Today’s classic A&J is from August of 1994, and it first appeared mere days before the changeover to digitalization. In other words, it was one of the last daily strips actually to be shipped by Federal Express to the syndicate offices in New York. Speaking of digitalization, remember when I mentioned earlier this year that I wanted to revamp this Web site? I’ll bet you haven’t forgotten. You just assumed I had. Well, I haven’t. I have decided, though, that I need professional help. With Web-site design, I mean. I have been in contact with said professionals, and I’m hoping I might have something new to show you early in 2015. I know we go through this sort of thing a lot. Believe me, I know, but please humor me. I’m going to ask you, again, to make suggestions for the new Web site if you’d like. That way, I’ll have your input all in one place and fresh when I meet with the Web people after the Thanksgiving holiday. Any new suggestions, or restatement of old suggestions, will be appreciated. And I haven’t forgotten about the T-shirts, either.
But seriously, folks…
By Jimmy Johnson
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251 responses to “But seriously, folks…”
The scoop: “Gustave Caillebotte (August 19, 1848-February 21, 1894), was a French painter, member and patron* of the group of artists known as Impressionists, though he painted in a much more realistic manner than many other artists in the group.” *Came from a well-to-do family, country estate and all that.
He did some still-lifes, but most in a more impressionistic manner than in the items on the dressing table in “Woman at her dressing table.” No indication that’s his wife. I’d like to see more of his still-lifes in that style, but didn’t want to go through 244 prints..
I’m guessing his most famous work is “Paris street in the rain”: Man + woman approaching, she hanging onto his umbrella-holding arm, several avenues/streets converging in background, well-rendered wet cobblestones.
Woke up with fuzzy gray cat fur on my face and Ashes across my chest, the 10# guard dog was on my stomach cuddled up with cat. Large orange cat alongside leg.
Debbe, Manhunter is available for free if you have the Dish Blockbuster package. It is in the on demand movies in the Crime section.
Ah, Jackie, those were the days. Tight skirts, stockings and high heels. One of the things that keeps me going is the knowledge that many of women’s fashions are cyclical. So if I live long enough, those may well reappear. Except, I hope for pantyhose, which are an affront to man and nature.
Had I been old enough, I would have gladly volunteered to come in on Saturdays and help you ladies in the warehouse. 😉
Skirts really were tight and skinny, hard to walk in and get up on a curb or in a car, forget ladders. And big trick was to keep the garter belt clips from showing through skirt fabric.
I swore I was not going to mention 9CL again but it shows on Yahoo with other comics in summary. She had a gun stuck in a garter belt top on her leg while being shot by firing squad and I want to know how they missed finding that? No holster, just gun in garter belt.
Obviously the artist has no knowledge of guns and garter belts.
That gun wouldn’t have stayed there for a minute before it fell out.
Love, Jackie
One of my favorite A and J cartoons is “Christmas stockings” which are just that, stockings, not panty hose.
Who owns the original?
I just returned from the post office via one of the oldest residential streets in the city. Hearing the contents of my glove box bouncing merrily up and down as I traveled the washboard pavement of one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city reminded me of reading that the City is about to undertake a resurfacing project (once they replace the 100+ year old water and sewer lines that underlie the street’s surface). The article also mentioned that one of the reasons the pavement has been so difficult to maintain over the years is the presence under it of the tracks, ties and concrete structures of the city’s early twentieth century trolley car line. Yep, the sleepy little southern town that existed here a hundred years ago had a public mass transit system.
That in turn reminded me of an elderly gentleman (now deceased) I met shortly after moving here. He told me that one of the lines had run to another town about eight miles south of here. During the summer, he would pack a lunch, board the trolley in the morning with his dog (the fare was 5 cents; the dog rode for free) and have the motorman let him off halfway between towns. He and his dog would then tramp through and explore the piney woods until late afternoon, when they would return to the track, flag down the next passing trolley and return home. It must have truly been a golden age in which to be a 10-year-old boy in the summertime.
Then it occurred to me that, today, letting your child do something like that would probably result in you being charged with child neglect/abuse.
