Post Thanksgiving, I got what? It rhymes with kumquats but has only one syllable. That’s right, I got gum!

No, squat. But if I did have gum it would be Black Jack. Beeman’s. I would like to think that’s the gum Agent Cooper would be pleased to know was coming back in style. I remember when it came back - not in style, it was never out of style. But it reappeared at the World Market store in its first iteration. They had lots of vintage stuff made by companies that knew there was a buck to be made reviving a niche brand beloved by a scant cohort that might part with six bits for the sakje of reactivating some seldom-accessed neurons that lit up a time, a day, a place. Then the World Market closed in the Great Panic of 08.

The space was vacant for a long time. Years. The Big-Box complex to which it belonged was snake-bit; there was a Circuit City when it opened, but it shuddered and died when that chain went down. There was a Staples, which endured; Daughter loved to go there and make mischief with the account profiles on the demo laptops. She would send emails from their fake accounts to her friends. A hockey store came. The Micheals store, a crafts chain, didn’t close; there will always be a good installed base of suburban women who keep a Micheal’s alive.

Then the Circuit City returned to life - one half became a Traders Joe, and the other was an Total Wine and Spirits, aka the All-Encompassing Central Nervous System Depressant Outlet. It languished in bureaucratic limbo for a year while the Powers That Be balanced the issues, no doubt pressured by the muni hooch store in the area. Eventually they deigned to let it open.

Then the World Market reopened. It was as if nothing had happened. It was there. And then it wasn’t. And then it was again.

And they had Beeman’s.

This was just hanging around waiting to be dropped in a Detritus entry:

 

I can't find any info on the artist. It's a rather standard strip, a bit more polished than other pre-1930 strips.

That guy is the archetype that shows up in every single strip, I swear. Same mouth, same head, same eyes.

He ain't got no yack.

This cartoon popped up somewhere, and it struck me as one of the stupidest things I've seen this century:

Someone with no respect for other people steals your property, and inconveniences you for all the time it takes to replace the bike, and costs you money, but if that person is happier for having a bike than you're unhappy about its loss, it's a general good for the world. Crikey.

Not to godwinize this right out of the gate, but you know what was a pretty happy place in 1938? Nazi Germany. It's not the amount of aggregate happiness that matters, it's the reasons for which they are happy. If it was determined that the population of Africa was 51% unhappy and 49% happy, nuking the entire continent would make "the total happiness in the world increase. So, whatever."

Just found it on the artist's twitter, and the responses were rather roasty.

Mumps chased down a double-dealing dames:

Stupid woman! Arizona only grants divorces in November!

Solution here.

 

 

Back to Frontier Gentleman music cues. New theme - and this one's much more Westerny. But the cues remind you that this is the new style of Adult Western. The music winks at the cliches and fufills them at the same time.

   
 
 

Composer: Jerry Goldsmith.

   
     

 

Instead of the swank old sounds of Goodwill albums, this year we're going to share bad 1960s pop music. The second- and third-tier tunes.

1968. Sunshine pop. Utterly rote.

   

Everyone's always treating the operator like a bartender.

 
   

 

 
 
   

1948. Signal Gasoline brings you Miss Margret!

 
   

 

That'll do! See you on Monday.

 

 

 
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