When Wallace the Brave and Spud set up their ridiculously rickety bike jump earlier, I said it reminded me of the one my eldest went over and broke his arm as a lad.
Well, here we are — yes, it’s a fracture — and I’d say Wallace’s mother’s response is more or less mine.
Brace yourself, Mom. It went right up to his senior year in high school, when I showed up 20 minutes late to a soccer game and saw him sitting on the bench, his keeper’s jersey covered with mud.
Seems there’d been a bit of a collision in the goal mouth.
Yes, he made the save. (That’s what matters!) But his coach turned away from watching the game long enough to suggest I take him to the ER and get his shoulder x-rayed.
Just a bad bruise that time. But I felt we should have gotten an ER punch card, where the 11th visit was free.
Will Henry has a second collection of WtB strips coming out — You can pre-order now!
I suppose this Alex could have been paired with Wallace as a Juxtaposition.
You think it’s a pain in the ass running your small son to the ER regularly, go ahead and marry somebody else’s kid who never outgrew the fascination.
Though, as football season begins here, let me temper that a bit: NFL afternoon games are only on Sunday, and the games involving someone’s favorite team do matter.
The other games should be negotiable, but you can take a ride in the country, or clean the gutters, on Saturday.
And it’s not fair to blame football if he doesn’t want to go antiquing if he wouldn’t want to do that on Saturday, or in the spring, or any other time.
And speaking of “consistency,” you should not be too surprised if you end up married to an Alex, if you met him at Buffalo Wild Wings.
One advantage Millennials have over us old folks is that they seem to date for six or seven or 20 years before finally making a commitment.
He might fake being obsessed with you that first football season, but, after that, it’s on you.
This SMBC repeats a theme that went around when those stupid signs first appeared, though here it’s just a bit ratcheted up.
However, Zach Weiner needs to update his annoyances, because I’ve got some Yuppie in the neighborhood with one that warns you to back off because of the baby in the car.
It’s not just a caution, it’s a hostile command.
The little yellow window hangers might make you want to crunch their bumper just so they’d get over themselves, but this thing makes me want to rent a monster truck.
Not when the baby is actually in the car, of course.
But that’s another thing: They should be ticketed for displaying that notice when there is, in fact, no baby on board.
Between Friends deals with changing technology.
I went mobile a couple of decades ago, but I live alone and the dogs weren’t going to answer the phone when I wasn’t home.
On the other hand, when you’ve got several people in the house, it’s nice to be able to call and talk to whoever happens to be there.
It beats making four phone calls until you find someone who’s actually in the building.
Though unless the message is “Your house is on fire!” I’m not sure what the benefit is to them of paying for that landline.
And they’d probably want to know that anyway, even if they weren’t there at the moment.
The Duplex was hot this week: I’d set aside three strips in my Friday Funnies folder. This one is the best of a good run.
Country music dominated the jukebox in the bar where we hung out as teenagers, so I heard a lot of Tammy Wynette and Charlie Pride and Eddy Arnold and Buck Owens and the gang.
City people don’t seem to understand that country music fans enjoy irony and self-deprecation, such that a song like “If You’ve Got The Money, I’ve Got The Time” is humor, and they joke about the heartache in country when perhaps a little more vulnerability in their own emotional makeup might be a good thing.
But I got away from country music until a few years ago when I started going to a dental office where the music of choice is the local country station.
Man, I thought dentist music was drippy back when they were streaming Musak.
Eno isn’t far off.
It’s all love songs aimed at the listener, and I don’t mean the tragic kind where the fellow explains that he loves her but he’s got a wife.
It’s mushy, Fabio drivel, recorded without Chet Atkins or Floyd Cramer or anyone slightly like them within 20 miles of the studio.
Y’damn right there’s a tear in my beer.
And on the topic of media, Reply All wonders about cable bundling, which actually has a reasonable explanation.
The standard joke is that you have 150 channels and nothing to watch.
The explanation is that you’re only really paying for a dozen of those channels and the rest are fillers that the cable company gets pretty much for free: They’re not paying for those crappy home improvement and home shopping networks.
Such that, if you cut it down to the channels you actually watch, it would cost pretty much the same.
(Most systems let you block channels, so you could conceivably unbundle to see only the handful you want.)
And this tip: If you’re not a subscriber to Comics Kingdom, now would be an excellent time to get aboard. The 1936 Spinachova storyline is wrapping up at Thimble Theater and look who’s waiting in the wings.
Speaking of Vintage comics, a few weeks ago KFS misplaced a week’s worth of Radio Patrol strips, and I wasn’t able to find them anywhere either — the strip was fading by 1949 and wasn’t in many papers — but I did find these.
Kids, this is what we had before ESPN:
I remember reading an article a trillion years ago or so that said the genesis of those baby on board signs was in fact practical: the inventor was a cop who had attended an accident scene where an infant, in those times of far less safety consciousness and regulation, had been thrown clear of the vehicle. The baby’s existence wasn’t even known until relatives asked about it.
Of course that’s a moot point now that everyone just uses them like a vanity plate.
When my son was a firefighter, he and a partner crawled through a burning apartment until their oxygen tanks were on their last “Get Out!” warnings in search of toddlers who neighbors said were in there.
They weren’t. Glad my kid got out okay.