Might be a regional thing but where I am pro-gun signs posted along the side of the highway are a thing you’ll see on every stretch of highway at least once. And I’m not too far off from where the comic is located regionally, so I ran with it as a decoration.
American stereotype. Minivan-driving, latte-drinking, little-kid taxi driving, suburban mom. Stereotypically paired with children with too many out-of-school activities, tutoring, and additional schoolwork. Usually a derisive comment.
On that note, there is NO WAY that a minivan appeals to the Mom of the house. My minivan’s rear seating area can be reconfigured 7 different ways, the roof rack itself has 5 or 6 adjustments, each passenger has a MINIMUM of three cupholders, it has two stereos and climate control systems, which can be controlled from either the front or the back.
My wife could care less about any of those things, nor would any of her friends.
The only way to make it appeal to dudes more would be to make it out of Lego.
I’m not sure derisive is the right word. The connotation is that the parent spends most of their time chaufering their kids around rather than having a life of their own, and is consequently repressed. It sometimes gets conflated with other stereotypes of middle age, middle class mothers, such as them being abusive to retail workers.
Plenty of people enjoy being “soccer moms,” and may even take pride in the label.
The derisive side of ‘soccer mom’ usually comes from the fact that said mother usually doesn’t have their own life, due to being constantly working towards their kids’ efforts. Which can result in said mother living through their kids, with varying levels of passive or overt aggression.
The stereotype for “Soccer Mom” also regards driving habits. Since the “Soccer Mom” has so much to do and no time to do it, they drive like they own the road, cut off people because the van full of kids clearly has the right to weave thru traffic and drive twice the speed limit, and silly things like courtesy is for the weak. Those rules are for the people that have the time to obey traffic laws. Honestly, as a guy, minivans have gotten pretty cool. Soccer moms now drive Crossovers (Crossover or CUV… basically an SUV built for the highway and not off-road).
Hey now. I drive a crossover. (Honda CR-V, specifically.) It was particularly good when I had to drive an hour each way to campus, and tended to keep a lot of stuff in the car just so I wouldn’t have to drive all the way home to get them.
The derisive comes in because mothers of young kids who play soccer tend to be the helicopter parent on steroids, combined with the parent who believes their kid is obviously the most talented, and you’d better not say otherwise.
I learned that from my sister, who used to play soccer when she was little, and told me what her teammates’ mothers were like.
Original minivans were not this fancy complicated or luxurious. they were large stripped down ecconoboxes with little in the way of accoutrement, Style, Accommodation or aesthetics. Oh and most minivan are slower than a crapped out trabbant with a bad 3rd cylinder
WOW! New Car Dealers will do that for you!!!??? i thought the only way to get those kind of mods, was for an “after-market” addition by your friendly local-neighborhood GUN Dealer… and i’m SURE you could get a deal if you went to your local DRUG Dealer too, though you may want to ensure they wouldn’t be stepping on each others toes…
Cause if you had a car accident, it’d just fall apart and then you could have fun putting it back together again. Then off you’d go as if nothing had happened! 🙂
nah!, you’d better pack a spare set of the most commonly lost Legos… things like the one-blip dot that is used as the spacer between things that without it, your ignition switch won’t turn… or maybe the two-blip long wheel/axle holder piece… those usually get broken so as to no longer hold the axle, and as soon as you start driving off, your rear (or front) axle just “falls off” and you’re left dragging the rear half of your car along the ground… ugh… THEN, if you don’t click them ALL together “properly”… it’ll just fall apart at the first bump in the road… lemme tell ya’… a Lego car would be just TOO much hassle…
Dave, your joke was strangely superior looked at one way, strangely eerie looked at another. I’ll ask Mitch, again, what hyou’re on, about. If Mitch doesn’t know his Aunt Tarry O. will know.
Hmmm . . . I might have to consult our same in-law Rens about the connection of this comment with Dave’s joke. Maybe a lamp antic will shed some light on things.
Drive down a highway in the American Midwest, and I can all but guarantee that at least once you’ll pass a farm with pro-gun signs posted along the highway next to it.
