5 Things That Are Better Than They Used to Be

People Are Pointing Out Things That Were Great Back In The Day But Suck Now. That’s the headline at buzzfeed.com. A list that includes Buzz Feed itself, according to a curmudgeonly commentator. Be that as it is…

Buzz Feed’s Reddit-trolling survey laments the degradation of politics, cartoons, concert prices, magazines, makeup, country music, driving, fast food, streaming, the news, theme parks, courtesy, the Disney Channel and social media.

Now get off my lawn!

Wait! Before you go! Check out my list of Things That Are Great Now That Used to Suck.

Underwear

Back in the day, all boys wore “tighty whities.” Introduced in 1934 by Coopers (renamed Jockey), mass-produced by Fruit of the Loom (as opposed to Fruit of the Womb), Hanes and Jockey, early TW’s were the bane of boys’ balls by the billions.

More constrictive than a python, less flattering than an abusive parent, visible under anything thinner than blue jeans, made of material designed to withstand infinite cycles in a prison washing machine, crafted to crawl up your ass crack (so Mom could see your sh*t stains), the underwear made a mockery of the [yet-to-be-born] term “white privilege.”

The transition from boys to men (not Boyz II Men) begat boxers.

Thank you Jacob Golomb, founder of the boxing equipment company Everlast. Introduced in 1925, Jake's boxers did, in fact, last forever (the underwear not the pugilists). When Uncle Sam sent 2m American soldiers “over there," they wore boxers, mainstreaming modified bloomers.

Boxers are only slightly sexier than Mormon Temple Garments, as prone to bunching as Germans at a beer hall and as jeans-compatible as a small sail.

On the positive side, a 2018 CNN study found that men who wear looser-fit boxer shorts have higher sperm concentration than men who wear tight underwear. On the downside, free-swinging boxer-borne dicks are more prone to injury.

Modern men’s modern underwear solves all these issues, and more.

Fashioned from barely-there high-tech stretch-to-fit fabrics – chosen, blended and assembled for cooling, moisture-wicking, durability, support, odor suppression and style – today's underwear is the bomb for balls of all ages, types and descriptions.

Jockey, Fruit of the Loom and Hanes have joined Tommy John Et. al in this under-acknowledged underwear revolution - the most precious gift to mankind since the pill.

[NB: Tighty whities – albeit in more modern fabrics and various cuts – account for 51 percent of the men's underwear market. Go figure.]

Cars

It’s hard for anyone who wasn’t born before 1970 to understand – make that imagine how terrible cars were during what’s called “The Malaise Era.”

Automobiles from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s were unreliable, ill-handling, uncomfortable and deadly. Unsafe at any speed (as it were). And that’s just their good points.

My first car, a Ford Pinto Station Wagon, was famous for blowing up upon rear impact, killing occupants in a ball of fire. When 60 Minutes exposed the fireball effect, no one who owned a Pinto was surprised.

If you think other cars of that era were better, you’re only right in terms of low-impact immolation.

With the exception of some Italian and English cars – most often viewed waiting for a tow truck by the side of the road or in a repair bay – Malaise Era automobiles were so ugly onlookers turned to stone.

Today’s cars aren't in the same universe. A present-day automobile that can’t last a hundred thousand miles is an also-ran (Saab owners used to take pictures of the odometer if their car made it to 100k).

A bog standard Toyota is safer, handles better and offers more creature comforts than anything of the pre-90’s era. Rolls Royce included.

Taxis

Before Uber lyfted Americans from under the jackboot of licensed taxi monopolies, cabs were a dirty business – both literally and financially.

You either booked a taxi by ‘phone and prayed it would show up, or tried to hail a taxi on the street, competing for dibs with anyone else who also wanted a cab.

In both cases, failure was an option. Often, the most probable one. Especially in bad weather.

Taxi drivers were uncouth, rude and dangerous, one way or another. (Seat belts? We don’t need no stinking seat belts!)

Cabs were an olfactory outrage; a scintillating blend of ammonia and stale cigarette smoke. If you thought escalator handrails are the world's dirtiest everyday item, you were right. Taxi seats ran a close second.

In big cities, cabbies were [rightly] known for refusing rides for racial, financial and/or personal reasons and taking customers for a magical mystery tour to run-up the meter.

A "taxi" app that confirms your ride, tells you how much it will cost and when it will arrive, conveys you in a clean car with a polite driver who doesn't demand a tip? What's not to love?

Don't ask the cabbies still operating in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, LA and DC thanks to government corruption. I mean, regulation.

Writing

I’m old enough to remember typewriters: mechanical beasts with levers that whacked the paper with inked characters via a keyboard designed to slow the collision long enough for the levers to get out of their own way.

While word processors used the same intentionally inefficient QWERTY keyboard, they totally upgraded the writing process, enabling editing before the creators’ output hit printed paper.

Crazy right? The only problem: the mothetruckers were prone to “crashing.”

An appropriately violent term. A WP crash would completely and irretrievably eliminate any and all work up to the unexpected, unwelcome moment of failure. Oh how I screamed. And screamed and screamed.

Today’s cloud-protected document files require zero floppy disks (as far as I know) and never go away (until an EMP pulse).

More than that, "word processing" offers writers copy and paste! Without which there wouldn’t be any Ivy League plagiarist professors and administrators to excoriate.

And without spell check, people would know how to spell excoriate. And which "there" belongs in "their" text.

And now we have AI to do the actual writing and plagiarize and check the spelling! So we’ve finally figured out how not to write at all.

Let me get back to you on this one…

Good-Looking Women

I remember when Big Hair ruled the roost (something to do with small birds needing a home). When smoking was dieting and grapefruit dieting was smoking hot.

Women were physically unhealthy specimens prone to parading in platform shoes, Hillary-esque jumpsuits and real fur (in all sorts of places).

Thanks to better diet and exercise and the unrelenting pressure to be as attractive as a photoshopped influencer or AI model (as above), today's women are far more comely than they were in the olden days, in terms of hair, makeup, clothing (or lack thereof) and, above all, fitness.

I meant to say women are more attractive today because of the great strides they’ve made in political and economic equality, and their triumphs in the never-ending fight against masculinity. Sorry. Toxic masculinity. Very different. Apparently.

The superiority of today’s strong, sexy sirens over Ye Olde Aerobics-fettled females is inescapably apparent. Although PornHub is banned in Texas. As it should be!

Truth Be Told

Men (sans tighty-whities) and women (sang froid) are better off now than they were back in the day.

Yes, some things have got worse. But we should not lose sight of how far we’ve come. If nothing else, we should be grateful that wedgies are no longer potentially fatal. Just sayin’.