What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? Why are Rufus and Joel in Charlotte, North Carolina? October 2023 – January 2024

The unsatisfying answer is they hitched a ride with Slim Wallet. Why was Slim going to Charlotte? He wasn’t, to start with; he was driving back after dropping off some tires. Rufus and Joel, taking over the driving, got lost. Slim took back over and drove them to the mall, where he was supposed to play Santa. As to why Charlotte as opposed to any generic city? My guess is Jim Scancarelli wanted to show off his great skyline photos of the place called “The Queen City of the West” by people who went on too long and accidentally named that WKRP place.

So this should catch you up to early 2024 in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley developments. If you’re reading this after about April 2024, or news about the comic strip breaks out, I’ll share with a post here. If neither of those are true, this is the most up-to-date stuff you can get except from whoever the dedicated Gasoline Alley snark bloggers are.

Gasoline Alley.

15 October 2023 – 6 January 2024.

Last I checked in, Bear, the bear, had got Jones, yet another foundling boy, fostered by Ranger Hoogy Skinner. While on a walk Bear and Jones meet up with Rufus and Joel, everyone’s comic pair of least-realistic characters in the strip. They’ve ended their hiding out in Bear’s uncle’s cave when Bear’s uncle starts snoring. Or growling. Whatever.

So that encounter — let’s date it the 16th of October — is when the main story of the end of last year started. Rufus and Joel figure to walk back home. It’s a longer walk than it was running out into the woods. They hitch a ride with Slim Wallet, returning from the Queen City after dropping off some tires. On the drive back to Gasoline Alley Slim gets so tired he asks Rufus and Joel to drive, while he sleeps in back on the truck bed.

Rufus and Joel decide to get on the Interstate, and before you know it they’re on I-77 and heading into Charlotte. They hit a pothole hard enough Slim falls out of the truck, but don’t notice until they make another orbit of the city. Slim’s angry, but awake, so there’s something to be said about being thrown out onto an Interstate. They pick him up again, and he drives, not to home, but to Gasoline Alley Mall.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 22nd of November, 2023. I think we all agree with Slim Wallet’s anger there. In driving around town to no point they’ve wasted all the time they could have spent at Carowinds amusement park!

Because it’s now Christmastime and someone’s got to play Santa for Frank Nelson at the department store. Slim was signed up for it, but with his road injury he’s not up to kids on his lap all day. Joel, the shorter and fatter one, has to take his place, while Rufus is his elf.

The kids are from the Gasoline Alley kids crew, finishing with Jones, who turns out to be able to say stuff after all. And then some woman I don’t recognize thanks him, as Santa, for spreading the true meaning of the season and whatnot. After that, some brat of a kid yanks on Joel’s beard and that’s enough of that for everyone.

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The 26th of December saw a big bit of news. Baleen Beluga and T-Bone, waitress and cook at Corky’s diner, are engaged. They haven’t set a date yet. And then from the 2nd of January we got … Slim, a grown man, failing to use the washing machine correctly. Where is this going? I don’t know, maybe they’re going to stretch and make it to Raleigh/Durham.

Next Week!

My schedule has me talking about Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail. But what if — and I’m just thinking out loud, silently, while watching The Price Is Right on the DVR — I looked to the world of Mongo instead? What might happen? Check in next week and we’ll see what happens. If it does.

60s Popeye: Uncivil War, about the processes that drive one bad

This week takes us back to 1960 and a cartoon with a baffling title. It comes from the Jack Kinney studios. The story’s by Gerald Nevius and the animation direction by Volus Jones. Here’s a short titled, for some reason, Uncivil War.

I don’t get the title at all. I expected it to be maybe a historical short, but more likely something where Popeye and Brutus have to share the housekeeping. “Popeye instructing Swee’Pea in good driving habits” would have been my maybe fourth guess after “Popeye fights with a squirrel”.

