CSotD: Too soon old, too late smart
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Warming up with the whole "saddest words" thing over at Candorville.
Lemont is moving to Canada to be with his girlfriend in Vancouver, whose name, as far as we know so far, is simply "Vancouver." They met on-line and he's been up there to visit her.
Once.
I'd love to be a romantic, but, boy oh boy, I'm with C-Dog on this one.
Go spend two weeks before you make the big move.
Better yet, take a road trip together. I once took a road trip with a gorgeous, wonderful woman I thought made the sun rise.
By Day Four, we despised each other. Permanently. Until then, I had no idea how small a car could be.
By contrast, a few months later, I took another road trip with a terrific woman and, on the third day, she asked me to drop her off at an airport so she could fly home. When I got back to town, we continued to date, we broke up very reluctantly, I still wonder how things might have turned out if we'd stayed together.
Besides that we wouldn't have taken a lot of road trips, or none that last more than two days. Apparently, getting out on the third day is the charm.
Come to think of it, her subsequent life involved a lot of road trips and I'm talking to places like Nepal and Africa.
Maybe it was me.
Anyway, I'm not unsympathetic to Lemont, because, I, too, had a perfect girlfriend from Vancouver.
At least, I think she was from Vancouver. She was going to Simon Fraser, anyway.
We only knew each other for about two days, and then I left on a road trip alone and hadn't gone very far before I realized I probably should have learned more about her, like her last name, except I thought she'd still be there when I got back.
I'll admit "I thought she'd still be there" is pretty high on the list of things only a young man would say, but, had I gotten back sooner than six weeks later and had she not been living in a bus, it all might have worked out.
Well, what the hell. You can't screw things up with a lover you can't even find, so I'm ahead of Lemont on that count.
(But if your name is Glinda and you went to Simon Fraser back when it was shiny and new, drop me an email.)
At the other end of time
This morning's Retail hits on the day after my bank sent me a new debit card with a chip, which is a new, much more secure way of tying things up forever at the checkout.
That's probably not true. I suspect that there is little difference between the time it takes to swipe and enter your PIN and then wait for the thing to say "Approved" and the time it takes to stick your chip card in the reader and wait for the thing to tell you you can pull it out again, but it seems longer.
On the other hand, nothing — not even people counting out exact change from their coin purses — takes as long as the person who waits for a final total before even writing the name of the store on the check, then fills out the whole thing because why would you let the cash register fill it out, and then updates their balance.
Well, except for the person who doesn't even take out the checkbook until all the groceries have been checked through.
One of the consolations of growing old is that your annoyance is not ageism.
It's a matter of having been around to recognize that, indeed, "there's no fool like an old fool."
Gray Snowflakes
(Rubes)
I was thinking that Norm Feuti was wise to make his check-writing guy middle-aged and not "old" but then Dave Blazek and Leigh Rubin took us into the animal kingdom with this pair.
My response to these cartoons is to laugh, but my response to the overall topic is that I don't get it.
I started graying in my latter teens. Not enough to see at a distance, but enough at the temples to have girls pull back from a slow dance and exclaim "You've got gray hair!"
Never lost a minute's sleep over it, or going bald, which happened considerably later, and I have often been puzzled by the guys whose fragile, vain response seems based on making the situation far worse.
I worked with a newscaster who was known behind his back as "Monsantohead," though he had the excuse of having to go on air.
Which would have been an even better excuse if we'd been in television and not radio.
His toup, however, was as seamless as Sean Connery's, compared to the plastic raccoon worn by one of my publishers.
Fortunately, we never had to worry about him overhearing us joke about it, because his aftershave invariably walked into the room 20 minutes before he did.
And I do not in the least understand Walt Frasier selling hair color for men, because Clyde was the epitome of cool in his day, and it's kind of sad to see him being so silly about it.
The other day, I referenced Julius Erving here and, in looking for links, found out what he looks like now.
I'd be thrilled to rock the gray like Dr. J.
An I-told-you-so update:
Yesterday, I said Steve Sack has been on fire lately and apparently I'm not the only one who noticed.
Later that day, we learned that the Overseas Press Club has given him the Thomas Nast Award, which is considered a very cool editorial cartooning honor.
Here's Michael Cavna's write-up, which includes quotes from Sack and runner-up Adam Zyglis.
Zyglis also appears here with some frequency and I might have snagged his current assessment of the Russian connection anyway.
Now here's your moment of zen
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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