CSotD: In which I get to say ‘Dadgummit’ a lot

Let’s start with Daddy’s Home (Creators) and no, I haven’t finished doing my taxes yet, but I’m finished dealing with the cost of putting kids through college, and somewhere in my storehouse of columns I wrote in the 90s is a rant about how college costs should be tax deductible.

And now they are sorta kinda, in that you can take a $2500 tax credit for costs of having a kid in college, at least for the first four years.

So I could shift into “dadgummit” phase and rant about how grateful today’s parents ought to be, except, well …

The scariest part of all is that this isn’t for four years. Just one.

This graph is from US News & World Report, which publishes the yearly roundup of the best schools, but they don’t include the US Navy, which was the saving grace for one of my kids and one of my grandkids-in-law.

There’s also a growth in high school voc-tech programs and an emphasis on community colleges, both of which I’ve had grandkids take advantage of, and there are movements to make them even more affordable.

So, yeah, if Elliot gets into college, they’re screwed, but maybe we’re going back to the days of Stover at Yale (1912) and Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) when colleges were a harbor for rich, spoiled wastrels, with a smattering of a few kids who honestly wanted to be there and scraped to get through.

Dadgummit.

While I’m in dadgummit mode, a salute to Will Henry for the way Wallace the Brave (AMS) breaks the mold (intentional choice of words) of comic strips set in some twilight zone of the long ago, because when I was the father of small children, we made mix-tapes on cassettes and were grateful to have upgraded from 8-tracks, dadgummit. CDs were for the next generation.

I love that Sterling has no idea what the old fellow is going on about this time. Welcome to irrelevance, m’man.

To set my own timeline, the first tapes I made — 53 years ago — were of Nashville Skyline and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere because I was tired of buying pre-recorded tapes and having the cassette player in my car chew them up.

And, for the record, I’d bought the vinyl I was recording from, dadgummit, so I wasn’t ripping off Bob or Neil.

God knows how musicians in the age of Spotify handle the horror of one of their kids getting into college.

This dadgummit is inspired by today’s Off the Mark (AMS).

Mark Parisi faced a real challenge in coming up with ridiculous flavors that aren’t actually in production, and I’m not sure he didn’t stumble here and there.

Some of it is gross but harmless: It doesn’t matter that new, silly flavors of Oreos now take up yards of shelf space so long as they continue to stock the regular ones.

But ketchup on Froot Loops makes nearly as much sense as most of what you’ll see in the cereal aisle, where the candy seems to outweigh the grain and a dose of tomato couldn’t make things any more gross than they are.

And, dadgummit, putting pineapple and Canadian bacon on pizza was only harmless while the kids in the kitchen still knew how to make the real thing. There are pizza places now that offer two dozen flavors of pizza none of which anybody from Naples would recognize or, certainly, eat.

And I’d comment on beer, except now the rednecks are all upset that Budweiser is marketing to everyone, instead of just straight white men.

First of all, I don’t want to get into politics, but, second of all, the beer coolers are full of alcopop confections and fruit-flavored beers, and I’ve seen these macho guys buying that silly stuff, so don’t be going all Ted Nugent on us now, dadgummit.

In fact, there’s an unintentional segue to this In The Bleachers (AMS), which I had already pulled out for a rant on how, yes, jury duty rocks. Which it does.

It took me years to get chosen and I found the process absolutely fascinating. I can’t understand why people are so eager to avoid it.

In fact, calling it “courtside seats” is accurate, because you not only get to hear every word, but they pass most of the evidence around so you can examine it yourself. You’re not just courtside; you’re in the game.

The connection to alcopop and such is that, in the case I got to be part of, two guys got into a fight that ended with one of them slicing up the other with a broken bottle of some light-flavored swill that, yeah, technically qualifies as beer, but not the kind you’d expect to become a deadly weapon in a bar fight.

I find it ironic that these flavored beverages are classified as “fruit beers,” given all the homophobic/transphobic uproar from the macho brutes who drink them, but facts are facts, and I held the remains of that 12-pack in my own hands.

I’ve ranted about this one before, but was delighted to see Deflocked (AMS) take up the cause.

I’m aware of the shortage of help in a land of low unemployment, but I’m also seeing signs promising $16 an hour to people willing to wear paper hats, and I’m similarly aware that the price of what they sell has gone up. Which makes perfect sense.

At this point, if anybody is still offering a “tipped wage,” and anybody is working for it, shame on them both.

I’m with Mamet: Handing me something over the counter is not the same as coming to my table, topping off my coffee, asking if I’d like anything else and so forth.

And I’m not being unfair: I don’t tip at the hardware store or the book store or the place I buy dog food, either.

Nor do I tip at the grocery store, whether I go through the cashier’s line or, like this fellow in Rubes (Creators), check myself out.

Mind you, I’m a generous tipper at real restaurants, the ones where I don’t have to fetch my own food. I give at least another 20% and I round up, on accounta that’s how it works.

It’s not that I’m refusing to change. I already did, 60 years ago.

I let my hair down and learned a whole new way of walking, and I’m not about to change again now.

Dadgummit.