Instead, we’ve got a safe-driving short. The idea seems oddly pitched for the audience, which would be mostly kids a decade away from driving. There were plenty of theatrical shorts pushing safe-driving messages, such as the excellent 1950 Goofy short Motor Mania, directed by some guy name of Jack Kinney. But that’s aimed at a general audience where some of the people are driving home from the theater. Also, the jokes were bigger, bolder. The jokes in “Uncivil War” are more mundane, more educational. There’s a preposterous pileup of cars, caused by Popeye stopping to read the signs too carefully, but that’s about all. The cartoon might have had more surreal jokes if it were just a short about Olive Oyl learning to drive or Popeye trying out his new car. It has a curious shift in structure. It starts out looking like Brutus is trying to woo Olive Oyl with his cool car and Popeye proves himself superior by being a more thoughtful driver. But then that evaporates and we get instead a string of jokes where someone drives badly and then the rest of the cast calls them stupid.

And you say only Popeye knows how to parallel park?

A choice I think I like here is that Brutus isn’t always the bad driver here. (Nor is Olive Oyl, a welcome avoiding of stereotype.) Everyone shuffles the roles of being the good and the problem driver. It helps spread out the laugh lines. It also conveys a subtler message that everyone is a problem driver in some way or another. I can’t imagine that many kids watching this came away thinking of how just being a Good character, like Popeye, doesn’t mean everything you do is right. But it is the sort of lesson one should have. It feels like an inefficient way to do it, is all.

I’d love to know why the Kinney studios chose to make this cartoon, of all the premises they could. Were they thinking of great how-to-drive shorts of the past, including Motor Mania? Was it some sense that they should have some cartoons with socially constructive messages? And how did “Uncivil War” get attached to it as a title? Would like to be able to give you an answer.

60s Popeye: Popeye’s Used Car, and the return of Milt Schaffer jokes

Popeye’s Used Car is another 1960, Jack Kinney-produced cartoon. The story’s credited to Milt Schaffer, of that fascinating Popeye-versus-Woody-Woodpecker showdown. The direction is credited to Hugh Fraser who’s got a lot of credits already here.

After several peculiar cartoons it’s almost a comfort to have a slightly boring one to write about. Boring’s not a fair terms, really. There’s a reasonable pace and flow to Popeye’s Used Car. It’s just that after a couple weird ones, a basic competent narratively-linear cartoon feels less exciting. It’s a basic, easy-to-follow plot. To keep up with Brutus, Popeye buys a car, and doesn’t really know how to drive. There’s no threat of breaking the time barrier here.

What I do like is the decorations put on this structure. There’s some fine little visual jokes, such as the freeway sign warning, “Enter at your own risk”. Or, on the dashboard of Popeye’s car, buttons for drift, draft, droop, and drip. A traffic signal working as a slot machine.

Who says they didn’t have cupholders in 60s cars?

Better is the dialogue, though. Popeye describes his bouquet of flowers as “a bit of fragrant frivolity perhaps, but they’re from my heart”. It’s a complicated way to say what he’s doing, and that’s good. It’s got personality, if not for Popeye then for the cartoon. People put things in funny ways throughout the short. When Popeye crashes his car into Olive Oyl’s bedroom she scolds, “Your manners are atrocious!” An angry driver yells at the too-slow Popeye, “Move it or milk it!” This is a funny enough image that I’ll probably use that next time I encounter someone doing 35 mph on the Interstate. Popeye’s traffic-school certificate graduating him “magna cum louder”, which could be the certificate or Popeye being silly. Popeye speaking of how Olive Oyl’s “heart is swayed by the glitter of chrome and whitewall sidewalls”.

Wimpy gets cast as the used car salesman. It’s hard thinking of Wimpy as having a job, but this feels close enough for him. His spinning that out into offering driving lessons feels weirder. That seems like more of an effort than I expect from Wimpy. He’s not as fun a driving teacher as I’d hope. I could see this work. Wimpy moving with an airy indifference to the chaos around him should make for good driving jokes. This might be the point where Milt Schaffer ran out of writing energy.

I do like the charming casualness with which Olive Oyl and Popeye take his smashing his car into her bedroom. They’ve been through this sort of thing before, and they know they’ll be through it again, and it’s not worth getting upset about.

