Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 25, 2024

Well one time I was looking in the phone book..

Try explaining to them why it’s called “dialing” a number.

No ding dong ditch em with ring doorbells either!

When I was working as a TA, the university every year sent out a one-page flier (this was just barely before everyone had email) that listed all the things that incoming freshmen had never encountered in the wild. It always caused me to stop and think…

May the season’s uplifting emotions leach away a lot of your “ratty” behavior… at least for a few days. Enjoy!

Now we have throwaway phones, do your pranks for awhile and toss the phone.

And who was Prince Albert and what was he doing in a can?

Ahhh, I miss those opportunities for prank calls.

They can’t see who you are when you dial *67 first.

Call the butcher shop and ask if they have pig’s feet, when they answer in the affirmative, ask them how do they get their shoes on!

Same as the ring the doorbell and run prank.

So instead of prank calls, now Rat works for a telemarketing firm selling automobile extended warranties.

They put tape over the camera. Done.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Moe’s Tavern prank calls by Bart Simpson. Classic! Or even the Tube Bar prank calls to “Red” the owner of the bar.

This is my take.

Back in the day, about a third of the entertainment was historical fiction. People knew what things like butter churns and wash boards were because they saw them in movies. There were paperback books about knights, pirates, and cowboys. I once saw an EC comic book that did all Civil War stories. The comic was aimed at grade school kids, and told about military tactics and the 1860 election.

These days, historical fiction is much rarer. A kid is more likely to see a science fiction or fantasy movie than they are to see something about El Cid or Benedict Arnold.

You know you’re old when you realise you’re speaking a different language.

“What do you mean when you say you were waiting by the phone all day for a call?”

“Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”

Just wait until rat tells them the story about 8 track tapes.

And yet there have been news stories about people making “prank” calls in the smartphone era

Pastis’s Revenge!

And you couldn’t carry them around with you. Maybe to the next room if you had a long extension cord.

Well, I’ll be. The caller ID says it’s Seymour Butz?

OMG!!!! There’s more Rats???

Okay, okay… How about Ding Dong Ditch where you ring the doorbell and run like that blue hedgehog… But doorbells have cameras! They’ll see your face before you even ring it! Doorbells did not have cameras back then! My mom was right. You ARE weird! AUGH!!

What amazes me here is that Nephew is wearing his cap normally and not backwards.

Describe a television tube.

When I moved to rural Oregon in 2004, the local phone company was still running a mechanical switching system and the next town over (4 mi) was long distance. They got bought out a few years later and a garage full of hardware got replaced by a box the size of brief case.

Now you spoof your name and number.

Another advantage of the old phones is that you didn’t lose them.

Yup. If they’ve never heard of it or seen it, it’s either totally new or it never existed anyway. And that’s true for a lot of people in their 20s and early 30s, not just kids.

How odd. The ONLY “movement” in this comic strip for the day is when it “switches” from panel 3(three) to panel 4(four) by opening two(yes, 2) out of the three(3) character’s mouths with a SCREAM from RAT and RAT’S NEPHEW. RAT’S NIECE doesn’t move at all…Dan aka…ps hmmm….

We used to return empty pop bottles and they would clean them and refill them.

And how about the TVs that were huge boxes and you (or somebody) had to get up to change the channel.

This is the very reason why I don’t go into antique shops. It is very disconcerting to see things you grew up with.

Like the girl who asked her Dad how they accessed the internet if they didn’t have computers…

Random strangers? Last I checked, people prank called girls, school rivals and authority figures.

When we bought this house, we plugged up all the phone and cable TV plugs. Nobody plugs phones into the walls and TV is all streaming now

Heh. Wait until the younglings find out about typewriters. Or punched cards; when I started working with computers we used punched cards and FORTRAN, one line of code per card. We also had analog computers, and for a long time it was thought that analogs were the future of computing. After all, analogs had been in use for decades; the fire-control computers in warships and assigned to artillery units were analogs, as were automatic pilots and bomb-aiming devices. Isaac Asimov was so convinced that analogs were the way to go that his massive system was named MULTIVAC, with the ‘AC’ being ‘Analog Computer’; in the story ‘The Last Question’ the final descendant of MULTIVAC cruising along after the heat death of the universe… no, I won’t spoil it, it’s a classic, look it up, I’ll just say that Asimov and Arthur Clarke plus computers (Clarke perpetuated ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’) made theologians nervous. The ‘positronic’ brains in his robots were analog systems. Go ahead, find a typewriter, a punched card, or an analog computer that’s not a wristwatch (yes, mechanical watches are analogs…) now.

Strange how now observing “that was before my time” is cool, whereas when I was young it was just considered being stupid.

These two are karma for all of Rat’s horrible behavior.

I wonder how autobiographical this strip is for Stephan.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Nothing beats the Bart Simpson prank calls on “The Simpsons.”

Uncle Rat, like many, lived in a different time.

No wonder Rat never spends time with these kids.

Reminds me of the Jerky Boys. Frank Rizzo!

Stephan must be feeling his age. Lots of boomer material lately.

The good ole days

Someone prank called the funeral home during my grandmother’s wake. The receptionist was clueless and was asking for “Mike Hunt”. I had to explain it to her.

Nope, the only screens we had were on windows and doors and were made of rusty metal.

Rat’s worst act as a child was when he cooked corn on the cob for his grandparents…& then hid their dentures!!

It’s fun seeing Rat so flustered,

Apparently, the kids have never received a call that just lists a city name and when they answer, it’s, “Hello. This is a message from your utility company. You have been paying too much. You will receive a rebate plus 50% off your future bills. To continue, press 1. To confirm that you are human so we can keep spamming you – ER, UH, to be put on the Do Not Call list, press 2.”

Also, Rat must be older than the *69 days (when you dialed star-6-9 to call back whoever it was that just called you – I “think” 1169 did the same thing with rotary phones).

Back then, pranks calls were just about making jokes. Now it’s about trying to con the person.

Family bonding is part of the holidays. Unfortunately.

my friends and I used to do that… good times, good times!

why didn’t you just text?

Uncle Rat

Everything is changin’ fast

We call it progress

But I just don’t know

And Uncle Rat

Let’s wonder back into the past

And paint me the picture

Of long ago

Merry Christmas!

If it’s "Uncle Rat’ to the kid, what names do the kids go by?

Try explaining calling a store and asking if they have Prince Albert in a can.

Tell them the numbers were spoofed grandpa.

as if kids wont see old films where rotary phones were standard. E.g. any old superman movie.

Calling the ‘time lady’.

“Is Prince Albert on the can?” “That’s not how it goes!”

I miss my Nokia 5180!

I’m going to be 37 next month. I remember when caller ID, and the internet didn’t even exist. Heck I remember how sucky, and SLOW the internet was

Santa owes me. He didn’t bring me the kind pig comic I asked for for Christmas. Getting rat is like finding coal in your stocking. :-(

on a related note, I watch detective shows from the old days and think “this would be all over in 15 minutes if they had cell phones then”

Do that now and you’d get slapped with a harassment charge.

I got a prank call once. The person asked if my refrigerator was running. I sighed and hung up. Couldn’t you put in some kind of effort?