stimulus stimularum

There was a comic strip I read a while back in The Herald called Pearls Before Swine which, as I recall, goes like this:

A duck is standing on a box when his friend Pig comes and asks, What are you doing, duck?, to which he replies, I'm standing on the crate of sadness.

But why?, the pig asks further. Because my girlfriend flew over a year ago and never came back, the duck answers forlornly.

The pig is intrigued and so he asks even further, So why are you standing on the crate of sadness?, and the duck's curt reply is a simple, Because this is where you stand when your dreams are not fulfilled.

On the strip's final frame, all the animal characters of the strip including the pig are standing on the crate of sadness.

That particular strip did not make me laugh; rather, it made me think. Not only was it so full of irony, it was also timely in the light of the current economic setting, so timely in fact that to a lot of people, the crate of sadness might as well be renamed America.

- to be continued