How To Get Ready To Go Someplace By Car

Before setting off on your car trip there are some things you should check. The first is to check that you have a car. While it’s often permitted, it’s socially awkward to just be running along in the middle of a highway without any kind of vehicle. Not least because you have to signal all your turns using your hands instead of with electric lights. This is great if you want to feel vaguely like you’re in a cartoon about wimmin drivers from the 1950s. But do you really want to feel like that? Yes, if it’s a heartwarming cartoon about being part of a family of cars. But otherwise no.

Similarly you want to check that you don’t have more than one car. I mean that you’re driving at one time. It’s fine to keep a second car in reserve, ready to leap into action when it turns out the first one has mysterious buttons on the door with labels like ‘ASW’ that don’t seem to do anything. But you only want to operate one at a time, unless you have extremely long arms and legs. Similarly you want to include yourself in the car trip. There’ve been great developments lately in self-driving cars. But these fully autonomous vehicles won’t take over the purpose of a car trip until they’re able to get to a spot, deal with whatever it is you were going to deal with, and drive home, and get annoyed that their podcasts are ten minutes too short or five minutes too long for the journey. There’ve been some great developments in this field lately, with research going in to how to make podcasts a prime number of minutes long. But the work isn’t yet complete.

If the relative count of cars and you’s turns out matches up well you can go to other checks. The first is that you’ve locked the house door. The second is that you’ve gone back and made sure you’ve locked the door. You can be confident you’ve gotten the door locked by no method known to humanity. But it’ll clear the issue up when you start pulling out of the driveway and realize you left your phone in the house and don’t have your podcasts with you. This will be a chance to run back into the house and go through the door-locking all over again.

Anyway before you do set off you should do a safety inspection of the car. This includes walking the entire circuit around the vehicle, looking for any signs of damage or wear or other problems, such as a tire being flat, a body panel being cracked, a muffler dangling loose, an animal hiding in some part we’re just going to go ahead and call the “manifold”, or any part of the electrical system being on fire. Responsible drivers have done this walk-around inspection an estimated four times since the invention of the automobile. You should also check that the mirrors are attached and showing the areas behind the car. If they are not, try taking them off and putting them on upside-down. This will not help matters, but making the effort will reassure you that you’re doing all that one could hope for. Really it might be easier to be an irresponsible driver.

It’s also worth checking that there aren’t traffic problems along your projected route. The radio could be a good source for information. The news station, for example, will happily let you know that there are delays on the Tappan Zee Bridge. They’re always reporting there are delays on the Tappan Zee Bridge. This gives you the chance to ponder the question: how often does there have to be a delay before the delay stops being a delay and just becomes normal? And wait, didn’t they replace the Tappan Zee Bridge years ago? In fact, didn’t they tear it down? (They did not. They just stopped hoping it would not fall down while anyone was watching.) Also, the Tappan Zee Bridge isn’t anywhere near you. You live somewhere like San Jose, California, such as Louisville, Kentucky. And in what ways is San Jose like Louisville? In what ways is it different? Can you answer in 700 words or fewer?

The wind has blown the house door open.

Uncle Chuck on How To Get Three Cars To The Same Place At The Same Time

I was figuring to take it easy for the start of the new year. So I’m reprinting a piece that originally ran when this feature was written by my great-uncle Chuck for the Perth Amboy News Tribune. I’m pretty sure he was my great-uncle. I hate to admit, but I do get mixed up some. The best I can follow all our male relatives on that side of the family were named “Chuck” or “Al”, as if the family were afraid we didn’t really know how to pick names and might get in trouble so we just went with whatever worked last time. I’m sure we could sort this out if we asked my father, Joseph. Or, if we had gotten to the question sooner, his father, Joseph. Anyway here’s an essay that first appeared in this column in 1955. Enjoy!

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There have been a great many enquiries to this office about how to get three cars to the same place at the same time. Perhaps the number is not that great, but they make up for it with persistence. “But madam,” I protest, “This is the water-commissioner’s office!” They are unmoved. They are certain I have answers. “Have you considered that it is because of the drought?” I offer. This hasn’t anything to do with the issue, but it promises a useful distraction. Still, let us consider the question in its original spirit and try to answer it fairly, two falls out of three.

