Milk Slurping

Welcome to "Today's Kids Got It Easy", where I discuss how much easier my kids have it than I did growing up in the 70's and 8o's.

When I was a kid I loved sugary breakfast cereal.

My kids love cereal also.

When I was a kid, after I had eaten all of my cereal (and then all of the marshmellows if it was Lucky Charms or a Monster cereal), I was always left with a half a bowl of sugary milk.

There is no way I was going to throw away all that good sugary milk, so I had to pick up the bowl, place my lips on the edge, tip up the bowl, and try to drink the sugary milk from the bowl.

Very awkward and messy.

Not today's kids.

These lazy little brats don't have to lift the bowl and never have sugar milk running down their neck.

TKGIE - KFC

Welcome to another installment of Today's Kids Got It Easy where I talk about how much easier my kids have it than I did growing up in the 70's and 80's.

When I was a little kid and I had a craving for finger licking good fried chicken, I had to ask my parents if we could go to "Kentucky Fried Chicken".

"Kentucky Fried Chicken" is 6 syllables. That is a mouthfull.

Todays Kids Got It Easy because all they have to do is ask to go to "KFC"

Why did the restaurant chain formerly known as "Kentucky Fried Chicken" change its name to KFC?

They didn't do it to give my kids a break, they changed the name because they were breeding mutant chickens with extra-large breasts and additional legs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration stepped in and told Kentucky Fried Chicken that the genetically engineered creatures they were producing on their poultry farms could not legally be marketed as "chicken." Rather than give up the lucrative sales of meat from their big-breasted, multi-legged fowl to adhere to FDA regulations, the company deftly sidestepped the problem by changing their name to "KFC," thus eliminating all mention of the word "chicken" from their menu and advertisements.

Today's Kids Got It Easy - Measurements

Today's Kids Got It Easy is where I explain how much easier today's kids have it than I did growing up in the 70's and 80's.

When I was a kid we learned about inches and feet and miles and pounds and cups and gallons.

Then, a few years later, the teachers told us that we needed to learn a new system that was accepted worldwide and would soon replace the measurements that we had come to know and love.

That new system - The Metric System

As a child, the metric system was new, different, and totally unworkable. It was based on powers of 10.

The inch is based on the length of some king's thumb, the meter is 1/40,000,000th of the polar circumference of the Earth.

We had to learn what all the stupid metric prefixes meant. We had to learn how to change our system to metric sytem and how to change metric system back to our system.

What a waste of time.

Of course our teachers were wrong and the metric system did not catch on. Today's schools rightly reject the idiotic french invention that is the metric system.

Today's kids got it easy because they don't have top learn the metric system.

I have long ago put my ruler with metric on one side and inches on the other side, away. Maybe someday it will be worth money, like a bottle of "New Coke"

2day's Kids Got it EZ - Magic Drawing Boxes

Introducing a new Turnipblog feature called 2day's Kids Got it EZ, where I will talk about how much easier today's kids have it than I did, growing up in the 70's and 80's.

The other day, my daughter ran up to me and showed me a picture that she had drawn in about 5 minutes on her Magna Doodle.



The picture was very cute, it was Madeline surrounded by hearts. I told her how much I liked the picture, but as I looked at it I couldn't help but think of how easy my kids have it.

Drawing the same exact picture when I was her age, in 1976, would have been nearly impossible.

Why?

A = Because today's magic drawing boxes, such as Magna Doodle, are so far advanced from 1976's only option, Etch-A-Sketch.

Magna Doodle comes with a magic pen. You can use the pen to draw freely on Magna Doodle as if it were a crayon. When you are finished, you slide a plastic bar over the Magna Doodle to erase your picture.

With Etch-A-Sketch your entire picture had to be composed of a single line. You couldn't just draw the single line with a magic pen, you had to use two knobs. One knob made the line go up or down, the other knob made the line go left and right. So if you only twisted one knob or the other, you either got a straight verticle line or straight horizontal line.

Only the most very skilled and patient Etch-A-Sketch artists could draw a diagonal line, much less a curve or circle, by precisely turning both knobs at once. These most basic shapes were certainly beyond my capabilities.

Oh Well...

... instead of sliding a bar across the Magna Doodle to erase my pictures, at least I got to shake the hell out of my Etch-A-Sketch.

2day's Kids Got it EZ - Television

Introducing a new Turnipblog feature called 2day's Kids Got it EZ, where I will talk about how much easier today's kids have it than I did, growing up in the 70's and 80's.

When we go to church we usually park on a little side street. One sunday, a few weeks ago, we were running late to church, as usual. We parked on the little side street and starting walking. As we walked past, I saw an old television sitting on the curb, in front of a house. It was obviously being thrown away. It looked just like the television that my parents had when I was the same age as my kids are now.

I stopped the kids and called them over to the old television, we were already going to have to sit in the cry-room.

"Kids, look at this. This is what a television looked like when I was your age. You couldn't pause TV and if you wanted to turn the TV on, you had to get up, walk over to the TV and pull out this knob here...

And if you wanted to turn the volume up or down, you had to get up, walk over to the TV and turn these knobs right here...

And if you wanted to change the channel, you had to get up, walk over to the TV, and turn this knob to UHF or VHF and then turn this dial down here to the number of the channel that you wanted...

And then when the handle broke of the dial, you had to leave a pair of pliers sitting on top of the television, and if you wanted to change the channel, you had to get up, walk over to the TV, and turn this knob to UHF or VHF and then turn the dial with the pliers..."

You get the idea, but I don't think the kids fully appreciated how good they got it.

2day's Kids Got it EZ

Introducing a new Turnipblog feature called 2day's Kids Got it EZ, where I will talk about how much easier today's kids have it than I did, growing up in the 70's and 80's.

To kick things off, here is the transcript of the famous Monty Python skit on the same subject.

The Players:
Michael Palin - First Yorkshireman;
Graham Chapman - Second Yorkshireman;
Terry Jones - Third Yorkshireman;
Eric Idle - Fourth Yorkshireman;

The Scene:
Four well-dressed men are sitting together at a vacation resort.
'Farewell to Thee' is played in the background on Hawaiian guitar.



FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You're right there, Obadiah.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o' cold tea.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an' all.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was right.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by
having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of
tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.

FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

ALL:
They won't!