Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for March 22, 2015

One thing Rat left out is that a landline phone can still function during a blackout, because the phone company sends a little electricity through the phone line just for that purpose. If a blackout lasts a few days, cordless phones and cell phones become useless as their batteries die.:Little kids with more attitude than intelligence exist to make me feel superior.

Brothers Benny and Rafi Fine made a “React” episode about the rotary phone on YouTube.

“The Time Lady”….wow, I’d forgotten that one! I do remember how you needed operator assistance to place long distance calls- and long distance in our area could be as close as North Vancouver to Richmond, a distance of only 6 miles! On the upside, we only had to dial 4 digits for local calls in some exchanges.Remember party lines?

Good ole POPCORN!On the minus side, you only got two types of phones to choose from and they made you pay a maintenance fee.

don’t forget the “ham radio”

I started to feel old when one of the young women where I worked at the time exclaimed to one of her friends: “Did you know that Paul McCartney was with another band before he was with Wings?”

I’m so old that in my day most big cities had several newspapers, including both morning papers and afternoon papers. So you’d probably get one of each, with whole different sets of comics, and maybe even more, so you could read lots of comics from different syndicates (back in our heyday in Chicago I often read four different newspapers each day, two in the morning—Tribune and Sun-Times, and two in the afternoon—Daily News and Herald-American)….

“THE WHO?!”

Um… no…Rat’s not that old.

Whoa… let’s not get carried away…operator assisted long distance, black and white TV…. that stuff was already disappearing 40 years ago….

But Stephan and therefore probably Pig and Rat live in the same city as I do…and our “time lady” only disappeared a half dozen ago….

Lots of people here still have landline phones…

Many of us can’t afford enough cell minutes to give them up…I get such a great deal on mine from my DSL provider it would be silly not to keep it, not to mention that they’re still actively investing in improvements.

Even with cordless phones like mine, land lines still have dial tones.

But rotary phones are another matter…. most people reading this forum probably remember them,however, in most places in the US, they still work for incoming calls, but will no longer dial out.

There’s a series of UTube videos featuring kids reacting to technology…this one of them trying to figure out a rotary phone is priceless…and made me feel 103.

Warning…. GoComics has just disabled both video embedding and the code that makes links open on a new page…so…RIGHT CLICK HEREand select “open in a new window.”

No, the Time Lady was never in The Who, though they’re nearly as old as she.

Hey Rat. Why don’t you tell them about something that’s more up your alley? You know, when beer cans actually needed a can opener.

And this is a dial. Everything had a dial, the TV, the radio and even the thermostat. You had to manually interact and manipulate the dial to control them. The dial emitted a series of clicks equal to the number. There weren’t any tones except he dial tone that told you the line was live.

Meanwhile the discussion here is similar to the one over at Non Sequitur.

Wait till he tells them about Dialing For Dollars. They had a cut-up phone book (what’s that?) and drew someone’s number out of a drum (what about people who weren’t listed?) during a break in a cheap afternoon movie, let it ring ten times (who would ever do that?) and if you answered you had to know the count and the amount (you actually had to be watching the movie at the time it was on?).

That phone is so old you can’t even use it to take a picture of yourself .

He’s ommitted to tell them that there were lots of public phones in roadside booths and in garages, pubs etc, so if you needed to call somebody while you were out you just found a public phone and put a coin in the slot. But you might have to wait for somebody else to finish their call first.

The Time Lady? Romana I or Romana II?

Rat forgot to tell the little kids how big brother knows everything they do,because of there cell phones. This is the reason why Mr Putin has gone back to manual typewriters and hand delivered messages.

My Mom is 78. In the ’60’s she worked in Calumet MI as a telephone switchboard operator. She was there when they “cut to dial” as she calls it.

You have to remember how technology has changed when relating to kids. My late husband was relating an incident when he was accidentally left behind on a family outing as a child when they stopped at a store and wasn’t missed until they were further down the road. I had to remember to explain to my granddaughter that we didn’t have cell phones back then to call people in cars.

and with Radio, you had to listen, and your mind put in the pictures…now those were the good old days!

is this a theme today? Non Sequitor today was also a lament for the land-line phone.

