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The Saturday Comics: Pete the Tramp

30 Jul

July 30, 2011

The World English Dictionary defines a tramp as “a person who travels about on foot, usually with no permanent home, living by begging or doing casual work.” They can be easily distinguished from bums or hobos as a bum is “a disreputable loafer or idler” and a hobo is “a migratory worker, especially an unskilled laborer.” OK, maybe it isn’t that easy to distinguish them after all. I think if you find one hopping a train it is a tramp, walking along with all his possessions tied in a handkerchief on the end of a stick it is a hobo, and sleeping on a park bench it is a bum. It is kind of like Big Foot. Spot one in the Pacific Northwest and he’s called a Sasquatch, spot one in South and he’s a Skunk ape. But tramp, hobo, or Sasquatch, whatever you call them, they probably won’t smell very good.

Which brings us to Pete The Tramp.

Pete the Tramp was a comic strip by Clarence D. Russell. It began in 1932 and ran for more than three decades. Howard Eugene Wilson, in the Harvard Educational Review, described the strip’s title character as “a hobo with a gentleman’s instincts.”

Wait- Pete the Tramp was a hobo? I give up.

From the wonderful resource Toonopedia.com:

Pete was like most fictional tramps of the time in that he moved around a lot, was always looking for a handout, did an occasional odd job when he couldn’t avoid it, and was generally disreputable. But he didn’t resemble the worst of them, i.e., wasn’t violent or a sneak thief—except the latter, but not very often and never for anything of great value. Pete was often seen in the company of a small yellow dog of indeterminate breed, whom he addressed as Boy. Under the name Pete’s Pup, the dog was the star of the Sunday page’s topper during the first couple of years. Pete’s strip was popular during the Depression and still maintained reasonable circulation after that period’s end made his situation less excusable.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Pete the Tramp. 

Snorky was another Pete The Tramp Topper.

Before you go, this little nugget of information came from where most stinky little nuggets come from, wikipedia: The Further Adventures of Pete the Tramp (1944) was a live-action stag film which stole Russell’s character and put him in an erotic situation.

You can’t see me but I am shaking my head in disbelief.

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Imponderable #8: Mt. Tabor Oregon

27 Jul

July 27, 2011

Doesn’t Portland have a filtration system in their reservoir? Actually, it does not, which seems a little reckless when you consider that they had an e coli scare in 2009 and everyone was told to boil their water. It seems that the unfiltered nature of the water was an unspoken secret that only came to light in 2008 when a pair of skinny dippers were found having fun in the water.

It is a fact, admitted by the Water Bureau administrator, that crap gets into the water supply all the time. I am not even talking about illegal dumping or anything man-made, I am talking about dead animals, sick fish, ground toxins, and yes, animal waste and pee. That is a fact and it is assumed and even expected. Strangely, rather than a way to treat or filter the water, which may be expensive but would be practical since it could be done at one central location as water leaves the reservoir, the city floated plans to cover the reservoir, at a cost of $500 million.

According to The Big Book of Boy Stuff by Bart King, an average man pees about 1 to 2 quarts per day. So assuming the drunk peed the limit, that would make 2 quarts of pee diluted in 7.2 million gallons of water. Or 1 quart of pee to every 14.4 million quarts of water. That means that every quart of water from that reservoir would be 1/14,400,000 pee. In other words, that is 6.944 X 10 to the power of -8 percent. This is far, far less than the proverbial drop in the bucket. It is a molecule in the bucket.

Compare this to the FDA guidelines for peanut butter. BEWARE, this is disgusting. The FDA allows an average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams and an average of 1 or more rodent hairs per 100 grams. That makes the drunk peeing in the reservoir positively hygienic by comparison.

So is the Water Bureau administrator over-reacting? After all, the two people who skinny dipped in the reservoir didn’t cause him to dump the water, and who knows what kind of bodily fluids they released?

In this era of droughts is it wise to dump 7.2 million gallons of water?

In this economic climate is it wise to waste $35,000 to dump effectively clean water? I admit that no, I don’t want to be drinking anyone’s pee, but at one part per fourteen million I don’t think I am. Consider that the EPA allows up to 7 asbestos fibers per liter of water. Asbestos is a known carcinogen.

Is one quart of human pee worse than the probably thousands of quarts of animal pee and possibly infected waste that goes into the reservoir?

Granted that the reservoir is in the middle of public parkland, how many people have already peed in the water over the years?

The question is Imponderable.

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