If you wish to get three cars to the same place at the same time the first question you must answer is: why? Is this really worth your doing? What I’ll bet you want is to get three cars’ worth of people to the same place at the same time. And the most efficient way to do that is to find some reason not to go there. Two-thirds of your party would be up for that anyway, and are secretly hoping someone will offer. But there’s that stubborn remainder that will have you all going out, come what may. “I don’t care that we could roller-skate in the basement, if we moved the garden furniture out of the way,” they’ll hold. “I want to go do it where there’s more space and we have to pay for popcorn.” Fine. Let them learn.

The best way to be sure everyone gets to the place is to give everyone the address and the meeting time. Then take out every map available, including that one of the Old Northwest you got intending a joke that never worked right, and review the course and three alternate courses. Then let everyone go off on their own and hope for the best. The best is two-thirds of the party gathering while the third that insisted on going out instead somehow ending up at the Perth Amboy YMCA.

But even with this clear plan and good will in mind, the cars will set off, attempting to convoy. The cars stick as close together as they can, the first two turning right at the end of North Feltus Street and the third turning left. This inspires a right jolly conversation among the passengers. It ends with sore throats and sorer feelings, but at least an agreement to catch the other vehicles and tell them they’re going the wrong way. Meanwhile the other two cars have come to a stop where they can just see the funeral home, waiting for their lost partner, which goes past without noticing them. They try to catch up, and are foiled by the traffic signal, which separates the now-second car from the third. The second car honks furiously, getting the attention of the first, and they agree to wait outside the accordion place in fond hope of regrouping.

And this is taking the simple way there. The other way would have taken the party through the triangle of streets inside the larger triangle of streets, planned out by the city fathers in order to demonstrate Book VI, proposition 8 in their Euclid. There is no chance of the three cars making it through. History teaches us at least one car will be nudged away from the convoy by a German submarine, and its passengers will be interned in Ireland for the duration of the conflict.

But we have set off on the less treacherous path. From here it should be a left turn at the KoC. But the sense of the party has decided it’s the left turn just after the KoC. Doing this brings everyone back around to the other side of the accordion place and agreement to try a right turn instead. From here it should be not more than a quarter-mile, everyone stopping before they get to the train tracks. Four other cars somehow get between the three voyagers.

The roller-skating rink is closed today.

Uh-Oh.

So I got this in the mail.

There’s a chance that it’s completely harmless.

Trivial, even.

I mean, we’re getting to about the time when my car registration needs renewal.

And I haven’t had a proper fiasco putting on the licence plate tags in, oh, three years now.

Still, though, given what I was just writing …

Level with me, kind readers.

Did one of you snitch?

I did NOT open immediately and now let’s see if one of you reports me for THAT.

In Which I Have To Take Back Nice Stuff I Said About Michigan’s Secretary Of State

So, I know that the last time I expressed thoughts about Michigan’s Secretary of State I made a fool of myself. Secretary of State offices around here fill the role that other states have a Department of Motor Vehicles for, and I thought that was just a quirk of terminology. And I learned that I understimated the office. At any of these offices you can do all the work that you might do by visiting the Secretary of State herself, without any necessarily awkward conversations or having to answer questions about how you broke into her home and whether you know it’s 1:45 am.

And that’s fine but recently I discovered what they need to issue a replacement driver’s license, in case you lose yours, something that I haven’t done in fourteen years and in another state anyway:

Eye color is an easy question for me. I have eyes that look as though the angels designing my body perused my nascent face and said, “Brown. Done. NEXT” and hit flood-fill as I was on the way out.

I’d like to ask the Secretary of State where I’m supposed to get my driver’s license number if I need to replace my driver’s license, but it’s too much work for me to leave the house at 1:45 am except to confirm my fear that I left the lawn sprinkler running since 3 pm Friday. I understand why they thought someone might have memorized their driver’s license number, if they thought that people were still seventeen and in the last age cohort that saw a driver’s license as something desirable, instead of something you need to get to avoid the civil penalties for failure to sufficiently car. But, yeesh. I’m good at remembering numbers and all I could tell you about my Michigan driver’s license is that it probably has some digits in it.

