Recent Comments

1. 9 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   If they were in Nancy, they could do it.

2. 9 days ago on Crabgrass

   To clarify, since I can’t edit: My contemporaries and I rode without equipment in the ’70s.

3. 9 days ago on Crabgrass

   I was older than these guys in the ‘80s, and I remember safety equipment coming in during that decade. My contemporaries and I rode everywhere, all the time, without a helmet or any padding in sight. Sometimes we even rode barefoot, although that stopped when we moved from bikes with rubber pedal pads to bikes with metal pedals.We weren’t unaware of the potential for injury. I once wiped out on some loose gravel and scraped up my ankle, and I remember one day a kid went over the handlebars right in front of our house when an extra pair of shoes he was carrying got tangled in his front wheel. HUGE goose egg on his forehead. Still, I rode enough to literally wear out every moving part on my bike from 1975-79 (ran up over 2500 miles according to the odometer) and never even thought about a helmet or pads.(I also remember seeing a Family Circus panel showing one of the melonheads sitting on a swing while wearing a helmet, knee pads AND elbow pads and thinking, “Parents don’t REALLY make their kids wear all that, do they?”)

4. 18 days ago on Luann

   YouTube creator Ali Spagnola spent THIRTY HOURS sculpting a tiny teddy bear from a Hershey’s Kiss for her partner, who hesitated for a second or two before eating it at Ali’s insistence. I’m not sure I could have just popped it into my mouth after learning how long it took to create. These, yeah, sure, eat ’em, but over the next week or so.

5. 18 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   It is indeed Skeezix’s birthday today. The little scamp is 104.

6. 25 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   It’s Trademark Preservation Time!

7. 29 days ago on Gasoline Alley

   Called it!

8. about 1 month ago on Gasoline Alley

   Having read a lot of HOA nightmare stories, I’m guessing they’ve been fining people who aren’t members (like Walt) and getting liens placed on properties when the owners don’t pay. And they’re probably embezzling from the fees and fines.

9. about 2 months ago on Gasoline Alley

   I bought my house in the late ‘90s, before I had regular Internet access, and even THEN I’d heard enough HOA horror stories that I told my agent I didn’t want to buy anywhere that had one.Walt’s lived in that house for decades, since before HOAs were a thing. I’m guessing it’ll turn out that he never agreed to join, and Mr. Couldn’t-Get-Into-the-Police-Academy-So-I’m-Doing-This-Instead will end up frustrated. There are stories of HOAs trying to enforce their rules on homeowners who were there before the HOA was formed.

10. about 2 months ago on Gasoline Alley

    For Walt’s age, I’ve always gone by the 2001 strip where someone showed up to give Walt a medal and told Phyllis, “Your husband was born in 1898…” Which would make him 23 in 1921 when Skeezix appeared on his doorstep. It would also have made him 18 when the USA entered WWI, which just about works. Phyllis, a WWI widow, could very well have married Jack Blossom in her teens and been within a year or two of Walt’s age. I agree that some details of Walt’s past (like graduating college and being a sales manager) point to him being older than 20 in 1918, but as far as I know that’s the only time he’s ever been given a birth year.And let’s not even discuss Doc and Avery, who were always appreciably older than Walt and who both lived at least into the late 1980s…