That in return reminded me of when I was that age and, along with some of my classmates, proudly wore my Cub Scout uniform to school on the days when we had den meetings after school. Part of the uniform was a multi-blade Cub Scout knife that dangled from a clip that hung from my belt. No one at school even batted an eye at that. I can only imagine the official pearl-clutching and swooning that would occur if that had been present-day times. I’d likely have been expelled forever and, instead of sitting in my home using a computer right now, I’d probably be asking a customer, “You want fries with that burger?”
Cats do not always land on their feet. I once saw Elvis roll over in his sleep and fall off of the window sill with a significant thump. Of course he claimed that he did it on purpose. Thanksgiving was outstanding. It was just my wife and myself at my mother’s house, but I’ve had holidays with just me, myself and I so this was great. It gave me a chance to ask my mother about some things that I had never asked her and I found out things such as she was born at home, how she met my father and so forth. I’m really glad I did it because this Thanksgiving could well be her last. The list of things to be thankful for from a couple of days ago was outstanding. A great football Saturday. Good luck to your teams. Re holiday spending- I don’t know who said it but “A good economy is when we buy things that we can’t afford and a recession is when we stop.”
Ghost – I seem to remember my parents talking about riding the trolley in Jacksonville, Florida, in their youth (1st quarter of 20th century). By the early 1950s my grandfather was riding the bus to get to work. Don’t know if they ever owned a car.
There have been several articles lately about how young people today are choosing to not own cars but prefer to live near where they work and/or use public transportation. I’m hoping they will get more involved politically and push for expansion/improvement of the latter so that all of us aging baby boomers might be able to get around without driving when we reach the point when we either can’t or shouldn’t drive.
When we lived, worked in both New Orleans and Honolulu I did not drive but rode street cars, buses or walked. Mike was in sales or college on other side of Oahu or worked over mountains. But my job and office were close enough to not drive. I really liked that. In case of Honolulu, my office was in FAA building and I lived next door. Loved that!
Office in NO was at Federal Building and I got on street car and rode down St. Charles to house in Garden District or in French Quarter when we lived there.
Have been dredging up my memory and I seem to recall the town of Monroe, LA which is where I moved mom from, having street cars perhaps when I was very young? I don’t remember them in my teens or college years. By then there was no public transportation worth calling it that.
Love, Jackie
Amen, Ruth Anne. When I was a teenage boy, I couldn’t wait to own a car. Now, owning one is a major expense and a pain in the derriere as well. I wish there was a viable alternative, at least for local and medium distance travel. And yes, transportation is a real issue for the elderly. What good is Medicare coverage if you have no way to get to a doctor’s office?
I’ve read that in pre-WWII days, one could buy a token for a commuter train in New York City, and by getting transfer tokens from one line to another, ride all the way to Philadelphia for 10 or 15 cents.
Jackie: Spent several weeks at an uncle and aunt’s home in the summer [of all times] of ’43 in Monroe. Don’t remember streetcars in Monroe, just heat and biting my tongue when people started to talk race. Also learned / Cajun cooking in Laplace, toned down for me, came to appreciate it later, ’73, with wife and two of our three kids.
Sent the above you tube thing to a group and got this back from younger son. Several years earlier, less expensive to do. Will send it also to some therapists where I work out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA&sns=em
Long before my time at Cornell [’47-’51], a streetcar line ran from Ithaca, NY to Rochester[? I think].
Peace, emb
Yeah, Martine is like Jason in “Friday the 13th”, isn’t she? Just can’t seem to kill her. Ike could have apparently saved a lot of casualties and expense by just shipping her about 400,000 rounds of 9mm Parabellum ammo for her Luger and turning her loose on the Wehrmacht. No, 410,000 rounds…I forgot that she provides her own anti-aircraft support.
The Brits call garter belts “suspenders”. Not sure what the French call them.
Is THAT what they were talking about?
Public transportation is a real problem in the part of Appalachia I live in. Once in the back areas there is nothing if you don’t drive, and most of the small grocery stores and shops are long gone. Walking and bicycling is taking a risk of getting run over, and still a long stretch to shopping, Drs, etc.. Unless you move into town you need to be able to drive.
