts would tower above all the others; and then would come Condorito, and then the gag comics of Quino. (I also grew up reading Quino’s daily strip, Mafalda, but was less taken with it.)

No niche-occupiers for me. I like my cartoonists to have hugely universal appeal.

Quino was just featured in a Google Doodle, throughout Latin America and in parts of Europe. I guess his appeal isn’t universal enough for the United States.

He isn’t a good caption writer. His best work is mostly wordless. Or it uses gibberish, as in this famous strip.

A few themes:

Owners.

Workers. (Uber, anyone?)

Politicians.

Law and order.

Reading/dreaming. (He is very good at drawing dreams.)

More reading.

Loneliness (one).

Loneliness (two).

Death (one).

Death (two).

The closest thing in this country is The Far Side. But Quino draws better, and with a certain grandeur.

Diploma

It’s been reported that the iconic Chilean cartoon strip, Condorito, begun in 1949, will no longer be printed.

This is big news. Condorito is the Peanuts of Latin America.

I could single out many great jokes from this comic, but I’ll recount just one: “Diploma.”

A traveler drives through Andean farm country. He stops his car and gets out to stretch his legs.

He asks a farmer for a drink of water. (The farmer is Condorito.)

A little boy is helping the farmer out in the field. The farmer tells him, “Diploma, fetch this traveler a glass of water.” The little boy goes. Presently, he returns with some water.

The farmer says, “Thank you, Diploma.”

The traveler slowly drinks his cold water. Then he turns to the farmer and makes conversation: “I couldn’t help but notice that the little boy is called ‘Diploma.’ A curious name! What is the reason for it?”

The farmer ruffles the boy’s hair. “Several years ago,” he says, “his mother went off to the city to attend the university. She told everyone that she wouldn’t return until she had a diploma. And here he is.”

The traveler goes ¡Plop!

When I was very little, I used to go around telling people this joke, not really understanding it. They would give me funny looks.

But it seems to me that this joke has somehow become one of the great themes of my life.

Quiz

The grammar quizzes that I write have been getting more and more ridiculous. This week’s quiz questions were about Condorito. Here is an excerpt (with the blanks already filled in):

Don Cuasi and doña Treme write a letter to their daughter, Yayita, to warn her about her rakish boyfriend. We’ve always been proud of you, daughter, they say; we expect that you haven’t hidden anything from us; we don’t believe that you’ve dissimulated. But we fear that Condorito has been playing us all for fools. Though he’s promised to lift weights every night, that lousy bird hasn’t been eating an adequate dosage of protein (meanwhile, every week, he has smoked). His arms have been turning thinner and weaker. We don’t believe that he’s been trying to do any exercise. … Love, Your Parents.

This passage is very strange, says Mary.

Well, that’s what happens when one must work from a very puny vocabulary list.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For the second time since she moved in with us, Ziva is “in heat.” With one arm, she drags herself all over the carpet. Jasper is sometimes responsive to this, sometimes not, but never (so far as we can tell) *consummately* responsive. … Fortunately, Karin has scheduled an operation for Ziva, to take place a few weeks from now.

En route to Aldi

“Mary, writing so much philosophy is distracting me from reading philosophy, which is distracting me from reading novels, which is distracting me from reading short stories.”

“Maybe it would help to distract you if I were to put on some more TV.”

¡PLOP!