→2012→07→10→Comic Strip of the Day→CSotD: Couple of old guys sitting around cartooning
Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Couple of old guys sitting around cartooning

Published: July 10, 2012 1 minute 8 comments

Nonseq

"Non Sequitur" gets into the "so old" jokes, which is particularly funny to me since I just referenced Leno the other day, and admitted then that I have no idea how he's doing today because I don't stay up that late anymore. 

I saw him live about five years before he took over the "Tonight Show" gig and he was inventive and hysterically funny. That was a quarter century ago.

He got over it.

It's hard to explain to anyone much under 40 that Leno was once very funny, and, as noted here more than once, I don't get the tattoo thing at all. Tattooes are like trophies: You used to have to do something to earn one, but now they are handed out to everybody for no reason at all.

Grumble, grumble.

So, having already read "Non Sequitur" this morning left me well set up for "Soup to Nutz," which is done by Rick Stromoski, a mere tyke in his mid-50s. (Leno, Wiley and I having been born within 18 months of each other seven or eight years earlier.)

Soup

"Soup to Nutz" is a nostalgic look at childhood, though I don't think it's as specifically rooted in the past as Brian Basset's "Red and Rover," which is very purposefully set in, and has frequent references to, the late 60s/early 70s.

(Editor's note: Rick writes "It's a contemporary strip locked in a late 60's early 70's feel, sort of like Lynda Barry's Ernie Pook — I purposely don't have computers, smart phones, gameboys etc that would date it.")

Today's strip, however, is firmly in the past and provokes a cascade of "I'm so old I can remember when …" connections.

For instance, there are still people with landlines, certainly including families with small kids. But does anyone still have corded phones? 

I'm so old I can remember when you found your kids by following the phone cord to the closet or the furnace room or wherever they could stretch it to get some privacy. Cordless phones ended that, and the gags today center on people racing around the house trying to locate the handset when a call comes in.

Having a corded phone does make it easier to answer a call quickly, but not everyone bothers.

And then Stromoski brings in the notion of "the phone company" and, moreover, the phone company giving a damn what you say or do with your phone, and of live operators. 

I'm so old I can remember "the phone company," but I can't remember the last time I spoke to an operator.

However, I can remember when you not only needed them, but when they were authority figures to little people who asked to be connected to Mom and Pop and Teddy. 

The operator in that case would call your number back and tell your mother that her child was playing with the phone. 

I was not "playing with the phone." I wanted to talk to my grandparents and my uncle, dammit.

I suppose the retelling of the incident later that evening included some parental giggles, but the immediate fallout did not.

(And I'm old enough to remember that, when this occurred, the term "fallout" was not in common usage, though we were breathing the stuff regularly.)

And then there is the overall topic of prank calls. I would suspect there is a pretty narrow age band today of being young enough to think these calls are funny and yet old enough to know how to block Caller ID. 

Even more narrow would be the odds of reaching someone at a store who knew what "Prince Albert" was, much less who was knew what it was and was yet naive enough to give you the straight line.

I suppose the real "I'm so old I can remember …" award would go to the person who says, "I'm so old I can remember when kids would call the shop and ask if we had Prince Albert in a can."

I'm pretty sure that, while there are plenty of people who are old enough to have gotten those calls, the ones who ever fell for it would be about 140 if they were still around today.

As I remember, they were about 140 back then.

 

 

 

Previous Post
Limited updating this week
Next Post
CSotD: How to carry a tray of (stone) soup

Comments 8

  1. I’m so old I remember calling the local hardware store and asking them if they carry 50 lb bags of salt. When they answered, “Yes.”, I replied, “I do too and they are damn heavy!” Not sure whether I got more of a thrill from the prank call or using the word “damn.” Wonder why they stocked 50 lb bags of salt?

  2. Dave: It was to melt the ice on the stairs and sidewalk.

  3. Here on the coast, where houses both have to be up on stilts and have to be retirement-friendly, many have elevators. And the law requires elevators to have phones in them for emergency assistance. And those phones have to be corded, to make sure the handset will actually be IN the elevator and won’t wander away.
    And we’ve got a corded phone in the house, just because. It’s cheap and easy. I don’t have to push any &%(# buttons to answer or to “send” when i’ve dialed, or to end a call. To me all that is like driving a stick shift. If you like the phone – or like driving – there are benefits to the extra procedures, but if you don’t, they make more work to do something that i didn’t want to do anyway!

  4. I do have a corded phone, and a cordless, and a cell, but the main reason for a corded is that the phone cables are buried around here and when we have severe weather, the phone still works even if the electricity is out – unless it’s cordless. And the cell towers may go out too. It’s sort of like wearing a belt AND suspenders, but around NE Ohio we’re a lot more likely to have awful weather than to have our suspenders snap.

  5. During our recent 6-day power outage we were very glad to still have one phone corded. It was about all that worked (some cell towers were out of commission, too). The downside of that technology was that it has no caller id. I spoke to more telemarketers in those 6 days than I have in the previous couple of years.

  6. Repeated many times in our house as I was growing up, essentially verbatim:
    (Dad picks up the phone receiver, clicks the button underneath twice. We wait a few seconds.)
    Dad: “Yes, Esther, connect me with South New Berlin 3Y5, please.” (Pause) “Yes, I know Myrt’s out of town, but my sister Mary might be at home.” (Pause) “It sure is a [nice, beautiful, cold, nasty, as appropriate] day.”
    (Long pause)
    Evvie Stevens, Myrt’s next door neighbor and one of several people on the same party line, piercing voice audible through the handset across the room: “MYRT AIN’T HOME.”
    Dad: “Evvie, I could have figured that out if you’d just let it ring!”
    (Dad slams down the handset.)
    Dad, grumbling: “Well, there’s another nickel on the phone bill.”

  7. On corded phones in emergencies: My phone stayed on in the Ice Storm of ’98 when everything was down, but I didn’t have a cell phone then to compare. I’ve had power failures during which I had to go out and plug the phone into the car to recharge it, but never experienced cell towers going out — at least in such numbers that I noticed, which is to say, if you can reach one, others can be out. On the other hand, I wouldn’t pay the phone company for a line simply on the chance of this sort of thing happening — I’d need more reasons than that. As said, if you do have a regular line, a corded phone is handy simply to know where you can pick it up when the handsets have migrated. The kitchen wall phone is most likely, since the plate is likely there anyway and might as well be covered with $5 worth of telephonage.
    And, Sherwood, I started to write that I had dialed Zero and asked to be connected to my grandparents but then decided that I couldn’t have known to do that without knowing that there was more to it. This would have been in about 1953 and I don’t know when we were converted to full dial-up.
    I do remember when you could ask the operator to break in on someone who was just yapyapyapping when you were trying to get through to them. The phone company stopped that service when too many people began routinely requesting it, I think.

  8. I just want you to know I have a corded phone. Right here on my desk. My next phone goal is a refurbished one from the 1940s. Back when being hit with a phone really meant something.

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.
^ Top