On the Old and New 4/30/21

First the old. It’s interesting to see which items go in and out of style. And for those of us of a certain age (and a certain temperment) we don’t give a damn even if they have gone out of style. Consider an item I brought to my marriage some 37 years ago. We jokingly refer to it as “The Dowry." It is an old-fashioned jar opener that belonged to my mother. Can’t find anything like it anymore. But I’ll try to describe it. Think of a circular shape at the top, hinged in the middle. The top has grippers on the inside and it opens up to two handles. You simply separate the handles, fit the circle on the jar top you’re trying to open, close the handles and twist. Voila! Open jar. So simple and elegant. Another item just as timeless that’s also been cast into the dustbin of history? The snack table. Nobody uses them anymore. Except very old people. I was watching an episode of “Comedians in cars getting coffee.” Jerry Seinfeld visits Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. Every night (obviously this was filmed before Reiner’s passing) Carl and Mel would get together and eat dinner on snack tables while watching Jeopardy. While the point was to marvel at how deep their friendship was and how they acted like an old married couple, I was transfixed by the fact that they ate on snack tables. About a month ago, our kitchen required a major renovation and we were forced to eat on snack tables. I even worked on a snack table, noting how well it fit a MacBook Air and a glass of water. When the construction was completed, we folded the snack tables back up and placed them back into obscurity, in a little corner of the laundry room, never to be seen again until the next emergency. Sigh.

Our second comic deals with texting. Now there are many different types of texters. There’re people who still don’t do it and have no interest in learning how. Then there are people with flip phones who have to hit the “5” key three times in order to type the letter “L.” Next comes people over 50 who text regularly but insist on using punctuation and who hate acronyms. And then there is the millennial generation and younger who want to purvey as much information as possible with as few keystrokes as possible. Hence ”L8R,” instead of “later.” Or “btw,” instead of “by the way.” I took some golf lessons this winter where the instructor showed a split screen of my swing before and after. Only he insisted on labelling the before swing “b4.” I pointed out that that wasn’t the way to spell “before” and he responded by telling me to move closer to the ball. As for the comic, I must admit that John came up with the punchline where Al says, “I’m trying to find the semi-colon.” If it’s old-school behavior to spell words out, it is positively neanderthal to look for a semi-colon. Almost nobody uses semi-colons anymore. They’re about as rare as snack tables.

That’s it for this week. And as long as we are speaking about punctuation, I want to give a special shout-out to our terrific proofreader (who just pointed out I used an unnecessary hyphen in proof-reader), David Ockene, who performs this task every week for free. David, we really appreciate it and you.

See you next week with two new ones. Have a terrific weekend and stay safe,

Andy and John