Feb 4th 2010 07:04 am Aluminum city
It isn’t hard to imagine where I got the idea for this one. When I drew it in 1990, I was a much younger man living on the shores of beautiful Pickwick Lake on the Tennessee River. Aluminum was right up there with hydrogen and oxygen as a common element.
I need to clear something up. When I said, a few days back, that the number of visitors to this site suddenly declined slightly, I wasn’t counting your comments. I was looking at data from my Web server that tracks such minutiae. There was a small drop in visitors last week that exactly corresponded with the winter storm in the middle of the country. However, I want to thank those of you who went to the trouble to post a comment to cheer me up. It did, actually!
Posted by jimmyjohnson / Vintage A&J
24 Responses to “Aluminum city”
Brenty on 04 Feb 2010 at 7:44 am #
The schools would rake in the money if the parents let them take the beer cans, too. Seriously, people, we all know you drink Natty Light, too!
Norman on 04 Feb 2010 at 7:53 am #
It’s funny. I have this contest with the neighbors (they don’t know it) every week on recycling day. I see their milk jug and couple of soda cans and scoff. No way they can compete with the wine bottles and beer cans we amass.
HC on 04 Feb 2010 at 8:11 am #
Somehow I missed yesterday’s strip …probably was ‘here’ too early … but the hair on Janis was quite a sight! Today’s (above) is pretty good too … looks like the peak on a baseball cap sticking out in front … The current hair is more “cooking pot style”. Remember when JJ wanted to change Janis’ hair? had us all fooled for a day!
Steve from Royal Oak, MI on 04 Feb 2010 at 8:32 am #
In Michigan, for the last 40 years, pop and beer cans have a 10 cent deposit. Living in neighboring Indiana, we would make fun of that. Having lived up her for the last 30 years, I can say that overall, it was a good law. Not as much litter and when you are short on cash, it is nice to know that you can cash in empties to earn a few pennies.
TruckerRon on 04 Feb 2010 at 8:48 am #
Because we don’t have that deposit on cans, we have to settle for the scrap aluminum price when we turn in our cans. And, we do pick up a lot of beer cans from our local river trail on Saturday & Sunday mornings.
Mindy on 04 Feb 2010 at 9:32 am #
I have a friend from Delaware who passes through here about twice a year and always stuffs as many 2-liter plastic water bottles [empty] as possible into every nook and crany and space by any other name to take home. There’s a 5-cent per bottle bounty on those bottles up there! And why doesn’t my keyboard have the cent sign? I just noticed…
bruce on 04 Feb 2010 at 10:26 am #
I do appreciate the more frequent updates. Thank you!
Bob, near Mark on 04 Feb 2010 at 10:38 am #
Mindy,
Because qwerty keyboards don’t make any ¢ ?
If you really need to make ¢ of your posts, (if you’re running Vista) go to:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/Using-special-characters-Character-Map-frequently-asked-questions
to see how to use the character map.
Connie on 04 Feb 2010 at 11:10 am #
Ah yes, the Michigan 10 cent bottle fund! I bought many a bus ticket with pop and beer cans when I was young. As well as cashing them in to buy cigarettes because I was also young and foolish.
Now, as a single, older adult who only drinks the occasional Diet Vernors to calm my stomach (or accompany pizza), they are still a pain in the backside. You can’t toss them, I mean they are worth 10 cents! However, I don’t collect them very fast these days so they are around for quite a while. Usually I end up giving them to the neighbor girl who occasionally walks my dog for me.
It is entertaining though to watch the college students dragging in huge garbage bags full into the local Kroger’s on Mondays. Unless of course I have a couple dollars worth and I get stuck behind them at the refund machines.
Sara on 04 Feb 2010 at 11:15 am #
Is Gene wearing a ponytail? Or is he just a little shaggy?
sideburns on 04 Feb 2010 at 12:24 pm #
Here in California, I recycle aluminum cans, glass and some plastics but no beer cans because I’m Type II and don’t drink beer. Not that I didn’t when I was younger, mind you, but that was before I developed diabetes. It’s not a lot of money, but it is a nice piece of change, and you get that good feeling that comes from Doing The Right Thing.
Floyd in Nashville on 04 Feb 2010 at 1:52 pm #
Sara - in 1990, the mullet’s stronghold on the scalps of American men, though slipping, was still moderately firm. Business in the front - party in the back!
Mary in Ohio on 04 Feb 2010 at 2:58 pm #
JJ - any time WE can cheer YOU up, we are more than happy to do so.
Ah yes - Michigan’s bottle law. Ohio lawmakers scoffed at it, and you can see the result, as the snow melts, on every roadside ditch and median, and often on our front lawns. “Keep Ohio beautoiful - if it doesn’t involve any effort on your part!” Good for you folks in states that put their money where their mouth is on that sort of thing!
