If I were going to address politics today — which I am not — I’d have given Scott Stantis the Great Timing Award for dropping this Prickly City (AMS) just as yet another Republican congresscritter appears to have turned in a piece of autobiographical fiction.
Alternative facts? The GOP is promoting alternative lives!
Or I might have picked up on last Sunday’s Pearls Before Swine (AMS), and remarked upon how Elon Musk seems to have spent the week making it seem true. Not only has he been bragging about dropping the legacy blue checks that legitimate journalists have had, and not only did the foolishness of his cherry-picked Twitter Files turn a Congressional hearing into farce but then he asked in a meeting why he was losing followers.
One of his engineers explained that people didn’t seem to want to hear what he had to say, and so what Elon had to say was “You’re fired.”
Or I might have simply run a collection of all the cartoons recycling this 1994 Doonesbury classic to make similar gags about Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Chinese spy balloon.
But I’m not doing politics today and I think I already referenced that Doonesbury recently anyway.
So, instead, I’ll riff on today’s Mr. Boffo, which will no doubt induce humorless pedants into pointing out that you couldn’t have 3,000 year old Christmas candy because Christmas itself can’t be older than 2,000.
To which I would point out that those nasty, iridescent hard candies were 1,000 years old when they started, and nobody has eaten more than one since. I say this as someone who defends fruitcake, but who had to sell ribbon candy at Christmas in seventh grade, which is only marginally edible.
Starting in junior high, each class had a Christmas specialty as it began fundraising for the senior trip to Washington. I think they assigned ribbon candy to the seventh grade because we were the youngest, still somewhat cute and so prone to get donations from people who didn’t want the damn candy.
Which reminds me in turn of when youngest was in high school. Kids would come to the door selling this or that and I’d just say, “My son plays hockey,” and they’d reply, “Oh, geez, how much do you need?” and start digging in their pockets.
Speaking of which …
Juxtaposition of the Day
I shopped at a place this week that only takes cash, as a result of which I have the world’s smallest Michigan Bankroll in my coat pocket: Two one-dollar bills wrapped ’round with a 10. Which I guess means I’ll be all set if I run into a panhandler.
Even the laundromat takes swipe cards, or insert cards or tap cards or whathaveyou, and I bought a wallet two or three years ago that doesn’t even have a pocket for cash. Which I didn’t even realize until I wanted to stick my car’s registration there.
I didn’t believe in a cashless society, but here we are. For that matter, I scoffed at a paper-free society a few decades ago and today a ream in the printer and a couple of reporter notebooks will last me through the year.
As for Stan, I can out-nostalgia him, because the phrase reminds me of Charlie Greer’s commercials on WABC for Dennison, the Men’s Clothier, where money talks and nobody walks (at about 2.30 in that aircheck).
Which is as good a reason to get rid of cash as anything.
Juxtaposition of Nostalgia
Two more blasts from the past, one intentional, one I’m less sure of.
My mother insisted we take typing because it was, she insisted correctly, an unspoken prerequisite for college. It also turned out to be a good way to meet cheerleaders and I wound up sitting next to a girl I’d had a crush on for years. However, not only was Mom right about college but it sure set me up nicely for a career in journalism, where plenty of my associates were hunting and pecking.
I don’t know when it’s taught now, but I hope earlier than senior year. I do recall being horrified when I toured my kids’ high school in 1987 to see typewriters in the business classroom, but they’d been replaced within a year.
The McCoys left me with a different question about times passed. The joke, of course, is that everyone in heaven wears white, but I tend to overthink everything, so my response was to wonder if anyone still separates whites from colors.
I once made the mistake of leaving something red in with whites and turning everything pink, but that was 53 years ago and I’m pretty sure most fabrics are colorfast today, aren’t they? The only separation I was doing by 1990 was to keep white crew socks away from work clothes because of the lint factor.
Apparently, however, it’s a trope that refuses to die. Or dye.
While as long as I’m in rant mode and channeling my inner Andy Rooney, I was pleased to see Jen Sorensen echo some aggravations I’ve been mulling over.
My urge to shop local is stymied in part by there being so few local stores anymore. I realize shopping at a chain preserves crappy local jobs, but it’s not the same as being able to talk to the owner, as seen in that last panel.
Meanwhile, as she also notes, shopping online makes you vulnerable to bogus reviews and to changes in suppliers, with the result that what you see is not necessarily what you get.
This may be a bigger problem in small town America than it is in the major metros. Even our Big Box stores are really just Small Carton stores, no more than two-thirds the size of their urban versions and carrying little beyond the basic inventory.
I’m not trying to make Jeff Bezos any richer, but I can’t see driving two hours to Boston just to buy a turkey baster that won’t be on shelves here again until November.
When it comes to phones, I’m admittedly no hipper than Bub in Betty (AMS). I use mine for phone calls and an occasional text not to exceed four or five words.
However, my desktop is pretty packed, Alexa’s on the bookshelf and I’ve also got a Fire.
Which you may stand next to, if you’d like.
Re: Mr. Boffo — Then how do you explain this? https://youtu.be/C7TJTni3rUo
Game, set and match.
You asked when typing is taught now. My kids are in high school at the moment, and they were taking typing in K-2. Chromebooks were passed out in 3rd or 4th grade, I think typing as a subject was done by then.
I took typing as a summer-school course in high school, because it was something I wanted to learn but not enough to dedicate an actual full semester to. I kind of agree with the comic: it’s the one class that’s certainly paid off the best for me. At the time, because I am old, typing was considered pretty feminine, not something a real man needed to bother with. Like you, I enjoyed the resulting boy-girl ratio. And I am 100 percent not joking that I think a key reason I got my entry-level job as a newspaper reporter after college is that I was the fastest typist who applied.
I’m off to buy some reporter’s notebooks now. Haven’t thought about them in a long time, but they really are the perfect size and shape to jot a note and then cram into your back pocket.
One of my favorite gags from The Office (US) TV show: The idiot boss Michael is sorting trash after an office party, when sensible receptionist Pam walks in and says, “Oh, we don’t recycle.” “We don’t?!” says Michael. “Then why have I been separating the trash into whites and colors?”
I took typing as a NYS Regents class in my senior year. I agree it was one of the most valuable classes, and it paid off nearly immediately. In college, I typed papers for guys in my dorm for $5 or a case of beer. (They usually got the beer because they’d get to drink it too.) It’s probably not even offered in HS any more.
In sixth grade (1963), I received an F in penmanship; my dad immediately bought me a [manual] typewriter. When Olivetti came out with an electric typewriter, he bought me one. I took typing lessons in high school (as well as shorthand), and other than learning how to bake (not cook!), it’s the course that I have utilized the most. I prefer touch typing commands to using a mouse. As I write my HTML scrips from scratch, plus doing a lot of emailing, my speed is great. Also my speed in making misteaks is great, but those’re easy to correct.
Oh, and my penmanship hasn’t improved a jot.
In sixth grade, my penmanship was awful. So, my teacher and principal had a brilliant idea: learning to type would improve my coordination and thus my penmanship. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
One summer vacation my mom sat all us boy kids down and made us learn to touch-type. She’d been in the service; “If they know you can type they’ll make you a company clerk, keep you out of the front lines.”