AMONG THE ASTORS

Dave Astor, who, you’ll doubtless recall, was laid off at Editor & Publisher after a professional lifetime of writing and editing for journalism’s trade magazine — a lot of that time covering news of comic strips and editorial cartooning — went home and started polishing an idea for a syndicated humor column like the one he’d been doing for the local paper for some years. He hasn’t found a syndicate deal yet, but his column now appears at HuffingtonPost.com; search under “Dave Astor.” Here’s an excerpt from a recent one:

So when an underpaid cashier looks up from my credit card and asks if I'm one of those Astors, I can honestly say no. I'm not a loathsome, materialistic hedge-fund bozo who tells his mistress "we'll always have Paris" as the bozo's financial victims say of him that "we'll always have parasite." I drive a five-year-old compact car, trim my weed-filled lawn with a manual push mower, and watch a small TV that has an antenna. (Yes, I'll switch my set from analog to dialog when I poke the corner of a $40 plastic converter coupon into my remote's stuck mute button.)

Maybe I should have taken my wife's last name when we married. She has a very nice last name (Cummins) that doesn't sound elitist -- though she and many of her family members are accomplished people. Actually, I did try to take her seven-letter last name, but it had dwindled to two letters after a bank bundled it with other last names and invested them in tricycles retrofitted with jet engines. (Corporations endanger our children's future in so many ways....) The bank got a $15-billion bailout last Christmas, but spent the federal money on three $5-billion fruitcakes.

I do go by "Dave" rather than "David" to slightly soften the aristocratic sound of my last name. But that's like being locked in a bank vault and trying to escape with a chisel made of cotton.

Remember the Titanic scene in which "Unsinkable" Molly Brown shouted "Hey, Astor!" to that John Jacob fellow? When I heard that back in 1997, I sank embarrassedly into my movie-theater seat. Twelve years later, I cringe even more at the recollection of actress Kathy Bates calling out such a highfalutin name. That's because the rotten economy has left me with less money to compensate for having a Gilded Age second name as the second Gilded Age ends.