Is he that dense? He must know that slide rules aren’t commonly used anymore.
Especially since “high visibility” yellow slide rules are definitely in the minority. (Yes, I have a slide rule collection, and a webpage for them. No, I’m not QUITE old enough to have used them in school.)
They’re so old that they don’t realize that use of ‘slide-rule yellow’ is diagnostic of oldness. Geezer-blindness-shaming.
My slide rule was white.
“He must know that slide rules aren’t commonly used anymore.”
But he also knows that not being commonly used doesn’t change what color something is.
“They’re so old […
They? There’s only one of him…
“Is he that dense? He must know that slide rules aren’t commonly used anymore.”
That is the joke. He’s not only old enough to have used a slide-rule. He’s so old he doesn’t know it makes him old.
…. Or maybe he doesn’t get why simply being old is supposed to be funny and worthy of scorn.
Why would the girl even know what a slide rule IS? And why is Trophy Wife laughing?
@ woozy: Didn’t you know? You can make fun of people for being old, fat, white, or male. Everything else is off limits.
If the cartoonist wants us to think that guy is much older than the dark-haired lady, and not her brother, he’s going to have to draw him looking older.
@ Treesong – “My slide rule was white” – I think that is precisely the joke: “sliderule yellow” means the color that a sliderule has aged to become, not the color it was when it was originally purchased.
P.S. I was exactly one year too young to be forced to learn slipstick mechanics in high school. The class ahead of me was subjected to a week of that in chemistry class; my class was required to purchase a programmable calculator. I bought a fairly good “Stirling” sliderule anyway. I still have it, but since I always kept it in a drawer, it never got enough sunlight to turn yellow.
I have my father’s slide rule, which is naturally yellow. I started taking it with me to tests in university after my calculator crapped out on me in a chemistry exam (I carefully charged it the night before, but it must have gotten switched on when I put it in its case). I never needed the thing, but professors and TAs would often come by and fiddle with it mid-test.
And I have a hard time imagining the guy in the comic is old enough to have a strong connection to slide rules. I’m 56 and never really learned, beyond some basic functions. Unless his daughter came along really late, he almost has to be the same age or younger than I am.
Good slide-rules were made of metal so they won’t fade or change color with age. They were often yellow because yellow was thought to be easier on the eyes than white.
I am more surprise that no one commented on the ugliness of a yellow couch.
The joke is that he doesn’t think of himself as old.
I guess I interpreted it a little differently than most. Sure the joke is “Old people! Ha ha!”, but Barney’s retort was more questioning why the girl finds it funny that someone is old rather than not realizing that he himself is old. I would probably respond the same way regardless of my age.
I just want to say that I own a yellow slide rule. But I am not a geezer. No, I’m not. (I’m not.)
I don’t even know what a slide rule is FOR, and I’m 70, graduated high school in 1967.
I don’t understand why someone would use “slide rule yellow” as a description. It doesn’t call any particular shade to mind to me, so it seems to fail as a description. But I guess the joke isn’t that, it’s the elderly nature of the guy. Or something.
@Andréa: How are you on history, biology or the French you took? (Is a Sam Cooke reference geezery or does cultural osmosis pull it out of the category?)
@Kevin: We had a yellow couch for a while. Probably not the best idea with 3 cats, 2 dogs, 2 teens and an elementary school kid, but they salesman claimed it was easy to clean. It was nice until it got really dirty. It was a little darker than a slide rule, though.
Andréa – you certainly don’t look it! While I don’t know what classes you took in high school, I am younger than you, but did use a slide rule in math and science in high school. The “Bowmar Brain” came out in the early 70s, but I would say the years 1974-1975 is when it was more commonplace to own a pocket calculator – led by the HP-35/45, the TI SR50 (my second), and others of their ilk. I don’t remember the name of my first calculator, but it only displayed 4 digits, and you would press a button to see 4 more.
I had a TI-30 and then a TI-55, but the one I coveted was a Casio model that did hexadecimal to decimal conversions, which the TI’s didn’t have. My daughter went through three calculators, because each year they added one thing that the math teachers decided was indispensible, even though a TI-84/85 seemed sufficient (and I already had one of those).
I had a TI-SR 51A my last couple of years of high school and first year of college. That was the one that crapped out on me in that chem test. Then I got an HP 41C that I still have floating around somewhere. It probably wouldn’t work if I could even find N batteries.
DemetriosX, that’s the one thing we all miss about Radio Shack: no matter how obscure the battery, they were certain to have it.
Of course I often wondered how they survived as long as they did, being the place people only went into to buy N batteries.