Every. Fricking. Store. In. Texas. has a huge sign outside it designating whether or not it’s legal or illegal to carry weapons in the store. It’s like the license agreement you ignore when you install a new app on your phone. Even my kid’s SCHOOL (Texas A&M) has signs all over campus designating where you can and cannot carry your firearm. (it is a public school so weapons cannot legally be banned from campus, except in designated areas.)
return fire to keep their head down then swarm the bastard tie him /her into a proper hog tie then proceed to extract information out of them. of course my putative children will probably be cloven hooved fork tailed and speak in tongues signaling the apocalypse.
NO, it’s Texas… and re-read APG’s post, “except in designated areas”
while “I”, personally don’t own a gun, i am familiar enough with them to respect them, and i respect those that do the same. i sincerely believe what my step-brother says about the subject… “an Armed society is a Polite society”… because if an hypothetical whack-job is going to a local that follows this principle, and he/she wants to start something, and they KNOW there is an extremely lerge chance that they may get blown away by MULTIPLE people VERY quickly after beginning, then they MIGHT just think twice about starting something… and NOT do it. then the whole purpose of that gun in your possession has been justified… YES, i KNOW there will ALWAYS be individuals that use them in ways not appropriate for general society, just like there are people that use cars, or steak-knifes the wrong way… again, that is on the INDIVIDUAL, not “society as a whole” would you want to ban ALL Knives… just because some psycho goes on a killing spree with one… but you, a “law-abiding citizen” end up keeping your fancy $1000 set of Laguiole en Aubrac 6- Piece Aubrac Wood Steak Knives, because you don’t want to try and cut your steaks with a butter-knives… but now you are labeled as some “misfit, deviant knife-nut”… wouldn’t YOU get a bit, um… “passionate” about your freedom to carry (or not carry) a knife in that example, and maybe go a bit overboard in that passion, by bringing it to church, to school, to funeral’s, etc…
YES i know that this is a sore subject for some and i will not get political about it, and more likely won’t bother to further the rhetoric either way, so i apologize in advance if this post starts an unintended flame war.
there are flaws in your logic:
1)a mad man going on a rampagne is too INSANE to considder whether other people are armed as well – or even wants to use it to die in the crossfire.
2) the US have more ‘nutso going bonkers with a gun in public killing people’-incidents than most other countries because its so easy for a nutso to get to a gun. other countries have nutsos running amok too, but with far less deaths due to lack of weaponry.
3) example: in GB the regular beat cops aren´t carrying firearms, you would think that makes them an easy victim, but criminals knows this and DON`T bother arming themselves. as a result, far less shootings+deaths.
face it, the US have more civilians dying through firearms then most other countries, only surpassed by kolumbia+the like where organised crime is rampant. thats not what I would considder a ‘polite society’
Peya Luna: Wrong. Nearly all of the mass shootings in the USA were carried out in a “gunfree” zone – and because the sane people obeyed the law, they had free reign until the cops arrived. Most of them either shot themselves or were killed by cops.
A madman who can put together several weapons and ammunition is capable of thinking through the details. Contrary to many ignorant gun-banners, buying guns is not as simple as picking up one off the shelf in Walmart. You have to present ID, fill out a long federal form, and wait while they look you up in a national database.
The trouble is, most of these mass shooters never committed a major crime or acted crazy before, so they can sail right through any check that wouldn’t exclude most law-abiding citizens. Not that a gun ban would keep them from getting guns if they really wanted to. The average armed criminal won’t even enter a gun store, but he knows people who know people who will steal guns from the police department, armories, and right out of the factory.
As for your argument about criminals not arming up because they don’t need guns to fight the police, 99% of criminals would never knowingly draw a gun on a cop. They know there’s no way to win after that, and if they survive, they’ll be in prison until they’re old or dead. There are more gunfights with cops in a week of American television than there are in a year in real life – but that’s nothing new. Back when western movies were in fashion, it was easy to find out that Hollywood showed as many western gunfights in a year as occurred in the west in the first 50 years after the Civil War – and that was before Clint Eastwood, Peckinpah, etc., began filming ridiculously bloody tales.
After living here a while I still haven’t decided how I feel about the subject.
For example, just last month (May 2017) a guy who runs a bar in Arlington was shot by a belligerent person who walked into the bar; one of the bar’s customers then pulled out HIS gun and killed the shooter.
Turns out the guy who shot the bar manager was carrying multiple weapons and was probably planning on committing multiple shootings.
The bar had what Texans call a “Blue Sign” which means that licensed, concealed weapons are allowed.
