CSotD: Remembrance of Times Past
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No specific commentary on this one, beyond marveling that Dan Piraro makes Sundays such a pleasure. There used to be more Sunday strips that featured painstaking art, but a lot of them are gone and the two whose Sundays I enjoyed most — Mark Trail and Prince Valiant — have been converted to a simpler style.
Those aren’t idle opinions: When I redid the Sundays in the paper where I was working in 2002, I negotiated a custom Sunday section that featured Trail and gave Val extra space to run the entire strip without cutting or compression. And I added Bizarro to our daily package shortly thereafter.
Then reality intruded. They dumped half the strips and reverted to a cheap non-custom Sunday package.
Then it intruded some more. Their circulation is only a third of what it was when I worked there, though that’s hard to truly compare, since they were a 7-day paper then and they’re down to three days a week, no Sundays, mailed, not delivered.
Here’s the dark humor in that: I bolted when Lee Enterprises became too depressing to deal with there, and four years later found myself working for Alden so I could watch vulture capitalists strangle another paper.
Even Dan Piraro’s artist couldn’t make that seem like less of a prison.
I’m so old that I can remember when newspapers came in sections and a couple could each read the daily paper at the same time.
In fact, I’m so old that I can remember when the Internet and Craigslist came along and the owners of newspapers sneered and said, “It won’t last.” Then they set up websites, and one of the publishers in our chain kept saying “Don’t give it away!”
The voice of one crying in the wilderness.
I’m so old that I had AOL email before there were Windows. And if you tried to sign on in the afternoon after school was out, you just got busy signals when you dialed in. Then I learned to search with Webcrawler, so I could find Angelfire websites which mostly featured red text on a yellow background.
Through three feet of snow, uphill both ways, barefoot.
This Carpe Diem made me cast my mind back even further, to a time before the well-marked interstate highway system with its bright green signs.
After VE Day, my father was supposed to report to an Army base in California so he could go invade Japan.
He stopped for the night in Kansas, but got back on the road in the dark, hoping to make good time, since he was on a tight schedule, and drove along until the sun came up.
In front of him.
So much for making good time.
Now a four-legged look back: When I was a kid, kenneling your dog meant taking it to vet where it would spend the week in a cage and be taken for walks out behind the building.
Over the years, kennels progressed to places with runs behind the cage that the dog could access at will, to the current day when most places have play-yards where the dogs spend long periods of time in compatible groups, sometimes with a wading pool.
One local place also features individual rooms with raised beds and heated floors. It used to have Dutch half-doors on the rooms, but the last time I was there they had full-length doors, so I gather there had been some disruptive escapes.
My ridgebacks’ favorite place when we lived by the border was a former deer farm with several acres of tall, secure fences, where they could just go roam all day. I remember driving in to pick them up and seeing them lounging on a grassy hillside in the sun. They saw the car, got up and trotted down to meet me at the office.
My childhood dog wouldn’t have believed it. She’d spent each “vacation” whimpering the Folsom Prison Blues and here they were out playing Born Free.
They were glad to see me, but I think they’d have been even happier if I’d pitched a tent so we could stay there.
I don’t have the PTSD other people seem to have about dodgeball, perhaps because we didn’t play it until junior high, by which time we were mostly hardened to the realities of adolescent social life. And if you got hit, you were out, so the only trick involved was to protect your face.
I’d have been more traumatized by debating. I had a friend who went to the University of Wyoming on a debating scholarship, but, then, I also met a guy who went there on a rodeo scholarship, and merging those two sports would also be interesting.
Dodgeball doesn’t bother me and I’d like to try my hand at some rodeo events, but I’ve testified at a couple of trials and I truly envy debaters and attorneys for their ability to maintain their cool.
I’d rather be thrown by a bull or get hit in the face with a dodgeball than go through cross-examination again.
I’d already been smoking for three years when the warnings were put on cigarette packages in 1966, which is to say I started at 13.
But cancer aside — and I’ve had it, so I can be light-hearted on the subject — I don’t know how anyone can even afford to smoke these days.
We were buying them — mostly from untended vending machines — for 30 cents a pack, which comes down to a penny and a half per ciggie. It’s up to about $8.40 a pack or 42 cents each now. The pack-a-day habit I’d developed by 17 would cost over three grand a year now.
Getting back to the cancer thing, you’re pretty stupid to smoke anyway, but you’re doubly stupid to spend three grand a year on it.
Besides, as they say, kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. For three grand, you could take somebody wonderful to Tahiti and find out how good a kiss can taste.
I’m not passionate on the subject, not one of those converts who can’t shut up on the topic. I don’t regret smoking.
But I sure don’t regret quitting.
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