Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 21, 2022

It sucks when ball players who should retire are decades younger than you.

Pig wants to Never-Never get any older.

The tech is 30 – 100 years away

that kano e way to look at it Pas!

Forever young.

When Nolan Ryan was playing baseball, I could say that there was a professional baseball player older than me. Then he retired.

One of my moments was when I found out that the Rolling Stones were older than the Home Secretary.

I shall take this comic, fold it into wax paper and iron it, then put it in a leather bound tome.

Who cares. Seriously. There are more important things to do than worry about age or death. Living life, for example. Everything else is just a waste of time, energy and joy.

My age hit me when I realized I was older than the Three Stooges.

Growing old ain’t for sissies.

It really hit me the day I turned 60 and realized that most likely my life was 2/3 over. I’d done nothing notable to that point, so no need to worry about it now. Woo-Hoo!

When I was in my late 40s, instead of thinking of myself as 48 or 49, I thought of myself as about 50, so that when 50 arrived, it wouldn’t be such a shock. It worked! Until one day I realized that it was exactly 50 years from the death of Frederic Chopin to the birth of Duke Ellington.

As the great cartoonist Walt Kelly penned: “Don’t take life too serious, son. It ain’t no-how permanent.”

First the cops are younger than you, then the teachers are younger than you, then your doctors are younger than you, need I go on.

You don’t have to age in a comic strip.

If only that was an option Pig!

The worse part about aging is when some of your friends are dead !

Like winning the Reuben award?

This is scarily accurate:<O

Weird coincidence. I was just watching Stewart Lee with the dead mouse routine. Searchable string is probably “rejected fitness first advertisements”, since all of his ad ideas ended with death.

But Pig… you are a cartoon character…. the odds of you aging much is unlikely, the odds of you dying and going to the spilled fountain pen in in the sky is even less, unless you are Farley in “For Better or For Worse”, or Bill the Cat (Bloom County), or Grandpa (Family Circus), or Dead Bird (Calvin & Hobbes), or Dick Davenport (Doonesbury)….

We can see where Rat gets his “infectious optimism” from!

I’m 28 and this is already starting. My first wake-up call was Shohei Ohtani.

It’s like when you’re a kid, baseball players look like MEN. When you grow up/old, they all look like KIDS.

Enjoy the ride and be kind.

In 2012, baseball pitcher Jamie Moyer retired. He was the last active baseball player who was older than me. And Moyer was an ancient 49 years old. That was the day I started to feel old. Now, probably 2/3 of the managers are older than me.

I had one of those moments yesterday: I went inside the bank (for the first time in a very long time) and the tellers were not only younger than me, they were a LOT younger than me. I glanced into the loan officer’s office (they guy I knew for years and years retired about a decade ago) and even the woman in there was probably 5-10 years younger than me.

grow older, but not up!!!!

I am reminded of Billy Crystal’s soliloquy to his young sons class about getting older, from the movie “City Slickers.”

Sounds like a plan.

“It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years.” – - – Tom Lehrer

Good thing you guys exist in a floating timeline.

Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.

I don’t mind being older than those folks. Most of them are dead already and I’m not.

Steph’s view is accurate enough, but much darker than it needs to be. If you loo for the bright side, unsurprisingly, things look brighter.

Good thing they’re comic strip characters

Age gives a person perspective. Yeah, I know it’s not original, but it’s true.I’ll be turning 70 next year. My best friend died of brain cancer at 36.I’m a volunteer guide at a historic cemetery. I look at the dates on those stones and realize that I’ve outlived most of the “residents”.I don’t whistle past the graveyard. I walk through and sing, hoping the residents can hear, and like, the song.

That’s if you’re lucky!

that’s an option!? Man, I had no idea! :D

One day you push up from your recliner and make a strange oof/grumble/pfft/cough/creak sound and voila – you’re old.

Wish it was an option.

By the time Duane Allman was my age, he’d been dead 42 years………

Back in 2009, when I realized that I was older than the President.

“All is vanity.”-Solomon (Ecclesiastes)

Bad news, Millennials. Barney the Dinosaur is extinct.

A frightening thought, PIG!

“Old age sure ain’t for sissies.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/12/02/aged/

Funny thing is, they both turn 21 years old in 10 days.

In the same year the new U.S. President, my new boss, and the new CEO we’re all younger than me. I survived.

The thing about getting old: either you do or you don’t. Those are the only options.

You will never be older than all of the congress legislators.

On a positive note, you’ll never be older than your 9th grade English teacher.

Your body dies, but not your soul. It will spend eternity in one of two locations. And then some get new bodies.

dunno, who are the present day world’s oldest professional athlete(s), male and female? past winners..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_professional_athletes_by_sport

Being older than my doctor was one of the first clues! I’m younger than our outgoing governor, but older than the governor-elect. Also older than the mayor and both senators, plus the new senator-elect. Oh, and former president Obama – who is my several-years-younger Birthday Twin :-)

Having a bit of age on me, I choose to concentrate on living as long as I am looking at the daisies instead of pushing them. Maybe, if possible, as a penultimate event thinking about the alternative a few days before the ultimate event just to be sure things are as cleaned up as much as possible. In the meantime, life is good.

Sometimes death seems like a golden alternative.

 The 4 stages of life:

(1) You believe in Santa Claus.

(2) You don’t believe in Santa Claus.

(3) You are Santa Claus.

(4) You look like Santa Claus.

There was a great cartoon by Wm Hamilton maybe 40 years ago, showing two suits at a bar sharing a drink; one looks morose, and is saying “Before you know it . . . you’re too old to be ‘the youngest’ dɑmn anything any more”.

When Barack Obama was inaugurated I was older than the President, for the first time on my life.

Just might work for you guys. However, with Pastis as your artist and writer, you better keep him alive and well for as long as you can…..

Well thanks a lot, Mr. Scrooge! And Merry Christmas to you too from a 76 year old reader!

A long time ago when I was in my 30s I worked with a very interesting guy who had just turned 50. Every once in a while, usually when something strenuous or contortional was involved, he’d say ‘growing old is Hell, but it beats the alternative. So far.’

I felt that way when Justin Trudeau was elected. Finally world leaders are getting younger than me. Then with the past two U.S. presidents the trend is back in the opposite direction. Oh well.

If only that would work, Pig! Cartoon-Boy is, unfortunately, exactly right….

My first age shock was many years ago, when I was teaching high school students and began to talk familiarly about watching the first moon landing, and I noticed they were all looking at me in a sort of odd way — and it hit me that I was talking about it as if it had happened yesterday, when it was as good as ancient history to them!

In 1972, a juke box in a place that I frequented had some old jazz recordings, including “How High the Moon” from about 1947. Really ancient. At the same time, “Layla” was on the TOP 40. Years later, I saw “Layla” on another juke box and the thought struck me: “‘Layla’ is as old now as ‘How High the Moon’ was then.” That was in 1997. 25 years ago.

You haven’t yet. Aging is worse for athletes, though

At some point you realize that nearly everyone older than you is already dead.

Thank goodness for Tom Brady. At least there’s a football player who’s as old as I am still active.

First it’s the athletes, then it’s the coaches.