CSotD: Rolling the bottoms of my trousers
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Baby Blues happens to be towards the start of my daily comics diet, and today's set the mood, because my response was to remember how, when I was a kid, lions and cheetahs and other predators pretty much had to live on promises.
Disney showed chases, but the prey always escaped, though sometimes we'd see lions eating something not too bloody and not too identifiable and not too often.
Mind you, instead of showing us the Circle of Life, Disney not only fudged the footage but faked the facts and thus created — or at least promoted — the lemming myth for which cartoonists should be ever-grateful.
Note that the narrator does call it a legend, but then confirms its truth, which involved collecting a lot of lemmings and shoving them off the cliff for the camera.
Me, I'd rather the kids occasionally saw a cheetah get an honest meal.
I read somewhere that half of the world now lives in cities, which means a lot of kids have no idea how food works. This reminds me of when I was at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo in 1968, and a buddy and I were laughing over the fact that one of the animals there was a cow.
We stopped laughing when a preschool group came by and were both fascinated by the cow and a bit put off by the idea that milk came from this huge, somewhat smelly beast.
They need to learn it somewhere, and even the ones who are going to be vegan have to know how the system works, or it won't anymore.
Another view of childhood and generations is seen in this 1956 Hi and Lois Sunday strip, one of several at the Comics Kingdom Archivist's blog (all of which, including this one, can be embiggened by clicking).
A different generational shift came to mind via Tina's Groove today, a moment in time back in the late 70s, early 80s that I referred to as "Kids in the Kitchen."
Perhaps it was not universal, but certainly in Colorado there was an outburst of letting young chefs produce new dishes, most of which involved fanciful sauces on what would otherwise have been perfectly good cuts of meat and fish.
As the comic suggests, we don't allow that anymore, except, I would note, in one segment of the industry: It is very difficult outside of major cities to find real, actual pizza anymore.
I tried to buy a slice the other day and found myself looking at an array of creative pies. I said to the kid behind the counter, "Is this one sausage, mushrooms and onions?"
"That's actually got a cream sauce …" he began, so I said, "Well, have you got any old-school, regular pizzas?"
"We've got some Hawaiians …" he replied, gesturing to a couple of pineapple-laden pies.
At least the fellow behind me in line chuckled. A few more years and he won't get it, either.
Further on the topic of how much things have changed dagnabbit, Pearls Before Swine has been having fun at the expense of phone books lately. The amazing thing about phone books is that they still exist, though they aren't actually produced by the phone company.
But I suppose as long as someone is willing to buy the ads, which is to say, as long as someone is convinced that being in the Yellow Pages is a necessary part of business, they'll continue to crank them out.
The post office here gets a bulk contract to distribute the things, and I'm all in favor of keeping the post office in business despite attempts to strangle and privatize it, so that's good.
But I'm glad they don't actually put the book in my PO Box, because then I'd have to deal with it. Instead, they put a card in the box entitling me to take a book from a bin in the lobby, a bin that appears to remain undisturbed for as long as it sits out there.
One of my sons was working maintenance at a motel a couple of decades ago where the traveling sales team for a phone book company set up shop for a week or two, and they apparently had a computer to create spec ads to wow potential clients.
They also apparently ordered a pizza they didn't much like, because they created a spec ad for that restaurant which he came across in the course of picking up their trash and brought home and I dearly wish I had a copy of it, because it was hilarious.
If all the ads were like that, I'd for sure grab my copy.
I don't have a moment of zen about phone books, so this'll have to do
(I knew a guy in college who made a mint one summer selling bibles.
Don't know if he used this technique or not
but I wouldn't put it past him.)
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