CIDU Bill always claimed that he named the “Arlo Award” concept after Arlo Guthrie, and there is still a statement to that effect in the CIDU FAQ. Anyone who has followed CIDU for a while will have realized that this was just a polite cover story, as the strip above clearly shows.
Comics I Don't Understand 
This is appropriately tagged Arlo, but it’s really kinda sweet!
One of the things I really like about Arlo and Janis is that they are a comic-strip married couple who have genuine affection for each other. I look at others (Blondie, Hi and Lois, Dennis the Menace, etc) and it seems they stay together either out of inertia, or for the kids. Take away the kids from most of them and I can’t see those couples tolerating each other for long.
Arlo and Janis, on the other hand….
I like Janis’ hair better long.
Kilby, aren’t ‘retro’ and ‘vintage’ the same thing?
I’ve been reading CIDU for a long time (anyone remember “while you’re waiting for the download”?). I don’t ever remember anything about Arlo Guthrie except a certain yearly recurring video around Thanksgiving time. The Arlo award has always been a reference to Arlo and Janis, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons.
@Chak: No. Retro is fake old; vintage is real old. Brad Pitt at the start of Benjamin Button is retro; I’m vintage.
“Vintage” implies some kind of standard of age. For a wine, it is merely the year in which the grapes were harvested. Many inexpensive wines don’t indicate the year, so they can’t demonstrate that they are “vintage”, but a 2022 Chateau LePew is just as vintage as an 1850 Chateau LePew. Many good wines get better with age, so you want to know the vintage; also the grapes some years are better than others.
Car enthusiasts have a strict definition: A “vintage car” is from 1919 to 1930. If it was made before 1919, it is a “veteran car”.
I’ve never heard “vintage” applied to Stradivarius violins or Steinway pianos. Any violin made by Antonio Stradivari is going to be more than 280 years old anyway. Pianos wear out and get rebuilt and wear out again and get rebuilt again. They may or may not be improved with each rebuilding. It’s a matter of opinion whether a particular Steinway made in 1890 is better than one made in 2020.
There are some people who build pianos that are similar to the ones Mozart played. I suppose you could say they are “retro” but I’ve never heard them called that.
@ Chak (3) – Luckily I refreshed the page before commenting; I was about to write something about the same as Phil @5, just not as funny. I guess he’s more vintage than I am.
I can confirm that Bill long maintained a tongue-in-cheek cover story that the “Arlo Award” (and the Arlo Page) was named for Arlo Guthrie and not this comic strip. Check it out in Bill’s own words here: https://arlopage.wordpress.com/
Even older example from 2007 here: “I probably would have called it the NSFW Page if that term had been in common use years ago, rather than naming the page after… um… Arlo Guthrie.” https://cidutest.wordpress.com/arlo-doggie-style/
phsiii, Thanks, that makes more sense.
Did Bill ever say why he named it for Arlo Guthrie? I don’t recall associating AG with anything risqué.
(signed) Vintage Ed
I always assumed it was a Little White Lie, so as to not directly implicate JJ/Arlo & Janis. That AG was just the most famous Arlo and named for plausible deniability.
Swimming Man Burning – One can still the movie “Alice’s Restaurant” taken from Arlo’s song if one searches for it online. Last year husband instituted a “Friday Night midnight movies night on TV”. (When we were first dating we went to Friday night midnight movies at the local art cinema after working at our retail jobs that night.) The first one of these he had last year was, of course,
“The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, but the day after Thanksgiving it was “Alice’s Restaurant”, which I expected him to run again this past Thanksgiving weekend, but he had not thought to do so. It is based on an actual event which happened to Arlo.
He had bought a deconstructed church upstate NY during the late 1960s. His idea was to have a place for young people who were addicted to drugs (or who were trying not to take drugs) to have a place to go to become clean of drugs. The song and movie are supposed to be based on an event which happened there on Thanksgiving the first year they were set up there. It is still being run as a place to help people who are addicted to drugs.
Arlo is online and has a good size following – including my husband. We saw him perform decades ago at a local bar/theater and we both have the same memory (which makes no sense to either of us and we have trouble believing) that after performing when someone else was on stage he came over and sat with us – and was just as nice.
He is online and has a rather large following. His dad was a major country movie performer (and his mom was a Brooklyn, NY Jewish woman. He and one of his sisters who shares him mother have even been the (whatever the correct term is – Robert is pushing me to go up to sleep) celebrities in one of the Rockaway Mermaid parades in recent years. He works rather a lot with charities and other “good causes”.
The legendary Woody Guthrie might be considered a country music performer but I think the designation more often used is folk. And of course songwriter along with performer.
Or maybe “all that and more”