Like I said, I wasn’t opening this up to political commentary; I don’t even know how I feel about it yet and I LIVE here.
Ok, I just realized that my daughter and Selkie have a LOT in common personality wise. My daughter is extremely self aware, loveably snarky, intelligent (surprisingly so, she’s used logic in arguments since she was five) and wants to play soccer for a chance to kick the ball at the groin of a boy who has been picking on her all year.
Do Sarnothi consume alcohol or do they have their own intoxicants for their day-drinking habits?
It would seem that distillation would be something that would not develop for an aquatic species before other things did. I am thinking psychoactive substances squeezed out of frogs or pufferfish or something.
Funny story, I once nailed a guy on the groin with a soccer ball without the ball ever leaving the ground, I stole the ball, he tripped over my foot (I swear, it was a total accident!) and landed with his crotch right on the ball.
Nice sign you got there on the side of the road.
Being from Texas I heartily endorse that sign.
Yes!
Might be a regional thing but where I am pro-gun signs posted along the side of the highway are a thing you’ll see on every stretch of highway at least once. And I’m not too far off from where the comic is located regionally, so I ran with it as a decoration.
agree. very nice sign.
What is a soccer dad/mom?
American stereotype. Minivan-driving, latte-drinking, little-kid taxi driving, suburban mom. Stereotypically paired with children with too many out-of-school activities, tutoring, and additional schoolwork. Usually a derisive comment.
On that note, there is NO WAY that a minivan appeals to the Mom of the house. My minivan’s rear seating area can be reconfigured 7 different ways, the roof rack itself has 5 or 6 adjustments, each passenger has a MINIMUM of three cupholders, it has two stereos and climate control systems, which can be controlled from either the front or the back.
My wife could care less about any of those things, nor would any of her friends.
The only way to make it appeal to dudes more would be to make it out of Lego.
Curious, where does the derisive take in it come from? That description doesn’t seem that bad.
I’m not sure derisive is the right word. The connotation is that the parent spends most of their time chaufering their kids around rather than having a life of their own, and is consequently repressed. It sometimes gets conflated with other stereotypes of middle age, middle class mothers, such as them being abusive to retail workers.
Plenty of people enjoy being “soccer moms,” and may even take pride in the label.
The derisive side of ‘soccer mom’ usually comes from the fact that said mother usually doesn’t have their own life, due to being constantly working towards their kids’ efforts. Which can result in said mother living through their kids, with varying levels of passive or overt aggression.
This.
The stereotype for “Soccer Mom” also regards driving habits. Since the “Soccer Mom” has so much to do and no time to do it, they drive like they own the road, cut off people because the van full of kids clearly has the right to weave thru traffic and drive twice the speed limit, and silly things like courtesy is for the weak. Those rules are for the people that have the time to obey traffic laws. Honestly, as a guy, minivans have gotten pretty cool. Soccer moms now drive Crossovers (Crossover or CUV… basically an SUV built for the highway and not off-road).
Hey now. I drive a crossover. (Honda CR-V, specifically.) It was particularly good when I had to drive an hour each way to campus, and tended to keep a lot of stuff in the car just so I wouldn’t have to drive all the way home to get them.
I guess the worst kind of Soccer mom would be the kind that drives Bimmer SUVs.
The derisive comes in because mothers of young kids who play soccer tend to be the helicopter parent on steroids, combined with the parent who believes their kid is obviously the most talented, and you’d better not say otherwise.
I learned that from my sister, who used to play soccer when she was little, and told me what her teammates’ mothers were like.
Original minivans were not this fancy complicated or luxurious. they were large stripped down ecconoboxes with little in the way of accoutrement, Style, Accommodation or aesthetics. Oh and most minivan are slower than a crapped out trabbant with a bad 3rd cylinder
But you can make it appeal more to dudes. Install a small CSI field kit and hood mounted Gatling guns.
I’m pretty sure you can get mounts that put the gatling guns right into the roof rack. Probably directly from the dealer.
WOW! New Car Dealers will do that for you!!!??? i thought the only way to get those kind of mods, was for an “after-market” addition by your friendly local-neighborhood GUN Dealer… and i’m SURE you could get a deal if you went to your local DRUG Dealer too, though you may want to ensure they wouldn’t be stepping on each others toes…
Being a girl, I would totally drive a car made of legos if it was feasible!
