TPO

It is now August. The party is over.

I was away last week, which is why Bronx Funnies went offline for a couple of days. I had my iPad, on which I create the strips, but I haven’t figured out how to port them over from there directly to Blogger. I could post them to Facebook, but to that I say Bah! They belong on CL, if for no other reason than that they cover me when I’m too busy to blog. Can’t complain about that!

The biggest news is that we’ve postponed Bump a day. The Friday on which we would normally start is Veterans’ Day this year, and I hadn’t given it much thought, but last week I heard from the school and they explained that they felt that the school should remain closed—completely—to honor veterans, which is the whole point of its being closed in the first place. I can’t say I disagree with that. Too often we think of holidays not as celebrations or remembrances of those being honored, but simply as a day off. I mean, Presidents’ Day is usually an ad featuring George Washington saying, “I cannot tell a lie: Our prices are insane!” I sort of believe that GW is a little more important than for use as a shill. Or good old Abe, or any other president. Except maybe Nixon. (“Shop with us, because we are not a crook!”) Anyhow, veterans aren’t just these really old guys in wheelchairs that served in War of 1812 and they roll them out once a year. Veterans are, nowadays, former Sailors who became soldiers, young folks serving really far away in really tough situations, or even folks serving close to home but doing service to their country rather than service to themselves. Veterans are also folks my age, lots of whom got a bum deal from fighting a difficult and unpopular war. And people my parents’ age: I was going through my father’s papers as I was settling my mother this spring, and among them were all his old army stuff. He was over in New Guinea during WWII.

Postpone Bump a day to honor these people? Proud to do it.

There will be Bumpian changes, though, because of the date change and because of some other things that we’ve been talking about over the last year. I’ll give them their due in separate posts. Meanwhile I will begin updating the invitation so that it will be ready by the beginning the local school year. And by the time this is posted I will have registered folks for Yale and Jake. If that doesn’t mean the party is over, I don’t know what does.

(Wow. TPO. Now that brings me back...)