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Day by Dave (AMS) reminds us that today is National Tattoo Removal Day, and I suppose the way you react to that information could be an indication of your age.
Whamond’s gag assumes a relationship between alcohol consumption, getting a tattoo and regret. The question isn’t whether that pattern exists. Of course it does.
The question is how common it is, which in turn prompts the question of who thought it was a good idea to have National Tattoo Removal Day?
My suspicion is that it is the result of intense lobbying by the National Association of People Who Make Their Living By Removing Tattoos, but that’s just a guess.
There are such people, and this article suggests that they’re staying employed, thanks to young women who regret showing ink in a bridal gown. But the piece doesn’t provide statistics to confirm that it’s really a trend.
And here’s an article that shows what you get if you ask about the possible carcinogenic effect of getting a tattoo, which is an incredibly lukewarm confirmation. It’s possible, yes, but unless you got your tat in a jail cell from someone using a Bic pen and a sewing needle, you shouldn’t lose sleep over it.
I suspect both articles were assigned by editors of advanced years for young reporters — possibly tattooed — to research and write.
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Non Sequitur (AMS) takes a grumpy old person’s attitude towards tats, and I can relate.
Like Flo, I remember when tattoos were an act of rebellion, and, like Cap’n Eddie, I remember when Jay Leno was funny. For that matter, I remember when Flo and Eddie were Turtles, and if you got that reference, you, too, are very old.
I wrote a column about tattoos back in 1996, in which I said that the difference between tattoos and platform shoes was that it doesn’t cost $3,000 to get rid of a pair of platform shoes, and that I was glad my Nehru jacket and muttonchop sideburns had not been permanently attached.
However, I wasn’t snide throughout the entire piece and, while I assumed it was a passing fad, which it apparently wasn’t, I said that even if it were, a lot of people probably wouldn’t mind exhibiting a best-by date well after their youth had expired.
I even considered getting a tattoo, back when I was about 20 and the only people with ink, aside from Polynesians for whom it was traditional, were sailors, ex-cons and bikers. I had several friends with tats and they were neither Tahitian nor in the navy.
However, I was put off by the permanence because I expected to continue to change and didn’t want to wear a milestone of some person I no longer was.
For the record, I did have a Nehru jacket and sideburns, but only briefly, and I never owned a pair of platform shoes.
And I now have several tattooed granddaughters, which, if it’s cool with them, is okay by me.
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In (Th)ink, Keith Knight turns the day into a political statement, and I would point out that even if you know what you’re doing, it’s hard to completely remove a tattoo without leaving a tattoo-shaped scar of some sort.
Dear Leader has indeed been trying to forget that he was ever associated with Project 2025, but Knight is correct in suggesting that the mark is permanent evidence of Trump’s poor judgment.
Though I’d be a little surprised at this point if Dear Leader still thinks substituting a picture of JD Vance would improve things.
The bridal-regret thing, BTW, is trending in the media, whether or not it’s actually trending among brides themselves. But if fad-happy editors assign enough articles on the topic, they’ll create some demand.
We’ll wrap up the topic with a quote from Kelly Ripa’s husband, because if not him, then who?
The first one I had, I don’t regret that I did it because it was meaningful to me because we went right to Chapel of the Bells, got married in Vegas, and we said ‘What should we do next?’ and I said, ‘Let’s go get tattoos.’
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Having spent time picking on youth, let’s turn our attention to the other end of the timeline with this The Buckets (AMS) gag.
This would have been a much bigger problem back in the days of the local pharmacist. Our little town had the only pharmacy for 30 or 40 miles, and one of the pharmacist’s daughters was a classmate of mine. And then, when my kids were little, the drugstore was on the next block, so they could go have Lillian make them a milkshake while her husband, Jerry, filled prescriptions.
But that was before Rite Aid and Walgreens and CVS and the rest of the faceless chains bought out those locally owned pharmacies. I feel sorry for the pharmacists who work there, because you still need all the training but now you’re treated — and compensated — like The Help, which you are.
I certainly felt bad when Jerry and Lillian shuttered their store, because they were nice folks and good neighbors and kind to my kids.
But the upside of all that, relative to this cartoon, is that there’s no particular reason not to let Jeff Bezos fill your ‘scripts online at Amazon, because the people who own CVS and Rite Aid aren’t local, either, and at least, unlike Walgreens, Amazon will fill your prescriptions without judging your morality.
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Besides, as Mia says in Pardon My Planet (KFS), this business of doing things in person is passé anyway. If you can meet and date online, you can certainly order your medications online, plus, if you never meet in person, it will reduce your number of potentially embarrassing prescriptions.
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I’m not the only one taking a break from politics, though, like me, Tom the Dancing Bug can’t quite manage to escape making some sort of point even when he’s going for laughs. Like Lester the Jester, we’re just clowns, after all.
And you know what they say, “Many a truth is spoken in jest. Though not by Les.”
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Finally, a heads up that Crabgrass (AMS) has just ended one of its extended story arcs, so this is a good time to jump aboard and see what happens next.
And how else could I finish today?