Do you have “Batteries and Bulbs”? Selling batteries is a full 50% of their business model.
What class/subject would a slide rule be used for?
Andréa: Any class where you need to do math. It’s basically a calculator.
Don’t know much about geography,
Don’t know much trigonometry
Don’t know much about algebra,
Don’t know what a slide rule is for
As soon as I saw @Andréa’s comment i wondered who would be the first to post those lyrics.
57 and a science major here and I never needed a slide rule in school. I ended up buying one just because they’re mentioned in Golden Age science fiction stories, but never used it.
Yep, I’ll bet that song was written about me (as opposed to ‘You’re So Vain’).
I knew exactly what color the couch was when I read the comic. I graduated high school in 1972 (the math is left as a problem for the reader). I had multiple slide rules for use in my science classes, most of them white plastic, one circular, and my pride and joy, a 12 inch metal Pickett, in yellow. I still have it in its real leather case. My moment of fame came after the Apollo 13 movie came out with all the engineers using the slide rules. The younger coworkers at our lunch table didn’t know how they worked, so I brought mine in and taught them how to use it.
But I consider myself at the end of the era. Junior year a friend bought the new TI SR-10 Slide Rule calculator with scientific notation and a square root button! for $169. I bought mine Senior year, when it dropped to $109. Why did the price drop? Because for Christmas 1971, Sears (yes, Sears) brought out a full scientific calculator with powers, sines, cosines – the works – for $169. And with that, the era of the slide rule was over.
@B.A.: I believe that the girl in the strip (Cynthia) is supposed to be pretty smart. So she could plausibly have read about slide rules and know that people used to use them before calculators became common, without having actually used or seen a slide rule in person.
If this –
– is the color of the couch . . . Martha Steward would NOT approve!
Stewart, I mean.
What bugs me about this is that “slide rule yellow” is not a standard color. So anyone who uses the phrase is being deliberately creative and is speaking to an audience in the hope the audience will recognize it and think it’s a creative description. (In this way it is like my mother who we describing the color of her 1972 Volvo station wagon said it wasn’t baby-shit yellow.) Such a person *knows* his audience and is speaking to people who share experience and reflections.
In other words the blogger *knows* he is old and *knows* his audience is old. Yet somehow 13 year old Cynthia assumes this is an unacceptable horrible offense by someone in ignorance.
Imagine someone came bursting in saying “I think this blog is written by a Minnesotan.” “Why?” “He talks about play Duck, Duck, Grey Duck” “ha, ha!” What’s your point?”
What *IS* her point? Old people should be ashamed of existing and it’s startling when is fails to hide it?
I was given a really fancy slide rule — in a nice, leather case — in 1968 (I can pin this down because it was the same day I saw a new film called 2001, and oddly enough there is a connection). I thought of it as outmoded technology by then, and only knew one person who actually knew how to use it.
“Batteries and Bulbs”? There’s actually a book about Radio Shack history? Is it more interesting than it sounds?
DemetriosX – he could be my age and his wife younger, hence his daughter’s age and I learned (and have forgotten how) to use a slide rule in high school.
I think of this reason as my sister had a party for my mom turning 90 this past weekend. One of my cousins (on dad’s side) was there with his third wife – and his daughter from his first wife and that daughter’s family her family. (Second wife Orthodox Jewish so their children were invited but it was not kosher and they did not come. Third wife had her children before him and they were not invited.) If his second wife had not had children before – he might have young children now. (Due to many more cousins on my dad’s side of the family plus multiple marriages of some of them and these cousins – cousins from the other side of their family being invited, other than my 2 sisters their combined 3 children, and our husbands, the only other relative from mom’s side of the family was one my one – never married cousin. Of the 4 tables 2 and a half of them were my dad’s family – and half of one table was Robert’s sister and family.
CIDU Bill – and my dad had several cards to get a free battery every month at Radio Shack.
Even more than Radio Shack I miss Lafayette. It was one of those exciting, mysterious places that dad would take me and would find stuff to fix stuff in the house and stuff that was just fun.
My slide rule was white – US army training issue that had come home with dad from WW2. It was also smaller in length than most and therefore not as accurate. I basically gave up and just did the calculations without it – faster and easier than using it. (Today, I have trouble figuring out how to add or how to calculate the half the weight of the macaroni I cooked to split it between us at dinner. When we were dating I impressed Robert by preparing his tax return without using any help for any of the calculations – that’s why I love him – I can impress him so easily. :-) )
I couldn’t reconcile the color “yellow” with a “metal” sliderule, but seeing the image Andréa posted, I see now that the solution would be “enamel” (and not “gold”).
