Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for February 15, 2020

technology has always been a problem…

In the good ol’ days, we used to use a pen and write below the comic strips on a newspaper, kid. Those were our comment boards those days.

for the times they are a-changing

Nephew Nicky looks so….so ….. yummy with his tender meat .

Here is a song for Rat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=UskDupcLM0M

Alert: F word occurs once.

It was nice, Nicky, not being expected to be in touch with everyone all the time.

We did have walkie talkies back then.

And didn’t have to worry about paying for a data plan.

Wow! Baby Pig and Rat! They’re so cute! Has Pastis ever drawn them like that before??

And we didn’t need spellcheck or auto-correct because we knew how to spell.

And there were hand-held communication devices back then… they were called hands :>. If you got angry, there was a particular finger you could use (hint hint).

“OK Boomer” in three…two…one….

Gotta keep the string taut.

It was heavenly!

I don’t want to read this comic and think he read my mind, so maybe I shouldn’t read this comic?

Back in the bad old days very seldom did you here of people walking into : cars , trees , poles , other people , ect. ect. like you do now ! … Croc Power !

And, for the Best of BOTH worlds, check THIS out…

https://gizmodo.com/someone-built-a-distraction-free-cellphone-with-a-worki-1841636089

This is cute.

Is Pig’s and Rat’s kitchen the same model as the bar?

No contract buy-in required, and the phones were as cheap as a can of beets.

And when I was a kid, we couldn’t imagine what our parents did without TV.

When I was a kid, we didn’t really have any devices. Just chat rooms and email.

I grew up in a one phone household ( although we did have a private line ) and it was a black bakelite, rotary one that was wired to the only phone jack in the house – and sat on a telephone stand ( with a seat ) in our dining room. My mom somehow managed to wangle a very long connection cable ( cloth covered in those days ) from the phone company, that enabled her to take the phone into any room in the house … she had the first portable phone in the neighborhood.

Panel 3 is very unrealistic. We had a 6 foot line, but stood on either side of a corner so we couldn’t see each other. (But that would kill the joke.)

I noticed that the young Pig and Rat are using hardwired phones.

Wait – where’s the Nephew Nicky pun??

Didn’t know, Pig, was in his mid 50s

Just funny!

LOL! How cute Nicky is!

I’m still waiting for something of interest to be communicated to me.

Sometime around 1950 my first toxic-friends taunted me by chanting “WALKIE TALKIE.” That was well before my Ham and Radiotelephone 1st Class licenses, Elect Engineering degrees, 33.5 years as AT&T Network mid-manager, and 20 years retired.

This year when we were studying sound in 8th grade science, I had the kids make these. I gave them string, several different sized cans and turned them loose. They had a blast. And of course used their phones to take pictures of themselves. ;)

And don’t forget those awesome walkie-talkies that might work if you were within 100 feet away…

58 comments and not one asking what the thing is. This is definitely a boomer crowd.

This may come as quite a shock many, but growing up…and living…without electronic tethers was actually rather pleasant.

And we paid more attention to each other than to a phone while right next to each other.

I’ve seen the two-tin-cans-and-a-string phone in many cartoons, and I’ve yet to see one cartoonist who realizes that the string needs to be pulled taut in order for the thing to work.

You may be right, technically, Pig. But Nephew Nicky will never understand nor believe what you’re telling him….

Rat and Pig are sooooooooooo cute as youngsters.

They’ve been friends for THAT long?!

I can verify that!

I actually got suckered into sending (don’t remember how much money) based on an ad in the back of a comic book for a wireless walky-talky! Which, after an agonizing time, arrived. In an envelope: A piece of very cheap string about 10 feet long and instructions for building the device pictured above. First lesson in spotting scams. And, when I complained, my parents explained that they’d let me do it as a lesson. And anyway it was true: No wires at all.

I tried that can thing, all i could hear was the can hitting the side of my head.

Kinda sweet to see rat and pig being friends when they were little…

AAAAA LITTLE BABY PIG AND RAT

awwww… pig and rat were friends as children!

S-so-c-cute… d-dying…