Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for January 09, 2015

Those damn kids and their dog got away in the Mystery Machine.

Zeke can speak a coherent sentence!

If he had a good roach clip, this wouldn’t have happened.

Zeke did have a roach clip….but he smoked that too. lol

Funny story unrelated to this strip, but related to the comments.A close friend has taught school and coached athletics for over 30 years. Early in his career he was teaching elementary school PE when a little girl approached him and asked if he wanted to see her roach clip. Preparing to be aghast, but outwardly calm, he said okay and, sure enough, she pulled out a small alligator clip of a type known to all college students. She said her brother had given it to her and, as he was contemplating what he should do next, she simplified his life again by saying “What I don’t understand is how you get it on their little legs.”

And the “fire” didn’t have a funny smoke smell, Mr. Fireman? Are the firemen staggering around and snickering?

Naturally, this reminded me of WE DIDN’T START THE FIREeven though I didn’t know the lyrics.Now that I do, I’m still not sure what Billy Joel had against Doris Day, Heinlein’s “Stranger in a strange land” and some of the others named..Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray,South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio,Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, televisionNorth Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe..Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, PanmunjomBrando, “The King and I” and “The Catcher in the Rye,” Eisenhower, vaccine, England’s got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye!.We didn’t start the fire,It was always burningSince the world’s been turning.We didn’t start the fire,No we didn’t light itBut we tried to fight it..Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and ProkofievRockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc,Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron,Dien Bien Phu falls, “Rock Around the Clock”Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team,Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland,Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev,Princess Grace, “Peyton Place”, trouble in the Suez..We didn’t start the fire,It was always burningSince the world’s been turning.We didn’t start the fire,No we didn’t light itBut we tried to fight it..Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac,Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, “Bridge on the River Kwai”Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball,Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide, Oh-oh-oh..Buddy Holly, “Ben Hur”, space monkey, Mafia,Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go,U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy,Chubby Checker, “Psycho”, Belgians in the Congo..We didn’t start the fire,It was always burningSince the world’s been turning.We didn’t start the fire,No we didn’t light itBut we tried to fight it..Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion,“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania,Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson,Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex,JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?.We didn’t start the fire,It was always burningSince the world’s been turning.We didn’t start the fire,No we didn’t light itBut we tried to fight it..Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again,Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock,Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline,Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan,“Wheel of Fortune”, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide,Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz, Hypodermics on the shore, China’s under martial law, Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore..We didn’t start the fire,It was always burningSince the world’s been turning.We didn’t start the fire,But when we are goneIt will still burn on, and on, and on, and on..We didn’t start the fire,It was always burningSince the world’s been turning.We didn’t start the fire,No we didn’t light itBut we tried to fight it..We didn’t start the fire,It was always burningSince the world’s been turning. We didn’t start the fire..

Who was it, Clyde? of Bonnie and, who wrote Henry Ford to say he stole only Ford’s because they were the best?The letters helped with sales.