@Joshua K.:
‘… know that people used to use them before calculators became common, without having actually used or seen a slide rule in person.” In fact all of us reading this know that the abacus and Roman numerals exist and that people knew how to use them before calculators and Arabic/Indian numerals. Probably some of us learned at least the basics of abacus operation at some point in our lives. We don’t associate a color with them unless we’re synesthetes, though.
@CIDUBill: “Batteries + Bulbs” is not a book; it’s a chain of retail stores. They sell batteries, dry and wet cells, and light bulbs, and pretty much nothing else.
You might be interested in the book I’m reading right now, ‘Third Wife’, by Linda Jewell. The man’s first two wives, all the children from his first two marriages, and his third wife (before she is killed) get together as one big happy family several times a year (birthdays, vacations, holidays). Not so far off from polygamy, if you ask me . . . isn’t this called ‘serial polygamy’? (Remembering who is who is difficult, for the reader, that is.)
Andréa –
One of my first cousins (the only one older than me) has been married 3 times. At my mom’s 90th birthday party a couple of weeks he and his current wife (#3) was there. His daughter from his first wife (and daughter’s husband and their child) were there. No one was there from wife #2 – I presume because they are Orthodox Jewish and would not eat there. Wife #3 and him do not have children together and her children from her first husband were not there. Not sure if any of the children not there were invited as my sister hosted the party. (3rd wife is widow.)
His sister was there with her two children, & their wives and children, from her first husband and current boyfriend/husband (not sure which).
Also there (now it gets complicated) was one of their first cousins on the other (their mom’s) side was there with her new boyfriend/husband (children not there).
I walked in and did not know who some of the “relatives” were!
I’m not that impressed, Meryl: at our housewarming party, my cousin’s husband stared at one of my wife’s co-workers for a moment and said “Didn’t you used to be my aunt?”
We never did figure out the logistics of that.
‘”Didn’t you used to be my aunt?” We never did figure out the logistics of that.’
An aunt could be the wife of a parent’s sibling. If that sibling divorces, the ex-wife is someone who used to be an aunt.
Well, don’t leave us hanging: did she used to be his aunt?
Yes, she’d been briefly married to his uncle many years earlier.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Is he that dense? He must know that slide rules aren’t commonly used anymore.
Especially since “high visibility” yellow slide rules are definitely in the minority. (Yes, I have a slide rule collection, and a webpage for them. No, I’m not QUITE old enough to have used them in school.)
They’re so old that they don’t realize that use of ‘slide-rule yellow’ is diagnostic of oldness. Geezer-blindness-shaming.
My slide rule was white.
“He must know that slide rules aren’t commonly used anymore.”
But he also knows that not being commonly used doesn’t change what color something is.
“They’re so old […
They? There’s only one of him…
“Is he that dense? He must know that slide rules aren’t commonly used anymore.”
That is the joke. He’s not only old enough to have used a slide-rule. He’s so old he doesn’t know it makes him old.
…. Or maybe he doesn’t get why simply being old is supposed to be funny and worthy of scorn.
Why would the girl even know what a slide rule IS? And why is Trophy Wife laughing?
@ woozy: Didn’t you know? You can make fun of people for being old, fat, white, or male. Everything else is off limits.
If the cartoonist wants us to think that guy is much older than the dark-haired lady, and not her brother, he’s going to have to draw him looking older.
@ Treesong – “My slide rule was white” – I think that is precisely the joke: “sliderule yellow” means the color that a sliderule has aged to become, not the color it was when it was originally purchased.
P.S. I was exactly one year too young to be forced to learn slipstick mechanics in high school. The class ahead of me was subjected to a week of that in chemistry class; my class was required to purchase a programmable calculator. I bought a fairly good “Stirling” sliderule anyway. I still have it, but since I always kept it in a drawer, it never got enough sunlight to turn yellow.
I have my father’s slide rule, which is naturally yellow. I started taking it with me to tests in university after my calculator crapped out on me in a chemistry exam (I carefully charged it the night before, but it must have gotten switched on when I put it in its case). I never needed the thing, but professors and TAs would often come by and fiddle with it mid-test.
And I have a hard time imagining the guy in the comic is old enough to have a strong connection to slide rules. I’m 56 and never really learned, beyond some basic functions. Unless his daughter came along really late, he almost has to be the same age or younger than I am.
Good slide-rules were made of metal so they won’t fade or change color with age. They were often yellow because yellow was thought to be easier on the eyes than white.
I am more surprise that no one commented on the ugliness of a yellow couch.
