Wednesday wordage, neologism proposal.

Frustratisfaction?  Satisfrustration?  What’s the word for when your schemes succeed beyond your plans, and you have some new issue, not entirely bad but time-consuming, to deal with?

Over the years we have acquired some animals that have been damaged, whether deliberately or innocently, and have all the signs of PTSD.  And, over the years, we have worked patiently to cawlm them down, win them over, and develop trust and tranquility that had been lost.  It takes effort—when we first got T., I feared that I would never be able to catch her at all.  Trying to touch D like trying to bring together the north poles of two magnets.  The first time I tried milking L it took 45 minutes.  But, there’s things you can do, if you are patient (and if you have someone like the Real Doctor show you how to do them) and can bring some measure of peace to these animals’ troubled minds.

And now, after a few years of work, here we are.  T, even though she is not being milked, gets in the way of the animals coming off the milk stand because she wants attention; I can braid her beard, and she’s fine with it.  D will do anything for a peanut, and has taken to blockading the exit of the milk stand until I give her a good scratching.  L is still a little nervous on the stand, but is mostly just one of the herd.  She will not move off the stand at all until she gets that spot on her shoulder scratched; her eyes, even now open wide most of the time in a look of extreme alertness and timidity, start to close a little, and then almost shut, as her head slowly arches back and her tongue starts to loll out of her mouth, as for a brief moment, from the demons in her head that torment her, she gains respite...

...but it kind of holds up the progress of getting the milking done.

Wednesday Words, pictures edition

Well, it looks as though Prince Valiant has joined the resistance.

I am no longer ashamed to admit that Prince Valiant is perhaps my favorite cartoon in the Sunday Papers, jostling out Frazz and Doonesbury (this ranking is only for newspaper comics, not web comics).  When I was a wee lad, I thought it was just soooooo hokey and dumb and unhip.  It might have been—it was kind of a fossil, going back to the 1930’s or so, and preserved in amber by successors to the original creator.  Heck, it was the favorite strip of the exceedingly callow, Nazi-curious Edward, Duke of Windsor.  But the more I look at it today, the more I like it.  It’s anachronistic, but it is original—every other strip in the paper adheres to more or less the same aesthetic formula, but Val stands alone.

Not only does Prince Valiant follow its own aesthetic muse, but it does so brilliantly.  People talk seriously about graphic novels as art, praising the layout of panels and the interplay of art within panels that drives the story forward or makes a larger point—and Valiant does exactly that, week after week.  The artwork itself is formidable, the colors vivid.  Look at the Sunday Funnies page from a distance, Valiant will stand out.  Look at it a little closer, the panel layout (which is never the same) flows.  Look at the text and the story, it matches the layout.  Look at the details, and they are rich.

Now, thanks to the n-th generation heirs of Hal Foster, Prince Valiant is woke.  The cast of characters is pretty diverse for medieval Europe, and people of non-Euro ethnicities play key roles in the stories.  Women do a whole lot more than faint and wait for the prince—they drive stories, are warriors, are politically savvy rulers of their own kingdoms.  This is the Dark Ages for the modern, multi-cultural world.

The most recent story arc highlights this hipness (the strip still moves in multi-month long stories) It features the Queen of the Misty Isles (Valiant’s spouse, but a queen in her own right, and on her own in this story) facing down a treasonous senator.  The senator, motivated by a hatred of foreigners, attempts to whip up popular support by demagoguery.  He colludes, treasonously—that’s the language in the strip—with a somewhat hostile foreign empire to try to seize power from the rightful queen.  He is thwarted, in part, by the Queen’s political savvy, an Amazon warrior, a boatload of immigrants, and his own two ne’er-do-well nincompoop sons.  Very, very with it!

So, all I have to say is, Rock on! Prince Valiant, Queen Aleta, and the rest of y’all.  Stay woke!  You GO!  And, hey, maybe could you come into our century and get medieval on somebody’s ass...

Monday Musical Offering, Wordy edition

Apparently, our president* thinks he is the equal of Lincoln.  I look forward to some latter-day Copland composing “A Trump Portrait.”

“When standing erect, he was...hey, cut that out!  This is serious!...[ahem]. And this is what he said...this is what Donald J. Trump said.  He said, ‘ When you’re a star, they let you do it.  You can do anything.  Grab ‘em by the pussy.’”

And so on.

I expect the music would be thoroughly noxious and banal at the same time.  The most disjointed serial music, and wall of noise, and minimalism, and industrial, the Horst Wessel lied,  and Varese’s America, all played as loud as possible and all at the same time.

Ugh.