Also no fear for that license I lost fourteen years ago. I got a replacement, for which I did not need to know my license number, which I did have memorized. Several months later the original license reappeared, as you might expect, as a bookmark in my copy of John Steele Gordon’s book about the transatlantic telegraph cable.

Statistics Saturday: Which Side Of The Road Various Countries Of The World Drive On

Country Of The World	Which Side Of The Road Is Driven On
Canada	Top
India	Top
United Kingdom	Top
Australia	Top
Mexico	Top
Germany	Top
Ukraine	Top
Norway	Top
Russia	Top
Romania	Top
Finland	Top
Turkey	Top
Hungary	Top
South Korea	Top
Brazil	Top
United States	Top
New Zealand	Top
Greece	Top
Serbia	Top
Argentina	Top
Vietnam	Top
Bangladesh	Top
Taiwan	Top
Lebanon	Top
Italy	Top
Spain	Top
Portugal	Top
Israel	Top
Philippines	Top
France	Top
Denmark	Top

Source: The Kind Of Motion We Call Heat: A History of the Kinetic Theory of Gases in the 19th Century, Volume 1: Physics and the Atomists, Stephen G Brush.

From The July 2016 Scraps File And Free To Good Home

Come one, come two, come at least a few of you and enjoy last month’s scraps file. I couldn’t do anything with these blocks of words. Maybe you’ll have some better luck. If not, you can get them at half-price in the August 2016 Scraps File in a couple weeks. Words are sold as-is and may not be turned into gerunds just because you didn’t have a better idea what to do with them.

and while you’d think that was good news you have to remember that noses, like all body parts, are terribly gross things — cut from riffing on this discovery of a new antibiotic produced by a bacteria that lives in the nasal cavity because while bodies are terribly gross things it’s not like antibiotics researchers have too easy a time of it and need some hassle from me. They know what body parts they have to touch all the time. I have to be responsible as a very slightly read blogger. I can be irresponsible later on if I metamorphose and I’ll try to keep you updated on that.

something something stray unattributed quote from Monty Python sketch something — cut from what was honestly a bit of comment-bait because I keep telling myself I’m better than that even though I’m not. I’d probably quote something from one of the lesser Monty Python sketches anyway, the ones the Internet hasn’t destroyed by endless quoting. Maybe the one where a bank robber goes into the lingerie shop. That one happened, right?

mandible — cut because it’s not really that funny a word, not when you’ve heard it already in the past three months, which I’m all but sure I have.

furthermore I do not know where your paranoid delusion that I am talking about you behind your back comes from; people think you incapable of telling the difference between “a good person” and “a person who flatters me endlessly” because of your own merry little band of sycophants and not my pointing this out to them — cut from that letter that really looks like it’s never going to be sent because while it’s not like I’m saying anything behind that friend’s back, I know the friend isn’t paying any attention here and that is PART of the WHOLE PROBLEM as I have said in many paragraphs cut already. Anyway, since I’m the one being honest in the whole fight I don’t want to descend to including stuff that’s merely technically true, even though, as has been the case this whole while, I’m right.

thatched — as above, it’s one of those words that sounds like it’s funny to start with, but really isn’t, not when you hold it up to close examination. I apologize for people who have fond memories of slightly famous mid-90s comic Thatch but there’s like four people who do and one of them is the guy who wrote it.

also where do we get off saying a dipper is a thing anybody recognizes anymore? Maybe there’s somewhere they deal with them, off where there’s all sorts of people keeping horses and stuff like that, but here in the city dippers faded away back when the “drinking fountain” came in. Drinking fountains were great. They were free, publicly available places to get tepid water dribbling a quarter-inch out of a metal receptacle. But we had them, and they made dippers obsolete. — cut from my thing about what constellation you’re looking at essay because I know with a rare metaphysical certitude that saying anything against dippers will bring down a force-two Internet Hailstorm of angry comments. And I’m willing to get into arguments online, don’t question that. It’s just I’m more inclined to put up with fights in which people insisting on one space after sentences try to get the rest of us to do it wrong. The dipper enthusiasts I don’t want to cross. For that matter, as much as I’ve riled up the constellation enthusiasts they’ve been willing to admit that I’m right about how we can’t see more than about six constellations anymore and I named all the big popular ones. I don’t want to get in trouble with their advocacy groups, Big Big Dipper and Big Little Dipper. Who would?

secret — removed from the phrase “my secret hope truckers appreciate how far ahead of them I get before moving back into their lane” as I can’t possibly call that secret now you’ve seen my explanation, can I?