The joke is that he doesn’t think of himself as old.
I guess I interpreted it a little differently than most. Sure the joke is “Old people! Ha ha!”, but Barney’s retort was more questioning why the girl finds it funny that someone is old rather than not realizing that he himself is old. I would probably respond the same way regardless of my age.
I just want to say that I own a yellow slide rule. But I am not a geezer. No, I’m not. (I’m not.)
I don’t even know what a slide rule is FOR, and I’m 70, graduated high school in 1967.
I don’t understand why someone would use “slide rule yellow” as a description. It doesn’t call any particular shade to mind to me, so it seems to fail as a description. But I guess the joke isn’t that, it’s the elderly nature of the guy. Or something.
@Andréa: How are you on history, biology or the French you took? (Is a Sam Cooke reference geezery or does cultural osmosis pull it out of the category?)
@Kevin: We had a yellow couch for a while. Probably not the best idea with 3 cats, 2 dogs, 2 teens and an elementary school kid, but they salesman claimed it was easy to clean. It was nice until it got really dirty. It was a little darker than a slide rule, though.
Andréa – you certainly don’t look it! While I don’t know what classes you took in high school, I am younger than you, but did use a slide rule in math and science in high school. The “Bowmar Brain” came out in the early 70s, but I would say the years 1974-1975 is when it was more commonplace to own a pocket calculator – led by the HP-35/45, the TI SR50 (my second), and others of their ilk. I don’t remember the name of my first calculator, but it only displayed 4 digits, and you would press a button to see 4 more.
I had a TI-30 and then a TI-55, but the one I coveted was a Casio model that did hexadecimal to decimal conversions, which the TI’s didn’t have. My daughter went through three calculators, because each year they added one thing that the math teachers decided was indispensible, even though a TI-84/85 seemed sufficient (and I already had one of those).
I had a TI-SR 51A my last couple of years of high school and first year of college. That was the one that crapped out on me in that chem test. Then I got an HP 41C that I still have floating around somewhere. It probably wouldn’t work if I could even find N batteries.
DemetriosX, that’s the one thing we all miss about Radio Shack: no matter how obscure the battery, they were certain to have it.
Of course I often wondered how they survived as long as they did, being the place people only went into to buy N batteries.
CIDU Bill: They still survive: https://www.radioshack.com/apps/store-locator
Do you have “Batteries and Bulbs”? Selling batteries is a full 50% of their business model.
What class/subject would a slide rule be used for?
Andréa: Any class where you need to do math. It’s basically a calculator.
Don’t know much about geography,
Don’t know much trigonometry
Don’t know much about algebra,
Don’t know what a slide rule is for
As soon as I saw @Andréa’s comment i wondered who would be the first to post those lyrics.
57 and a science major here and I never needed a slide rule in school. I ended up buying one just because they’re mentioned in Golden Age science fiction stories, but never used it.
Yep, I’ll bet that song was written about me (as opposed to ‘You’re So Vain’).
I knew exactly what color the couch was when I read the comic. I graduated high school in 1972 (the math is left as a problem for the reader). I had multiple slide rules for use in my science classes, most of them white plastic, one circular, and my pride and joy, a 12 inch metal Pickett, in yellow. I still have it in its real leather case. My moment of fame came after the Apollo 13 movie came out with all the engineers using the slide rules. The younger coworkers at our lunch table didn’t know how they worked, so I brought mine in and taught them how to use it.
But I consider myself at the end of the era. Junior year a friend bought the new TI SR-10 Slide Rule calculator with scientific notation and a square root button! for $169. I bought mine Senior year, when it dropped to $109. Why did the price drop? Because for Christmas 1971, Sears (yes, Sears) brought out a full scientific calculator with powers, sines, cosines – the works – for $169. And with that, the era of the slide rule was over.
@B.A.: I believe that the girl in the strip (Cynthia) is supposed to be pretty smart. So she could plausibly have read about slide rules and know that people used to use them before calculators became common, without having actually used or seen a slide rule in person.
If this –
– is the color of the couch . . . Martha Steward would NOT approve!
Stewart, I mean.
What bugs me about this is that “slide rule yellow” is not a standard color. So anyone who uses the phrase is being deliberately creative and is speaking to an audience in the hope the audience will recognize it and think it’s a creative description. (In this way it is like my mother who we describing the color of her 1972 Volvo station wagon said it wasn’t baby-shit yellow.) Such a person *knows* his audience and is speaking to people who share experience and reflections.
In other words the blogger *knows* he is old and *knows* his audience is old. Yet somehow 13 year old Cynthia assumes this is an unacceptable horrible offense by someone in ignorance.
