For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for October 29, 2013

…or some other green, leafy substance.

Doh!

Isn’t that Phil’s old pipe?

But…guess who will stay warm when it gets cold out that evening?!!!

I think Gordon’s supposed to be Ziggy Stardust.

very Relevant comment, Mike

I’ll take a nice pipe! And don’t care if others don’t like it! They probably do something I don’t like too!

The amazing thing to me is that young kids even recognized who Holmes was! This must be a really old comic, from a time when kids actually read books….

I wish you were right about the book reading, but according to our one remaining book store (two others closed due to lack of patronage) and our library system, Harry Potter was an exception. Most of the kids who come to the book store are buying the games that are sold as spin offs from movies (some are buying ereaders), and the ones in the library are there to use the computers.

If that kid’s dressed as Sherlock Holmes, there are lots worse things than tobacco he could be asking for.

I’d have thought the answer to that question (Why aren’t you dressed like us?) should be: ‘I didn’t want to be like everybody else, I wanted to be different’.

But then … maybe I’m different.

Well, I am cheered by your experience. I am an as-yet-unpublished writer by avocation and the idea that the next generation hasn’t given up on books gives me much hope.

“My kids have bookshelves loaded with the popular books of their generation which they and their friends have all read. Your experience where you are is very different from mine. My impression is that the kids of today are readers.”

Well, sounds like you have some readers around – but have you read the material they are reading? They are reading, for the most part, the books tailored for adolescents.

What do they learn from that stuff? At that age, my bookshelf was loaded with Nevil Shute, various of the classics, scifi and animal stories, which in those days were informative and mostly accurate in husbandry terms. Not the fubsy guilt invoking tales you see today.

Have any of them read any Dickens? OK, Dickens is hard – what about Heinlein? London? Sewell? Terhune?

What we were reading forty and fifty years ago was material valuable to our intellects, as well as to our hearts and souls. Before you trumpet kids’ reading habits today, maybe you should read what they are reading. If you have and consider it useful – well, we must agree to differ.

I thought we might be able to get through one day without the hateelly club,but apparently not. Sigh………………………

Sidney Paget drew Holmes in a deerstalker and cloak for the original Strand Magazine stories.

Not just ANY green leafy substance.Ever hear about the kids who smoked a green leafy substance and didn’t know it was poison oak?No, they did not tell that story. They couldn’t after their smoking bout.