Statistics Saturday: The Hardest Things To Understand In Old Movies

Also hard to get used to: how they said ‘Los Angeles’ with a hard g, the way Bugs Bunny did when he was affecting a manner or something.

Robert Benchley: Keep A Log

In my occasional travels I have not taken the advice of Robert Benchley in this piece from My Ten Years In A Quandary And How They Grew, but I should have. Also, while this whole essay is a buffet of funny meaningless syllables, the thing Benchley reports finding at Lurding — itself a great name — is one of my favorite nonsense phrases. Made-up funny words are difficult for the writer, and harder for the reader, but Benchley shows off his deft touch from East Mipford on.

Keep A Log

In planning that automobile trip upcountry this Summer don’t forget to consult those notes you made last year when going over the same route. They’re in that combination log-book and Japanese fan that you took along for just that purpose.

These notes, most of which were jotted down en route, seem to have been made with the wrong end of the pencil. They are part lead-markings and part wood-carvings. It would be fun to dig up that pencil today, just to take a look at it and see where the lead stopped and the wood began.

To make things harder you apparently made the notes while taking part in a hill-climbing contest, when the car was at an angle of forty-five degrees. They are the work of a man in rather desperate straits to keep himself in his seat, to say nothing of indulging in the luxury of writing. You couldn’t have been as drunk as that.

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The first one, jotted down with great difficulty, was made opposite the name of the town, East Mipford, fifteen miles from your starting place. It says, as nearly as you can make it out, simply “East Mipford.” This would seem rather silly. Presumably you already knew the name of the town, as it was right there in the map in plain letters. Why jot it down again in that round, boyish hand of yours? Possibly you were just practicing handwriting. God knows you needed practice!

Anyway, there is “East Mipford” and, opposite it, “East Mipford,” so East Mipford it is. It’s a good thing to know, at any rate.

The next bit of puzzle work was jabbed into the paper at Orkington. Here you saw fit to write “No sporfut.” Either this was meant as a warning that, at Orkington, one can get no “sporfut” or that it is dangerous to “sporfut” in or around, Orkington. If you had some clearer idea of what “sporfut” was you would know better how to regulate your passage through Orkington this year. The lack of “sporfut” last year must have been quite a trial to you, otherwise you wouldn’t have made a note of it. Well, better luck this time!

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At Animals’ Falls you had what was designated as “lunch,” which is pretty easy to figure out. After it, however is written “Gleever House—Central Hotel—Animals’ Falls Spa.” It must have been a pretty good “lunch” to have included all three restaurants, and, as you made no designation of which was best, the only thing to do is try them all again this time.

Perhaps you will remember, after ordering at the Gleever House, that it was the Central Hotel which was the best. Perhaps you meant that all three were rotten and that you should go on to the next town before eating. The only way to find out is to try.

From then on you are confronted by such notations as “fresh cob” at Turkville (which may mean “fresh cop” or good “fresh corn on the cob”), “Emily” at North Neswick (which may be where you left Emily off), and “steening chahl” at Lurding, which obviously means nothing. You arrived at your destination, according to the log, at “27 o’clock.”

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That is the value of a log-book. It makes the second trip seem so much more exciting.

Statistics Saturday: The Time It Takes To Travel

What consumes the most time in traveling.

Some Dangerous Kangaroos

1. The Western Middling Light Grey (not particularly dangerous in itself, but it smells so very much like a fried clam dish from that stall in the mall food court that nobody, nobody, has ever been seen eating from as to be distracting)
2. The Razor-Beaked Wallaby
3. Gorndrak, the Marsupial-Spirit of Unproductive Workdays
4. The Antilopine Gossiping Kangaroo (its passive-aggressiveness can drive people mad)
5. Red Kangaroos Driving Without Their Prescription Eyeglasses
6. Trinitrootoluene