CSotD: The thrilling days of yesteryear
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I finally got rid of my typewriter about five years ago. I'd hauled it on two moves without ever plugging it in and decided it was silly to take it on a third. Which is to say, I'd held onto it for considerably more than a decade without using it. Closer to two.
As Wiley notes in today's Non Sequitur, there are these moments that say, "man, you have been around a loooong time." For me, it's not seeing my life in a museum so much as seeing cars I remember new, featured in classic car shows, alongside the Packards and Stanleys and DeSotos.
Yeah, yeah, I'm old enough to remember DeSotos. Groucho drove one. (He told me to say that.)
We all have our breaking points, and, if carbon paper isn't showing up in museum exhibits yet, it's at least something you have to explain to people, including some who are not what you'd call children but maybe are what I'd call children.
The median age in the US is about 37 (I just read somewhere, but then confirmed before citing, which really shows that I'm an old guy), which means that half the population was born in or after 1976, and was about 7 years old when I got my first computer and about 9 the last time I used my typewriter.
I wouldn't call every person born in 1976 a child. Just one. Mine.
But you don't have to be totally ancient to have this kind of reality check: I used to operate, and write questions for, a high school quiz bowl, and, in about 2005, posed this technology question to the high school kids: "With what once-common device would we associate the numbers 78, 45 and 33 1/3?"
Their teachers were dismayed when, in the six matches in which the question was asked, only two out of a dozen teams were able to answer correctly, both very tentatively, one of them after their opponent had given a wild and incorrect guess.
My grandfather once remarked that he felt privileged to be old enough to remember seeing his first automobile, and yet to also have seen men walk on the moon. It is a particularly fine slice of history to have bestraddled; hard to come up with a more attractive chunk of 75 years or so.
By the way, next week is the 44th anniversary of the day Neil Armstrong was misquoted, and more than half of the people in the United States today were born since the last time men walked on the moon.
How does that grab you, darlin'? (And more than half of America won't get that reference.)
The telephone booth thing in Wiley's cartoon is a little different. The booths themselves were gone in time to be the focus of a sight gag about their loss in the first "Superman" movie, which half the people in the United States don't remember because they were only two years old.
Pay phones as a whole, on the other hand, filled a necessary gap until relatively recently. I can't imagine there are a lot of people today who don't have access to some kind of phone, if only by virtue of being in a crowd of three people, but I do think the phone company moved a little swiftly to put that technology out of its misery. You still see pay phones, but not often.
By contrast, typewriters became outdated the moment PC's became affordable. A few old dinosaurs clung to their Underwoods, but mostly to establish their cumudgeonly cred. I've got nothing against people who prefer to compose in long hand, but I was appalled, touring my son's new high school in 1987, to see a roomful of typewriters in the business department.
It's an interesting bit of happenstance that this wire story has just hit, about Russia — home of security expert Edward Snowden — using typewriters for sensitive documents.
However, given the revelation that this move to double-naught secrecy has a budget of about $15,000, I wouldn't say they're shifting their entire government back to the old technology.
My guess is that their military spends more money than that shoeing horses. Ours and Britain's most certainly do.
But here's something outmoded we shouldn't have abandoned:
Editors.
Back in the days when we had an adequate number of experienced, qualified editors on board, they helped protect you from this sort of brain-fart horror.
I'm putting this one in the "My Sweet Lord" file. George Harrison most assuredly never sat down and said, "I think I'll rip off the Chiffons," and I'd bet that this, too, was either unconscious or the result of someone casually referencing the idea to Gorrell without mentioning that they'd seen it in cartoon form.
After all, that's how Alan Brady ended up plagiarizing Uncle Spunky.
A lot of cartoonists purposely don't keep track of what other cartoonists are doing for fear of subconsciously ripping them off.
Which is exactly why editors really, really need to. Really, really.
Two different syndicates, yes, but the first version appeared well before the other:
Tom Toles, June 30
Bob Gorrell, July 11
I'll update if anyone involved in this mess has a comment, but my guess is that Bob didn't mean for this to happen.
Still, wow.
UPDATE: I have since realized that an expensive watch was a prominent item in the list of things the governor should not have accepting, making the gag more obvious.
BOB GORRELL WRITES:
My take on this is, to quote Charlie Brown, "Good Grief!"
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