Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for October 09, 2014

Sometimes you have to be Crayola to be kind.

the built in sharpener are very cheap……… and most plastic types when you squeeze it with your hand as you are holding it, they expand, thus making them less tight, and less efficient, is better to go and buy metal or wooden crayon sharpeners

Who sharpens?

Easier to peel back the paper and bite the end. AND you could prove to the teacher you really weren’t chewing gum!

Since when did the crayons even last long enough to be sharpened? They’re usually broken in a matter of days.

But the crayon sharpeners were never about sharpening the crayon.They were about playing with the crayon SHAVINGS. That was the fun part.

I never saw the point of colouring in in the first place. Seemed to be a waste of time. :)

Turns out to have been a metaphor for all forms of help to be obtained from official sources that haunts many people for the rest of their lives.

LOL

And why was it necessary to include both “red-orange” and “orange-red” in the giant box?

Now I am going to have to buy a box of crayons to find out what they were complaining about. It has been a long time since I had melted by last set.

Ooooh! I never got that fancy a box!

we used colored chalk, and used our fingers to mush it around.

The built-in sharpener always worked just fine for me. I must’ve been doing it wrong.

[walks away with head hung low]

Probably dating myself, but no box of crayons I ever had came with a built-in sharpener. For that matter, the very notion of sharpening a crayon seems alien.,,,

The real trauma? Crayons never tasted as good as they looked, even when fresh.

That’s what those were called!? I remember my mom having some when I was a kid. No clue why though. I just remember liking to pull the string.

I have always loved the “gnashing teeth” look SP draws on his characters when they’re venting.

we were SO poor -how poor were you?we were SO poor we didn’t even know that crayons came in any other size than 8 to a boxand we sharpened them in a pencil sharpener which always made my parents happy as it gummed up the sharpener and usually broke off the tip of the crayon inside the sharpening cone.

What are they talking about? I have a Crayola 64 box on my kitchen table right now, and I marvel at how well the sharpener works! It puts a “factory new” tip on the crayon, complete with the offset collar! This thing is a modern marvel!

I looked forward to using the sharpener when I was given that big box (not sure if 128s were an option yet) of crayons, and the first time I put one in the hole, the sharpener broke right off and fell inside. I don’t know if I ever had one that worked.

But I held my head up, and carried on, and today I’m a grownup who goes to a comic strip’s comments to complain about the crayon sharpener I had in 1962.

For your trivial pleasure, the Crayola box of 64 crayons with the built in sharpener was introduced in 1958.For you Boomers, check us out at www.bbemuseum.com

I never had a problem with it. True it never made them as nice and sharp as they were when they were new, but it helped. And actually, at 41, I’m still using crayons. I have that box of 120 colors that comes with that cute sharpener that looks like a crayon with arms and legs.

Yes there is nothing more irritating than a pencil sharpener which doesn’t work.

Get over it, Rat. Things can be replaced.

xxx

We had to chew on our crayons to sharpen them… my favorite flavors were flesh, green or orange

I spent my life looking for the “hazel” crayon so I could verify the color everyone said my eyes were!

The worst is an eraser that just smudges everything.

I had a sudden flashback to being 10 yrs old and opening a brand new box of crayolas. Inhale the scent of multicolored wax and you had a natural high hard to match in later years.

That and a pencil box and new underwear could only mean.one thing, The start of a new school year! Yippee!

And green blue and blue green? I remember yellow green but not green yellow for some reason.

Oh my goodness, it’s true

School manual pencil sharpeners are broken.