I don’t consider my self so old that I didn’t know Flo and Eddy were in the Turtles and that they were associated with Frank Zappa.
Music is music.
The Turtles broke up in 1970, so to remember when they were happy together you’d probably have to be about 65 now. Not ancient, but hardly young.
Knowing the past is not a requirement of age. I know the Keystone Cops, but I am not in my 90’s.
There is never enough to learn. Reading your Posts are helpful.
I remember when Mark Volman (Flo) was “The Phlorescent Leech.” Don’t know why he shortened it.
Nice memory…how did Howard Kaylan become Eddie?
According to Wikipedia, he was Flo in The Turtles before he became The Phlorescent Leech with Zappa. He couldn’t use “Flo” after the Turtles ceased to exist due to “Contractual Restrictions.”
The Nehru jacket was my introduction to the fleeting nature of fashion. I have ignored fashion ever since.
I’m thankful I was a little too young, my parents were smarter than I, or the kids’ clothing budget was limited (or a combination) that I never got the Nehru jacket I thought was so cool.
Looking at the tats on my shoulders (a dragon on each, the Triumph motorcycle logo on the left arm, the logo of a motorcycle club I belonged to on the right) I’m pretty glad I stopped when I did, considering they’re all thirty years old and definitely looking a bit worse for wear. Yeah, I have some regrets that I didn’t have my club colors done on my back, but I’m not really sure I’d have been willing to put up with the time, expense, and pain.
Flo and Eddie? Memories of “200 Motels”. And even if you don’t remember them from the Turtles, there’s enough videos on YouTube that you can certain get a memory implant.
I often wonder who tattoos are for. If you’re trying to impress people you don’t know, you’ve got a bad self-image problem. If you’re trying to impress people you know, once they’ve seen them, they’ve seen them, and they’re never likely to look at them again. If you’re trying to impress people who are close to you, you better make sure they stand at least several feet away, or they won’t know what they’re looking at. All I know is that, at twenty feet away, it looks like you got yourself a bad bruise, and you’ve gained my sympathy, if that was your intention. And as far as sexual attraction goes, remember–once you’ve got a tattoo, you can never be truly nude again. (I’ve also thought for a long time that the first person who invents a painless, easy tattoo-removal process that takes less time than it took to get it in the first place will become a certain multi-millionaire.)
Back in the day, condoms were behind the counter and only available from that neighborhood pharmacist. Talk about embarrassing.
Avoiding that embarrassment resulted in many a hurried first marriage.
A friend of mine worked in a drugstore in circa 1963, when he was still in high school. He’s told me of his “side hustle” of selling condoms to his fellow students. I imagine that there was quite a few of those folks around in those days, before the condom machines became common in some gas station restrooms. I was too young to know him in HS, but everyone knew which restrooms had those machines.
Hard not to recall that old joke about the young fellow buying condoms at the pharmacy in anticipation of a first date with a young girl. Later, when picking her up and meeting her parents, he and the pharmacist dad share some awkward moments
My first job out of college in ’75 was working as an accountant for the now defunct Frederick & Nelson department store. I worked with several young women just a bit older than me who treated me as their little brother. One of the most fun of the bunch was a girl named Jill. She looked like she could have been a model for Ivory Soap with the cleanest appearance you ever saw. Tall, maybe just a smidge overweight, light red hair, mischevious green eyes, and always with a smile. One day somebody was talking about music, maybe going to a concert or something, and she said, “Get this. My brother is the bass player for the Mothers of Invention.” Not one of my favorite bands but I had just had a roommate who had their albums that he loved to play so I knew their music and, I thought, the band members. Looking at the archetypical girl-next-door, I could only say, “Are you kidding me?” She said that her brother, Jeff, played bass and whenever the band was in town, her parents always had Frank Zappa, Flo, and Eddie over for dinner. She said they were really nice and it was always a blast because the conversations were always unpredictable. Having seen a few Zappa interviews, thanks to the Web, that may have been an understatement.
“Lester the Jester” is pretty sobering, in how many former comedians are now being taken seriously as pundits who espouse hateful garbage.
Asimov had a story about how society “evolved” to the point where they could only communicate while apart, via computers, and couldn’t stand to be in a room with anyone else. Then one of them is murdered, so we got a well set-up locked room mystery. I can’t remember who did it or how, or what the name of the story was, but it seems rather prescient. In re-reading Asimov, though, I did discover that he was rather the misogynist. I do remember Flo and Eddy, though.
I think that was the novel The Naked Sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun
“Lydia the Tattooed Lady” was one of Jim Henson’s favorite songs, and the Lydia muppet was one of his best–pleasingly plump and so happy as she danced and showed off her artwork.
When I was a child, I was fascinated by my Uncle Walt’s American flag tattoo on his right arm. I never asked about it, even though I knew he was Canadian, lived in Windsor all his life, and served in the Canadian army. Must have been quite an evening.
Here’s a different song also called the Tattooed Lady. Somehow an Australian version but performed by the Kingston Trio.
https://youtu.be/21c-v3TDf6Y?si=0b3smqzKQy8VyJ1c