Zits brought a bit of a sigh this morning.
When I moved from Colorado to the East Coast in '87, I was driving a red 1971 VW van. Mine was a camper, but Jeremy's is close enough that I always get a kick out of the strips featuring it.
I've had good cars and not-so-good cars over the past 40-some years, but the VW is the only one I really miss.
But I was moving from the part-time winter on the Front Range to the OMG world of everlasting snow in Northern New York, and while Hector says they need to "fix the heater," there's really nothing to fix, at least nothing stock.
The "heater" on those old classic VWs was pretty much a tube that took some of the hot air from the engine and sort of nudged it up towards the front, if it wanted to go, at whatever pace it thought might be nice. It certainly wouldn't move fast enough to melt much more off your windshield than a light frost, and then only in the corner where the tube came out.
You can retrofit a blower, however, and I tried to do that.
The shadetree VW fellow said, "That's expensive."
"How much?"
"I'd have to special order it."
"Yes, I know. It's May now. How much?"
It finally dawned on me that he just didn't want to do it, and I wasn't making enough money to have a "summer car," so I sold the VW and bought another car.
Oh well, Having a blower would not have turned it into a four-season vehicle anyway, as this November, 2009, strip reminds us.
I bear glad tidings
Bob the Squirrel announces the dreaded Glitter Season, but I will, in turn, unleash the latest bit of really good environmental news: We need to get rid of that crap.
Or at least convert it to something that doesn't add to the microplastics disaster.
There would be some serious pushback, if 11-year-old girls had a more well-organized union. As it is, glitter is either going to become biodegradable, in which case the "all over everything" element will be somewhat addressed, or it will become something they can tell their children used to exist.
Maybe both: Biodegradable glitter would probably be like actual, non-carcinogenic root beer, where you can tell your kids that there used to be a kind that didn't suck, but, since you can't have it anymore, they'll never experience the good stuff.
Though glitter will still fall out of the box every Christmas for the next century or so.
I wish a bottle of real root beer would.
Killing the fatted goose
Tank McNamara has been having fun this week with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and the ongoing drop in ratings for the NFL, which Jerry seems to attribute to the existence of the NFL Commissioner and President Trump is pretty sure is due to people wanting civil rights, but which Mark Cuban and I attribute to watering down the product.
You would think the fact that team owners are millionaires would mean they'd understand "supply and demand," but somehow they've got the idea that adding more games will magically increase audience and thus profits.
Mind you, they also seem to think that people will tune in on Thursday night if the players all wear Day-Glo pajamas instead of their regular uniforms, so it's probably futile to try to understand how they make decisions.
And I'm too old and cranky to have an opinion, because I'm still wishing the NHL had stuck to six teams whose games all mattered.
Speaking of me being a very old person ...
Pajama Diaries often does a nice job of reminding me of what it was like to have kids in the house, but it also often does a nice job of reminding me that these folks live in a different era, mostly because Terri/Jill is the age of my kids and her kids are the ages of my grandchildren.
When I was growing up, we had to make arrangements from home, and then, once we were out the door, we had stepped into a black hole.
However, where I was growing up, it was binary: You were there or you weren't. There weren't any places large enough that anybody had to do more than look around to see who was there, and not many other places for a person to be.
When I had kids, by contrast, we lived in the city, so they were often at the mall but there were plenty of other places to be as well.
I used to give them a wrapped-in-paper quarter which was free if it was used to call for a ride but cost them $1 if they used it for something else.
For the most part, as Jill says, we'd agree on a meet-up, and, for the most part, everyone stayed within five or ten minutes of the appointed time.
I'd be interested in knowing if being able to micromanage arrangements by cellphone has made people less aware of time in that regard, in the same way that we used to know each other's phone numbers but don't anymore, and used to be better seat-of-the-pants navigators before we had apps to do it for us.
Mostly, though, what I remember is that the two "come get me" incidents I can recall happened when the kid had gotten stuck out in the woods once and (seriously) in a cornfield the other, and both had to hoof it a significant distance to find a phone.
It built character, dammit.
Meanwhile, there's a whole lot of pop culture references that must make no sense at all to kids.
For instance, Mrs. Avery can't just intercept Sylvia's calls anymore, and operators don't interrupt you:
Though sometimes getting the girl on the phone is the least of your challenges.