Is anybody else watching the Caribbean Series on MLB Network? Lovely scenery! (And I don’t mean the cheerleaders or the players’ uniforms.)
Phil in Sugar Land, TX on 04 Feb 2010 at 3:06 pm #
Another interesting idea I saw in Italy some years ago was at a supermarket. The baskets were out in the parking lot and you put a quarter in the slot to get a basket. When you were done, you took it back to rack and got your quarter back. Or you gave to an urchin hanging around and he got the quarter. (or 100 lira piece in those days)
It kept the baskets out of the parking spaces and get the urchins something to look forward to.
On the other hand it didn’t snow in Tuscany, which would be a problem with that scheme
CIDU Bill on 04 Feb 2010 at 3:14 pm #
Phil, you might see the same thing if you visit exotic New Jersey.
Mary in Ohio on 04 Feb 2010 at 3:39 pm #
Or even exotic Aldi’s Markets in NE Ohio (it works, though!)
buzz on 04 Feb 2010 at 4:12 pm #
To show you hold hold a f[o]rt I am, OUR BOARDING HOUSE did a somewhat similar gag back in the early 60s. Major Hoople used a hacksaw black to cut the upper portion off a beer bottle and a blow torch to round the edges, turning it into a glass tumbler. Thinking he could make a batch of tumblers for the lads & lasses at the orphanage (yeah, I find it far-fetched, too, but what they hey, it’s a set-up for the punchline), he asks some neighborhood boys to find some old beer bottles and bring them to him.
Last panel shows the Hoople backyard filled with beer bottles, the neighbors tsk-tsking over the Major’s drinking habits, and the Mrs. bearing down on him with a rolling pin.
Bob, near Mark on 04 Feb 2010 at 4:21 pm #
buzz,
I used to like to read Our Boarding House, too, from as far back as the late ’40s until the strip vanished from our local paper. Add me to the list of old f[o]rts. FAP!
Phil in Sugar Land, TX on 04 Feb 2010 at 4:47 pm #
I flew through Newark on my way to Italy, but the plane was late and I didn’t even get to see the airport properly. That’s just about as much as I’ve seen of the states east of the Mississippi.
Someday, I’ll make a swing through those states north and east of here. Beats me why they call some of those states the midwest though. From an (ex) California boy, Nebraska looks like the midwest
Jim in SE Mississippi on 04 Feb 2010 at 6:49 pm #
Back in the glass “coke” (generic for any soft drink here in the South) bottle days of my youth, I paid my tuition for a high school summer school class I wanted to take by turning in bottles at, as I recall, $.02 per bottle. (See, Mindy, you really don’t need a “cents” symbol.) Of course, you could buy them from a vending machine then for $.06, so I guess that would be about the equivalent of about $.25 per bottle now.
I haven’t bought a soft drink in a glass bottle in many years (even though it’s a scientific fact that the best Coca Cola of all time is one consumed ice-cold straight from a six-and-one-half ounce green glass bottle on a hot summer afternoon, in thirty seconds or less), so I have no idea if return deposits are even paid down here any longer.
‘Taint a fit night out for man nor beast, here. Hope it’s nicer where y’all are.
Steve from Royal Oak, MI on 04 Feb 2010 at 8:23 pm #
It is such a beautiful day and night in Miami, I will not want to go back to Michigan. My son n DC says that they are expecting more snow there like they got at Christmas. I think Detroit is only at 20 inches for the year and DC got that in one storm. I truly feel bas for those who will be fighting storms in the next few days.
I feel strange thowing the empty pop bottles away. I did find a “returnables” container to put mine in.
Woodrowfan on 05 Feb 2010 at 7:39 am #
I remember riding my bike around the roads picking up pop bottles for the deposit, then cashing them in at a 7-11 and getting a Slurpee and some baseball cards… (alrightttt, I got a Johnny Bench!!!)
Connie on 05 Feb 2010 at 7:46 am #
Steve from Royal Oak, MI
Used to be a bit of a joke here when friends and family would come to visit from Illinois, you’d spend the time pulling pop and beer cans out of the trash. Now though, even my family of rednecks recycle.
I find myself at a loss when I eat something out of a can at work. Lansing has a recycling system where you rinse out a can, take the label off, throw it in the tacky florescent green plastic bin and set it out with the garbage every week. I find I only use one garbage bag a week now.
If it wasn’t for copious amounts of used cat litter, I could go back to the cheaply made, but very expensive to buy, city garbage bags.
D Cline on 05 Feb 2010 at 4:28 pm #
Does the minutia tell you where your visits are coming from geographically?