Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for December 31, 2013

When I was a child, I was at one end of the generational gap. Now… I am at the other end. Still, not as wide as this gap :-)

The stars will dissapear from the sky and I still will be young (=P)

You can’t beat a unicorn in a “Back in my day” contest. Though Marigold sure could tell some topper stories. "Back in my day we had to walk 15,000 miles to school. In the ICE AGE and across the land bridge, with Woolly Mastodons on our tails! And Princess Celestia STILL looked the same age then as she does today. I would say Marigold is as old a s dirt and time its self but she invented both those things.

When I was a kid, I never had to take a bath because I’m older than dirt.

I thought she was ancient. (Father’s sneeze)

Marigold was born before the human race even evolved. Our whole species are just a bunch of irresponsible children.

@ujean: Don’t put too much faith in Wiki; it’s only as smart as the general populace. Trust Marigold instead; she lived it!.Q4horse: I chuckled at your comment because you mixed evolution with a magical unicorn. :-)

So thats why unicorns are white. Camouflage.

In my day, we had two VHF channels – three if you counted Channel 5 in New York, which came in a bit snowy. Two UHF channels, one a bit snowy (Springfield, Massachusetts). There was one other UHF station, what was then called “educational TV” and is now known as PBS. And it had limited hours; they’d be on the air a few hours at a time, then sign off. And we listened to rock-and-roll on AM radio. The big station back then had a Top-100 list that they played on New Year’s Eve.

Long ago………….

It would be interesting to hear Marigold and Celestia swap “When I was young…” stories.

Marigold’s looking good for her age.

How times have changed…

giggles

Well, when I was /very/ little, we had two TV stations, and they were both NBC. Color broadcasting was just beginning, and the network would make a point of explaining in every promo that, yes, you could watch the show even on a black-and-white set, although you wouldn’t see it in color.

We lived out in the country, and we had a party line. You picked up the phone, and listened to hear whether any of your neighbors were already using the line (in which case you were supposed to hang up and wait for it to clear). If the line was free, you’d turn a crank (it was actually a little hand-powered generator), which would ring a bell at the local operator’s desk, and you’d tell her who you wanted to talk to. She’d use a plugboard to connect your line to the other line.

Even if you had a dial phone, you had to go through that to make a long-distance call. (Even by the time I was a teenager, if you wanted to make a trans-Atlantic call, you were wise to make an advance reservation.)

Older phonographs had infinitely-variable speed, which helped with old records from the time (the 20s or so) that the speed of 78 hadn’t been decided on, though they were usually somewhere between 75 and 80. (45 and 33 didn’t come until after WW2). In those days, an “album” really was an album, a book-like object with record sleeves for pages.

(And here’s another difference. Old records were completely flat. It was only sometime in the 50s that someone had the idea that if you made the center and the rim stand out a little, the grooves would be protected when records were stacked together.)

A good “high-fidelity” set included an extra control called the “record compensator”. You’d look up the record manufacturer in the instructions, and set the dial accordingly, to get the sound right. (In the mid-50s, all the record manufacturers agreed to use the RCA setting, which made things simpler.)

I agree with your dad and unicorn.

We lived in the sticks. If we wanted to see the other channel, we had to go outside with a pipe wrench and turn the antenna pole to a different direction.

In Equestria, she’d have to be an alicorn who somehow lost her wings.

Love the 42 on the father’s shirt. The answer to life the universe and everything.

Mustn’t forget the 4th record speed! Something like 16-1/2. My dad actually had one record that played at that speed too; it was made of red whatever. (“Ave Maria” if I remember right.) :-)

42 = The answer to life, the universe, and everything! Thanks, Hitch-hiker’s Guide. :-)

You’re bluffin’ Marigold. No way your early playmates were mastadons…

16⅔, to be exact, exactly ½ of 33⅓. It was mostly used for talking books for the blind, because the sound just wasn’t as good, but for a while, nearly all record players included it.

Fogies? Whippersnapper? I never knew this comic was part dictionary…

ROFLI read a lot of comics, and a lot of them are really good ones, but this one is the BEST one. BLAART!

And you kids get off my lawn!