Cause if you had a car accident, it’d just fall apart and then you could have fun putting it back together again. Then off you’d go as if nothing had happened! 🙂
nah!, you’d better pack a spare set of the most commonly lost Legos… things like the one-blip dot that is used as the spacer between things that without it, your ignition switch won’t turn… or maybe the two-blip long wheel/axle holder piece… those usually get broken so as to no longer hold the axle, and as soon as you start driving off, your rear (or front) axle just “falls off” and you’re left dragging the rear half of your car along the ground… ugh… THEN, if you don’t click them ALL together “properly”… it’ll just fall apart at the first bump in the road… lemme tell ya’… a Lego car would be just TOO much hassle…
I think we’re starting to see a bit why Sai Fen and Pohl are together. They make a wicked humor combination.
Dave, your joke was strangely superior looked at one way, strangely eerie looked at another. I’ll ask Mitch, again, what hyou’re on, about. If Mitch doesn’t know his Aunt Tarry O. will know.
Oy.
*clap clap clap* Well done, my friend. 😀
Hmmm . . . I might have to consult our same in-law Rens about the connection of this comment with Dave’s joke. Maybe a lamp antic will shed some light on things.
If you lampshade it, … Thats would be a lamp-antics, I’m O?K.s with thats, if yous jokes around with mes, bes specific.
Ow. Ow ow ow ow ow. Ow.
Ow.
ha. I like Pohl more and more every time we see him XD And Selkie…. crotch shots, really
What’s with that sign? It seems oddly political
Drive down a highway in the American Midwest, and I can all but guarantee that at least once you’ll pass a farm with pro-gun signs posted along the highway next to it.
And gunracks in trucks. Every truck has them.
And everyone has a truck. *nod nod*
Every. Fricking. Store. In. Texas. has a huge sign outside it designating whether or not it’s legal or illegal to carry weapons in the store. It’s like the license agreement you ignore when you install a new app on your phone. Even my kid’s SCHOOL (Texas A&M) has signs all over campus designating where you can and cannot carry your firearm. (it is a public school so weapons cannot legally be banned from campus, except in designated areas.)
So you can’t legally keep guns out of schools? Isn’t that… kind of insane?
The more I learn about America the more I come to believe this applies as a whole.
For every person who says it’s insane there is someone else who wants their kid to be able to return fire.
No, I’m not kidding.
return fire to keep their head down then swarm the bastard tie him /her into a proper hog tie then proceed to extract information out of them. of course my putative children will probably be cloven hooved fork tailed and speak in tongues signaling the apocalypse.
you know what trumps 1 shooter aiming at 100 people?
100 shooters aiming at him
NO, it’s Texas… and re-read APG’s post, “except in designated areas”
while “I”, personally don’t own a gun, i am familiar enough with them to respect them, and i respect those that do the same. i sincerely believe what my step-brother says about the subject… “an Armed society is a Polite society”… because if an hypothetical whack-job is going to a local that follows this principle, and he/she wants to start something, and they KNOW there is an extremely lerge chance that they may get blown away by MULTIPLE people VERY quickly after beginning, then they MIGHT just think twice about starting something… and NOT do it. then the whole purpose of that gun in your possession has been justified… YES, i KNOW there will ALWAYS be individuals that use them in ways not appropriate for general society, just like there are people that use cars, or steak-knifes the wrong way… again, that is on the INDIVIDUAL, not “society as a whole” would you want to ban ALL Knives… just because some psycho goes on a killing spree with one… but you, a “law-abiding citizen” end up keeping your fancy $1000 set of Laguiole en Aubrac 6- Piece Aubrac Wood Steak Knives, because you don’t want to try and cut your steaks with a butter-knives… but now you are labeled as some “misfit, deviant knife-nut”… wouldn’t YOU get a bit, um… “passionate” about your freedom to carry (or not carry) a knife in that example, and maybe go a bit overboard in that passion, by bringing it to church, to school, to funeral’s, etc…
YES i know that this is a sore subject for some and i will not get political about it, and more likely won’t bother to further the rhetoric either way, so i apologize in advance if this post starts an unintended flame war.
“An armed society is a polite society” is just another way of saying “We will enforce our social mores at gunpoint”
This is not even remotely healthy.
Consider various things that were considered “impolite” or “improper” as late as forty, fifty years ago.
there are flaws in your logic:
1)a mad man going on a rampagne is too INSANE to considder whether other people are armed as well – or even wants to use it to die in the crossfire.
