There Will Always be a Mr. Tudball

We shall call him Mr. Tudball. As this candid picture shows, not everyone is cut out for a smartphone. Hell, adding a camera to a flip phone was clearly a trial for Mr. Tudball.

We all know one or two close friends who, like Mr. Tudball here, haven't taken a shine to plain old cell phones, let alone smartphones. Hell, here in the Curmudgeon fraternity, there are a LOT of such Luddites. They completely miss how quickly one gets to appreciate rapid communications with people, and as a corollary, how much they miss by not being able to stay in the loop with family and friends.

There will always be the Tudballs of the world...and thus, chortles for the rest of us.

Closed Captions

My Sainted wife and I have taken to using closed captioning when watching TV, and not for the reason you're probably thinking:  "they're old, they're going deaf." No, as suggested by an alert reader, we use it so we can understand the dialog in British shows.

Yes, yes, I know they too are speaking English, but let's face it - when the British get to talking fast it can be a struggle to keep up. Plus they have this habit of pronouncing everything differently if they don't have an entirely different word handy (e.g., chemist is pharmacist) which really puts a spanner in the gubbins.

Which brings up a troubling observation: closed captioning is always there when you need it. That means it is there on even the absolute WORST movies imaginable (Plan 9 From Outer Space and its ilk). I assume that means someone actually had to sit through these awful things typing up the, for want of a better word, dialog.

I hope the dialog typing union is good enough to get them some kind of combat pay for being exposed to these horrid things.

Kids Today (Slight Return)

My fellow curmudgeons are forever whining about "kids today" being on their phones all the time. Followed, generally, by some creative mangling of the names 'Facebook' or 'Twitter'. I touched upon this last April.

Kids spending too much time on their smartphones is really a tired trope these days. When I think of what I spent too much time on when I was that age, I cringe. So kids walking around with a computer in their pocket and commu-
nicating with each other excessively doesn't even appear on my radar.

And, according to this picture, we old farts are just as guilty.

Curmudgeons Abroad

Let's face it, foreign travel is not for curmudgeons. Even if we could tolerate the actual getting there bit, we would probably starve once there.

There is no safe haven abroad - England? They boil EVERYTHING. Scandinavia? Do you KNOW what gravlax or finnan haddie are? Greece? Yeah, we're going to eat yogurt and figs. Pressing on, un-Americanized Italian or Mexican would no doubt be deadly, and let's just cross India (how spoiled IS this curried meat?) and Japan (you didn't COOK this fish?) and China (why is my dinner moving?) right off the list.

Aah, give us good old American cooking. Like Denny's...or Taco Bell. Beautiful!

Start the New Year Right - Comment!

For my devoted readers who are just as confused as me about how to send comments on this blog, I have, mostly, good news.

The good news - IT CAN BE DONE!

- Tap "No Comments" (for bizarre reasons that have yet to be explained).
- Enter your comment in the cute box provided.
- Selecting "anonymous" in "Comment as" is fine.
- Tap "Publish"
- Tap "I'm not a robot" to get one of those (damned) CAPTCHAs. Solve it, hit "verify" and it checks off that you're not a robot - that's a good thing, isn't it?
- Tap "publish" because you've been verified as human by the Blogspot computer (a tad meta, no?).
- You're back to your comment - but with "Your comment was published" proudly displayed!

Easy, no? I agree - no. But don't let that stop you! Comment away!