Not all public transportation is worth using. To use the bus system here to go to my job, just 3.3 miles away by car and about a 15 to 20 minute drive depending on traffic lights, requires walking 1.03 miles plus 30 minutes on the two buses (yep, there’s a transfer). We cannot use the buses/trains to get to my MIL at her nursing center or my SIL’s home in a decent amount of time… 2.5 hours in transit plus a 1.5 mile work to the center and a 2.23 mile walk to the house.
When I worked for Oracle in 1995 in the SF Bay area public transit was a joy!
My mom was still driving at 90 with early dementia and bad vision. She was living over 20 miles from nearest town in country with nothing between, not even a rural store. Of course, she was driving far greater distances daily.
I joke that had I known (or thought) I would not be living over 100 miles south of Tulsa and most of our medical appointments.
We do have shopping and stores and even doctors and dentists in our little town, however. There is some bus services available sort of like a taxi, you make an appointment or call for the mini-bus, but I am not certain they come as far as where I am, as I am actually just inside county line of another county!
Public transportation needs to be available in some form all over our country. Living in Houston for over 25 years the sheer numbers of automobiles on road was mind boggling.
Love, Jackie
And if they were on public transportation, all the “distracted drivers” would not be causing accidents. You could talk, text, do makeup, etc safely. Too bad there are not enough good, useful public transportation routes. The only decent bus service in Tuscaloosa is that run by the University of Alabama on-campus for the students. It works because they have a very limited area of operations.
Our city bus system is inadequate to the needs of the people here, with too few buses running on banker’s hours during the week and no weekend service at all.
Prague, Czech Rep., has about the population of Mpls/St. Paul. It has 4 subway lines. The Twin Cities have 2 light rail lines, one just opened last fall, the other maybe 10 years old now. They had real trolleys [with rails] when we came in ’58, but tore them out within a few years.
I had a potential post retirement gig at a UCC suburban seminary in the mid ’90s, and a free apt. courtesy of the UMC. Didn’t pan out, but I would either have had to drive expressways at ghastly mph. [and leave wife w/out a car] or transfer at a bus stop with more than a half hour wait.
D.C. has a lovely subway system, but the stations are much farther apart than NYC’s much older system.
Ruth Anne: “. . . young people today are choosing to not own cars but prefer to live near where they work and/or use public transportation. I’m hoping they will get more involved politically and push for expansion/improvement of the latter so that all of us aging baby boomers might be able to get around without driving when we reach the point when we either can’t or shouldn’t drive.”
When you think of the moneyed interests that benefit from our dependence on cars, what chance is there that “expansion/improvement of the latter” will happen, at least if it involves Congress? I believe we still have pennies because one congressman [pretty sure it’s male and have no idea which party] represents a district where most of the zinc[?] for the pennies is mined.
Ghost, my cheat materials say the French call them “jarretelles,” with garter belts being “porte-jarretelles.” Oo la la.
We call them “underwear,” the Brits call them “pants.” We call them “panties,” the Brits call them “knickers.” We call them “pants,” the Brits call them “trousers.” Hilarity often ensues, especially if one observes that Arlo was wearing knickers instead of jodphurs.
Porte-jarretelles. Yeah, that sounds at least vaguely racy. More so than “garter belt”, which somehow makes me think of part of an assembly on a piece of agriculture machinery.
It comes from “garters” which I believe both men and women wore once upon a time to hold up hose/stockings for men and women. Remember, “Knights of the Garter”?
So when they invented a way to hold up the hose around the waist it became a “belt” like in men’s belts for trousers. Now I am getting myself confused. Do you think men ever wore garter belts?
I watched a fascinating historical show on PBS probably about underwear and how it was worn but it was a long time ago.
Love, Jackie
So, I went to wiki and found out men did wear garter belts and other forms of hose support, including garters. And I forgot that the men wore sleeve garters as well, as in gamblers?
But the garter belt concealed carry holsters are a whole lot more functional than just sticking your gun in a piece of elastic, as I suspected. Now this may be erotic to some of us?
Love, Jackie
Roll Tide Roll. 55 Alabama-44 Auburn.
And with all these comments about Arlo’s directorial garb, did you notice that he had argyle socks?