Imagine someone came bursting in saying “I think this blog is written by a Minnesotan.” “Why?” “He talks about play Duck, Duck, Grey Duck” “ha, ha!” What’s your point?”
What *IS* her point? Old people should be ashamed of existing and it’s startling when is fails to hide it?
I was given a really fancy slide rule — in a nice, leather case — in 1968 (I can pin this down because it was the same day I saw a new film called 2001, and oddly enough there is a connection). I thought of it as outmoded technology by then, and only knew one person who actually knew how to use it.
“Batteries and Bulbs”? There’s actually a book about Radio Shack history? Is it more interesting than it sounds?
DemetriosX – he could be my age and his wife younger, hence his daughter’s age and I learned (and have forgotten how) to use a slide rule in high school.
I think of this reason as my sister had a party for my mom turning 90 this past weekend. One of my cousins (on dad’s side) was there with his third wife – and his daughter from his first wife and that daughter’s family her family. (Second wife Orthodox Jewish so their children were invited but it was not kosher and they did not come. Third wife had her children before him and they were not invited.) If his second wife had not had children before – he might have young children now. (Due to many more cousins on my dad’s side of the family plus multiple marriages of some of them and these cousins – cousins from the other side of their family being invited, other than my 2 sisters their combined 3 children, and our husbands, the only other relative from mom’s side of the family was one my one – never married cousin. Of the 4 tables 2 and a half of them were my dad’s family – and half of one table was Robert’s sister and family.
CIDU Bill – and my dad had several cards to get a free battery every month at Radio Shack.
Even more than Radio Shack I miss Lafayette. It was one of those exciting, mysterious places that dad would take me and would find stuff to fix stuff in the house and stuff that was just fun.
My slide rule was white – US army training issue that had come home with dad from WW2. It was also smaller in length than most and therefore not as accurate. I basically gave up and just did the calculations without it – faster and easier than using it. (Today, I have trouble figuring out how to add or how to calculate the half the weight of the macaroni I cooked to split it between us at dinner. When we were dating I impressed Robert by preparing his tax return without using any help for any of the calculations – that’s why I love him – I can impress him so easily. :-) )
I couldn’t reconcile the color “yellow” with a “metal” sliderule, but seeing the image Andréa posted, I see now that the solution would be “enamel” (and not “gold”).
@Joshua K.:
‘… know that people used to use them before calculators became common, without having actually used or seen a slide rule in person.” In fact all of us reading this know that the abacus and Roman numerals exist and that people knew how to use them before calculators and Arabic/Indian numerals. Probably some of us learned at least the basics of abacus operation at some point in our lives. We don’t associate a color with them unless we’re synesthetes, though.
@CIDUBill: “Batteries + Bulbs” is not a book; it’s a chain of retail stores. They sell batteries, dry and wet cells, and light bulbs, and pretty much nothing else.
You might be interested in the book I’m reading right now, ‘Third Wife’, by Linda Jewell. The man’s first two wives, all the children from his first two marriages, and his third wife (before she is killed) get together as one big happy family several times a year (birthdays, vacations, holidays). Not so far off from polygamy, if you ask me . . . isn’t this called ‘serial polygamy’? (Remembering who is who is difficult, for the reader, that is.)
Andréa –
One of my first cousins (the only one older than me) has been married 3 times. At my mom’s 90th birthday party a couple of weeks he and his current wife (#3) was there. His daughter from his first wife (and daughter’s husband and their child) were there. No one was there from wife #2 – I presume because they are Orthodox Jewish and would not eat there. Wife #3 and him do not have children together and her children from her first husband were not there. Not sure if any of the children not there were invited as my sister hosted the party. (3rd wife is widow.)
His sister was there with her two children, & their wives and children, from her first husband and current boyfriend/husband (not sure which).
Also there (now it gets complicated) was one of their first cousins on the other (their mom’s) side was there with her new boyfriend/husband (children not there).
I walked in and did not know who some of the “relatives” were!
I’m not that impressed, Meryl: at our housewarming party, my cousin’s husband stared at one of my wife’s co-workers for a moment and said “Didn’t you used to be my aunt?”
We never did figure out the logistics of that.
‘”Didn’t you used to be my aunt?” We never did figure out the logistics of that.’
An aunt could be the wife of a parent’s sibling. If that sibling divorces, the ex-wife is someone who used to be an aunt.
Well, don’t leave us hanging: did she used to be his aunt?
Yes, she’d been briefly married to his uncle many years earlier.
[Keanu]Whoa…[/Keanu]
CIDUBill – :-)