Monday, November 27, 2017

Robert Lee Haycock shoots

A DAY LATE A DOLLAR SHORT

1 comment:

  1. J. R. Williams published a syndicated one-panel cartoon on 3 March 1939. It was part of his "Out Our Way," which began in 1922 and had a readership of 40 million by 1930, when a newspaper promotion compared him to popular poets Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley; at its peak it ran in over 700 newspapers. The panel showed two blue-collar workers listening to an inventor describe his labor-free pick; one says to the other, "No, he’s in the same fix as th’ rest of us. It’s called progress. I just learn about half the traffic rules an’ they change ’em. You can’t beat progress. You’ll always be a day late an’ a dollar short." Since then the idiom has been ubiquitous, for example in the Tom Waits song, :Nighthawk Postcards":

    There's a blur drizzle down the plate glass
    As a neon swizzle stick stirrin' up the sultry night air
    And a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon
    Rollin' maverick across an obsidian sky
    As the busses go groanin' and wheezin'
    Down on the corner I'm freezin'
    On a restless boulevard at a midnight road
    I'm across town from easy street

    With the tight knots of moviegoers and out of towners
    On the stroll
    And the buildings towering high above
    Lit like dominoes or black dice
    All the used car salesmen dressed up in
    Purina Checkerboard slacks
    And Foster Grant wrap-around,
    Pacing in front of Earl Schlieb
    $39.95 merchandise

    Like barkers at a shootin' gallery
    They throw out kind of a Texas Guinan routine
    "Hello sucker, we like your money
    Just as well as anybody else's here"
    Or they give you the P.T. Barnum bit
    "There's a sucker born every minute
    You just happened to be comin' along at the right time"
    Come over here now

    You know, all the harlequin sailors are on the stroll
    In a search of "Like new," "new paint,"
    Decent factory air and am-fm dreams
    And the piss yellow gypsy cabs
    Stacked up in the taxi zones waitin' like
    Pinball machines
    To be ticking off a joy ride to a magical place

    Waitin' in line like "truckers welcome" diners
    With dirt lots full of
    Peterbilts, Kenworths, Jimmy's and the like, and
    They're highballing' with bankrupt brakes, over driven
    Under paid, over fed, a day late and a dollar short
    But Christ I got my lips around a bottle and
    My foot on the throttle and I'm standin' on the corner
    Standin' on the corner like a "just in town"
    Jasper, on a street corner with a gasper loo

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