The time guy is the voice of George Fenneman, used to be the announcer on Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life”.

http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2015/03/22

Who knew there was a comic strip theme today

Now you’re more likely to hear, “Stella’s dad was in a band?”

I remeber her…“at the tone the time will be”…….I vaguely remember the phone number, here in NYC, started with the Meridian exchange….later on it was 976-1616…..There was even a # for the weather, WE-6-1212.

Great way to start day, a trip down memory lane excellent!

We had this conversation a while back, but it started with 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.

So I know about the phones, but what’s a time lady? Like River Song?

Anybody not only remember but still have the old bake-lite "pulse " rotary phones?

@Tardis1120 No, like Missy. Aren’t you up to date on Season 8 yet?

and early in the morning TV stations would ‘sign off’

Supermarkets didn’t appear in my area until well into the 50’s. Prior to that, we had a little general store with merchandise behind a counter which was fetched for the customer by the proprietor or an assistant. Very social and very expensive. Likewise, there was a legion of sundry route salesmen (and they were all men…): The breadman, the milkman, the eggman, the vacuum cleaner and encyclopedia salesmen, even the Fuller™ brushman. And yes, the phone was rotary dial, on a party line, and one dialed just 4 digits for a local call and long distance always required an operator. It was a VERY different time.

-We needed one exchange to reach our county services and another to call into DC so we had two phone lines, both on “copper” laid underground..-The biggest problem we had with copper lines was over winter, mice would nest in the outside junction boxes and chew on the insulation. When it rained in the Spring, the lines would short, and either be filled with static or stop working..Of course, the phone company always claimed any problem was inside our house, not at the outside junction box where the problem inevitably was. .For many years, our home phone system was half digital and half rotary. With both phone lines coming through both types of phones. It was always fun watching the phone company techs’ faces when they were confronted by it..-One line was switched over to FIOS years ago, (it’s now on cable) but we kept the other copper line until just last month when the local phone company upped the monthly charge so high it became impractical to keep it, especially since zone calling charges went away a long time ago.

There must be something in the air… Non Sequitur is also nostalgic for landlines today…

The modern Yellow Pages around here REALLY STINK compared to the ones that the phone company used to print……..

I have some cassette tapes which still work very well.And I don’t feel old in the slightest!xxx

One ringy dingy. Two ringy dingy….

What’s a “time lady?” I keep thinking of Doctor Who, but that can’t be it.

First Wiley’s Noon Sequitor and now this! Do I see a pattern here?

I remember the Time Lady! Didn’t she take off in a blue police box? And is it the anniversary of the landline or something? Wiley also had a strip about it today.

Making a cross country long distance call in the 1950’s was a real adventure. After dialing “0”, and asking for long distance, you’d get a long distance operator in your area who would have to connect to another. So to call from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, say, she’d connect to Omaha, and request to be put through to Los Angeles. But the next step was probably Denver, then Las Vegas, and finally you’d get an operator in L.A. who would connect you to your party. At each of those stops, the operator would have to take the cord on which your call came in and connect it to a line that went to the next city. And during that time, you (the caller) would hear the operators moving your call along. I think it created a lot more awareness of how complex a cross country call actually is.

Yeah, it was a very long time between my last Prince Valiant experience and finding him online.

Prior to cell phones you could get total privacy. Go the the beach and think, watch the birds, do whatever you liked without being interrupted by ringing phone or emails. Of course you can still do that. Turn your cell off. I do, it pisses my kids off!

I recently saw a cartoon of an adult cellphone showing kid cellphones a picture of a landline:“See, children, once upon a time, we all had tails.”

This blog confirms my surmise about the demographics of comics-readers.

I remember Channel 3 on the TV where all the programs would slowly scroll through. That was eight or so years ago. What has happened to us?

Two more memories:CHU the Canadian time announcements on 3330 kHz and 7850 kHz

Toll-free Enterprise numbers, where you’d call the Operator and ask to be connected to, say, Enterprise 267.

excuse me…but does any body here have a match…I need a light