2) the US have more ‘nutso going bonkers with a gun in public killing people’-incidents than most other countries because its so easy for a nutso to get to a gun. other countries have nutsos running amok too, but with far less deaths due to lack of weaponry.
3) example: in GB the regular beat cops aren´t carrying firearms, you would think that makes them an easy victim, but criminals knows this and DON`T bother arming themselves. as a result, far less shootings+deaths.
face it, the US have more civilians dying through firearms then most other countries, only surpassed by kolumbia+the like where organised crime is rampant. thats not what I would considder a ‘polite society’
Peya Luna: Wrong. Nearly all of the mass shootings in the USA were carried out in a “gunfree” zone – and because the sane people obeyed the law, they had free reign until the cops arrived. Most of them either shot themselves or were killed by cops.
A madman who can put together several weapons and ammunition is capable of thinking through the details. Contrary to many ignorant gun-banners, buying guns is not as simple as picking up one off the shelf in Walmart. You have to present ID, fill out a long federal form, and wait while they look you up in a national database.
The trouble is, most of these mass shooters never committed a major crime or acted crazy before, so they can sail right through any check that wouldn’t exclude most law-abiding citizens. Not that a gun ban would keep them from getting guns if they really wanted to. The average armed criminal won’t even enter a gun store, but he knows people who know people who will steal guns from the police department, armories, and right out of the factory.
As for your argument about criminals not arming up because they don’t need guns to fight the police, 99% of criminals would never knowingly draw a gun on a cop. They know there’s no way to win after that, and if they survive, they’ll be in prison until they’re old or dead. There are more gunfights with cops in a week of American television than there are in a year in real life – but that’s nothing new. Back when western movies were in fashion, it was easy to find out that Hollywood showed as many western gunfights in a year as occurred in the west in the first 50 years after the Civil War – and that was before Clint Eastwood, Peckinpah, etc., began filming ridiculously bloody tales.
After living here a while I still haven’t decided how I feel about the subject.
For example, just last month (May 2017) a guy who runs a bar in Arlington was shot by a belligerent person who walked into the bar; one of the bar’s customers then pulled out HIS gun and killed the shooter.
Turns out the guy who shot the bar manager was carrying multiple weapons and was probably planning on committing multiple shootings.
The bar had what Texans call a “Blue Sign” which means that licensed, concealed weapons are allowed.
Like I said, I wasn’t opening this up to political commentary; I don’t even know how I feel about it yet and I LIVE here.
Hmmm… “Soccer” and “groin” don’t get pluralses… She isn’ts aimings fors the soccers goalie’s groins?
Selkie can get it right when the plural/singular distinction is important to her. She knows she can only get one goalie in the groin at a time.
XD Selkie’s silly.
I love Pohl. As a mom of one, I would totally be down for day drinking with Pohl and Todd.
And now I go rescue my 8 month old from the durance vile of his high chair (oh no, blueberries)…
Oh, the dawning self-realization on Todd’s face. So that’s what it looks like from the outside…
As I drove off the lot with my minivan my wife’s response was “Oh, sh*t, what have we done?” I was busy counting cupholders.
Ok, I just realized that my daughter and Selkie have a LOT in common personality wise. My daughter is extremely self aware, loveably snarky, intelligent (surprisingly so, she’s used logic in arguments since she was five) and wants to play soccer for a chance to kick the ball at the groin of a boy who has been picking on her all year.
If I see correctly, Todd already IS wearing a turtleneck.
na, his shirt is a blue-ish T-shirt looking thing from yesterday’s strip, I’m pretty sure that is the neck collar of the jacket itself.
Do Sarnothi consume alcohol or do they have their own intoxicants for their day-drinking habits?
It would seem that distillation would be something that would not develop for an aquatic species before other things did. I am thinking psychoactive substances squeezed out of frogs or pufferfish or something.
Interesting question. Dunno that it’s ever came me up in the comments before.
fermentation CAN happen underwater and alcohol will get fish “Drunk”
Here, that gun sign. Fucking rednecks.
Funny story, I once nailed a guy on the groin with a soccer ball without the ball ever leaving the ground, I stole the ball, he tripped over my foot (I swear, it was a total accident!) and landed with his crotch right on the ball.