Dear Gramps: I was at some dive bar last weekend in Venice, and completely fell in love with this mystery girl, but lost her number the next morning and really want to find her. What should I do?

Signed, Bummed in Van Nuys

Oh, now I’ve had enough, ya cheap simp! You youngins don’t know what it’s like to get stuck on a genuine smudger gal like I do. I was jiggered and juiced in a bar in Seoul during the great Korean War back when you were still a nightmare in your crummy grandparent’s visions of the future.

I was quite the sharp-looking jay-bird back then, a real cellar smelling serviceman who just loved that giggle water, so when some real nifty looking local kneeduster strolled in, I thought the night would end with me neckin’ the grummy outta that ole’ holaholy! Spent the whole eve barneymugging, giving her the absent treatment and flopping her around on the dance floor like a real button shiner.

Turns out, the dame was just an oilcan using her cherry smashes to got the scoop on my unit’s movements. Next day, the gang and I got firebombed by a platoon of Koreans screaming at us. That buttoned boofer cost me the use of my lucky eyebrow.

So pipe down, junior! You could have it worse. I’ve been looking for a declaration of independence from good ole” Mrs. Gramps here since Kennedy got shot, so we can’t all get what we want when it comes to the high hatty hotsy-totsies. The bank’s closed on that one, weakling.

Dear Gramps: I’m going to be graduating in May and I’m starting to freak out about not being able to find a job. I need some life advice, and fast.

Signed, Nervous and Scared CTVA major in Northridge

You don’t even know what hard work is, junior. When I was your age, I was working at a brewery in Milwaukee, hauling barrels of hooch and moonshine up and down three flights of stairs all day, every day, six days a week, 64 weeks a year. Yeah, you heard me!

Didn’t even think of thinking about the future like kids these days do. Punching the bag about work when they don’t even know what taking an ankle excursion with 150 pounds of gin mill supply on your back across an unheated factory floor feels like. Bah!

Words of advice, slim: get yourself a real job before you start talking to me about hard work, or I might just tie you up to the back of my lawnmower and drag you around the neighborhood to show you what it feels like to really sweat.

In other words, ya slimy dewdropper, go get a real job! Studying how to write and direct motion pictures for all the pathetic film-going low-lives to see? You call that a real job? And how can you even call what’s in the talkie houses these days “movies?” When I was a kid, nobody talked in the movies. Little black screen came up and told us what the samhill the characters were saying. Not like today’s pictures, which are just full of pretty ladies taking off their garters for two hours. There ain’t never a train robbery or a pistol duel or anything even remotely entertaining. Just a bunch of a crazy young folks dressed up like fools talking on their cell phones.

All right, that’s all for now, ya cheap umbrella. Talk at ya next week.