A rare treat this week for Eyrie subscribers: after waking up needing to pee, then knowing I’d be unable to get back to sleep right away, I whipped up a stiff pot of Java and got to work on tomorrow’s Substack post. Having completed the thing early, I then decided what the hey and went ahead and posted the thing a day in advance. No need to thank me, gang, I’m a giver like that.
Entitled “The wit and wisdom of Erma Bombeck…plus, ALIENS!!!”, the topic is one you decrepit oldster-types among us will likely recognize right off the bat with a warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. Younger CF readers, if any, won’t know what or who the hell I’m talking about. Which beings us right to our appetizer ‘graphs.
What terrible things it says about how very far our society has fallen that Erma Bombeck’s gentle humor would be incomprehensible to contemporary “Americans,” the timeless perspective therein either disdained as “dated” and therefore irrelevant or just condemned outright as being the product not of insight and intelligence, but of some nebulous, unspecified form of “bigotry” and/or “privilege.”
Said insights and humor were once universally understood and appreciated in America That Was, just part of our shared cultural experience. How very sad that today they come across almost like bizarre artifacts from some far-distant alien planet, transported to us across galaxies in a funky flying saucer.
Which, natch, is where those aliens I mentioned before come into the picture. Whether you’re at all cognizant of Erma Bombeck and/or believe in beings from another planet or not, this is one my better pieces yet, or so I believe, of which you should definitely read the all.
Update! Taking advantage of an old man’s habit of insomnia to muck about with the Substack CP a bit, in this case by inserting a couple pre-formatted “Subscribe now” buttons in the Bombeck post. I’d LOOOVE to be able to find some way of altering font sizes within otherwise-normal text and such, but thus far no joy with that one.
Pay no attention to me, folks, I’m just playin’ around here.
Oh hell, that’s just a dandy Mike. Erma Bombeck, I had forgotten about that very rare and fine wit. Thanks for digging her up.