A belated Happy Rockyversary to Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose

Charlie Meyerson's Chicago Public Square had this yesterday, but it's not the first time I've been a day late... or, for that matter, a dollar short.

Hard to believe that Moose and Squirrel have been frustrating Boris and Natasha and Fearless Leader from their base in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota for 65 years now, but that's what Meyerson reports.

I'm a fan.

OK, I'm an obsessive: I have all five seasons of the show on DVD. My children never quite got into the shows; some of them chafed at my constant explanations of the references, once topical, by then historical. (Perhaps -- just possibly -- not all of the running commentary was necessary.) But I have grandchildren now, and, like Boris, I have a Fiendish Plan.

My Fiendish Plan has been to introduce the show to the grandkids... but, also like Boris, my plan has foundered upon implementation. It seems the new generation is not as much interested in sly Cold War comedy as they are in... well... Paw Patrol... or Super Kitties...

which is the Disney Channel's 'homage' to Paw Patrol -- and can you believe someone would want to imitate Paw Patrol? -- or Batwheels...

which, incredibly enough, is just exactly what it looks like....

There has to be a window where it will be possible to bring at least some of the kids into at least an appreciation of Rocky, Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-Right, Peabody and Sherman, Aesop's Fables, and (of course) Fractured Fairy Tales ... but, inasmuch as the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show never once mentioned Taylor Swift, it can't be a very large window.

But I continue to hope.

A voice from the past, describing the present

I came late to the writings of C.S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was already a major motion picture before I got around to reading the Narnia books. Somewhere along the way, I enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, but I'd never even heard that Lewis had dabbled in science fiction until recently, when I found his science fiction trilogy at Costco.

I'm on the third volume now, pictured here, but I had to interrupt my reading to make this post.

Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength in or about 1944. But the words he puts in the mouth of a very bad character, in the course of trying to recruit a naive professor into her evil organization, with just minor adjustments for topics and technology, could easily have been written in the last few months:

Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it's properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us---to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is."

"I don't believe you can do that," said Mark. "Not with the papers that are read by educated people."

"That shows you're still in the nursery, lovey," said Miss Hardcastle. "Haven't you yet realised that it's the other way around?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything."

"As one of the class you mention," said Mark with a smile, "I just don't believe it."

"Good Lord!" said the Fairy, "where are your eyes? Look at what the weeklies have got away with! Look at the Weekly Question. When Basic English came in simply as the invention of a free-thinking Cambridge don, nothing was too good for it; as soon as it was taken up by a Tory Prime Minister it became a threat to the purity of our language. And wasn't the Monarchy an expensive abusurdity for ten years? And then, when the Duke of Windsor abdicated, didn't the Question go all monarchist and legitimist for about a fortnight? Did they drop a single reader? Don't you see that the educated reader can't stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can't. He's been conditioned."

(That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, ch. 5, pp. 97-98, Scribner Ed. 2024.)

I've often wondered why the Trojans let that horse in....

I don't know if the Millennials and Zoomers use antivirus programs; if they do, I suppose they would call them "apps," not programs. But the names of the unfortunate Trojan guards in the cartoon above should be familiar enough to the younger generations to prompt a chuckle, even from them.

The rest of us have paid for McAfee or Norton since before the Earth's crust cooled. Norton now operates on a subscription basis; actually, I think Norton was one of the first programs to require subscriptions. I know I was a subscriber in 2010, when I dealt with an actual 'trojan horse' virus. Much as I don't like subscriptions, I suppose a subscription model makes particular sense for antivirus programs, given the rapidity with which new security threats evolve in the online world.

But am I the only one who thinks the most common feature of antivirus software is trying to upsell the user on new products or features? The occasional scan may be reassuring, but the results always come with a warning that there are all sorts of unnecessary files or applications slowing down your computer -- and, if one tries to click toward a solution, an offer to 'solve' the problem by upgrading one's subscription for only several dollars more per year.

It feels less like protection... and more like protection racket. Hey, this is a nice computer you got here... it would be a shame if something happened to it.... It does leave the user -- this user, anyway -- wondering what it is that we are actually paying for now....

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The cartoon above was taken from a Facebook site called Writers, Readers and General Tomfoolery. I tried, but failed, to decipher the creator information at the top of the image so that I could give proper credit to the actual cartoonist. I apologize for that. I will gladly update to properly credit the original source if it can be ascertained.