We Know We're Getting Older, You Don't have to Remind us. 11/13/26

For those of you who don’t know Dick Tracy…forget about it. Just kidding. Dick Tracy was a comic strip (and a 1990 movie with Warren Beatty). Tracy was a tough, square-jawed detective in a strip that ran from 1931 until 1977, illustrated and written by a guy named Chester Gould. He talked on his special watch which doubled as a telephone. It seemed crazy that something like that would ever exist. In its time, Dick Tracy was even more popular than The New 60 Comic, if that’s even possible. But the important thing is that people in younger generations do not get many of our reference points. I hear this from a number of my retired friends who are adjunct professors. One of them said in class, “It’s a fish out of water story, like Joe Pesci, a Brooklyn lawyer who winds up in an. Alabama court in My Cousin Vinny.” He looked up to see a classroom of blank faces. Another was teaching a writing class and referred to the classic Abbott and Costello routine, “Who’s on First.” The class had absolutely no clue of what he was talking about. And why should they know? Things are changing so rapidly. There’s an old joke about some kids going to a record store (they still have some of those), thumbing through a bin and picking up a Beatles album while exclaiming, “Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings? From records, to cassette tapes to 8 trackS to CD’s and now to streaming, everything becomes obsolete more quickly. We can imagine someone in the future explaining this comic to their kids. “That’s a reference to the old comic strip, Dick Tracy,” to which the kid replies, “What’s a comic strip?”

Our other comic is about the rise of self checkout aisles in drug stores and supermarkets. On the one hand, it is slowly phasing out cashiers in these stores. On the other hand, we think the remaining cashiers should thank members of the Boomer generation for two reasons. One is that we prefer people checking us out. And the second is we’re so technologically adverse, that stores actually require a cashier to monitor the people at the self-checkout aisle because they frequently cause the register to buzz while the checkout screen posts the embarrassing (and time consuming) message, “Help is on the way.”

Don’t get us wrong. We like that help is on the way. We just don’t like the fact that we need it. Have a great weekend,

Andy and John