CSotD: Everything old is still old, dammit
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Baby Blues sets off several rants. I'll try to contain myself.
This is actually a reverse of the "Clueless Cellphone Buffoon" issue, because Kirkman and Scott are inexplicably suggesting that a man could actually go to the grocery store without screwing it up if his wife would not turn it into a manipulation game.
I hope they are not expelled from the National Cartoonists Society for this heretical gag.
But the Clueless Cellphone Buffoon, an embarrassment to our gender, is a real thing: The guy who spends the entire shopping trip with his cellphone plastered to his ear, checking back with Mission Control.
"Honey? The diced tomatoes? Are they in cans with pictures of tomatoes on them? Do you want the diced tomatoes that say 'Diced' or 'Whole' or 'Crushed' on the label?"
It's evidence that the old whine "I went from being somebody's daughter to being somebody's wife, and I never learned how to be myself" can be applied to men as well.
Everybody — male or female — should have to spend three years on their own in a town without takeout. ("Town Without Takeout" sounds like a horror movie title, doesn't it?)
I would give the buffoon on the cellphone this much: He may be playing that game where, if you prove to be incompetent enough at a task, you won't be asked to do it again.
It used to be easier, for instance, to get out of ever having to do laundry again, before they started using colorfast dyes on everything. Something red in the white load would generally do it.
These days, you have to throw her favorite wool sweater in the dryer.
Now that I'm empty-nested, I don't shop anymore; I market, Euro-style. That is, instead of making one trip to round up a week's menus, I go nearly every day and grab whatever looks good to me.
When I was an at-home parent, however, I shopped during the week, avoiding the days when coupons came out or when the senior center bus brought people in. And never at noon, or after school was out.
Those of us who took the job seriously were like lap swimmers — the pool belonged to us during those certain hours.
In those pre-cell-phone days, the ones who made me embarrassed to be a guy came in on weekends with a list from Mommy, and then defied the male stereotype of logical efficiency by going down the list instead of down the aisles.
And, since they didn't know what aisle anything was in, they'd find an item, then begin wandering around looking for the next item.
Nor did they have the sense to scan the list ahead of time. If they had, when they found the Shredded Wheat, they'd realize it would probably be a good time to pick up the Captain Crunch, too.
But no: Swing around and go wandering off in search of whatever is next.
Weekends at the grocery store were like a Demolition Derby played with carts.
And then there's The Family That Shops Together, and I'd rather encounter the Clueless Cellphone Buffoon puzzling over the tomatoes on the phone than run into Mom, Dad, Bud and Sis spread out across the aisle trying to reach consensus on the subject.
These are not the rantings of an irascible old geezer. These are things that drove me crazy in my 20s and 30s.
As an old single guy, I just zip in and out of the store, sometimes with a basket but almost never with a cart, and so I can chuckle at the things that once drove me mad.
Speaking of Mad …
Here's a little reward for your having waded through that whole rant. Let the masters — Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis — demonstrate proper kvetching on the topic.
And to pick up the bitching-and-complaining part of that rant, here's Sean Martin on the topic of people constantly telling you you're doing things wrong, though he's doing so over at Medium instead of at his usual hangout.
I am sick of being told I'm doing everything wrong, and y'all haven't invented a damn thing, either: What smug Internet jackasses call "life hacks" were, before your mother was born, called "handy household hints," and, specifically, Hints from Heloise, who was almost militantly unhip.
Well, the original Heloise was.
When her daughter took over the gig in the late 70s, word on the street was that she was pretty hip indeed but smart enough to keep it on the down-low. If nothing else, she was hip enough to rock that premature gray well before anyone else.
In any case, neither of them would announce in snotty tones that you were doing something wrong. They'd simply suggest a new way you might want to try.
Most of the "life hacks" I've seen on line are useless: Either they're something I figured out long ago or they're not as efficient as something else I figured out long ago.
But, perhaps ironically, the two I actually have adopted are re-heating pizza in a frying pan and … wait for it … peeling bananas from the bud rather than the stem.
Today's Edison Lee made me laugh, but then the final panel got another laff because, yeah, not worth it for a Tootsie Roll.
I greatly suspect that's something else they've ruined.
Tootsie Rolls were Old School even when I was a kid. They were first made in 1896, and I suspect did not taste like rubber candles back then or they wouldn't still be around 121 years later. They were still pretty good in the '50s.
It's nice to get hold of some throwback versions of Mountain Dew or Coke and discover that you're not imagining it: They once tasted much better. And so I wish Hostess would make throwback cupcakes and that Tootsie Rolls would also come out in vintage versions.
Though they're probably wise not to.
I'm not sure why the soft drink makers think it's a good idea to remind us of what their products were like before they turned into crap.
Here's your moment of zen, Tootsie:
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