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Andy Rooney’s eyebrows sponsored by Sunsetter Retractable Awnings…

I committed a terrible sin this past weekend.

No, I didn’t cheat on my girlfriend with a high-priced hooker. It was way worse than that.

It was a few minutes before the hour and for some insane reason I decided to watch the tail end of 60 Minutes.

Which, of course, meant I had tuned in just in time to hear Andy Rooney be confused about something that had happened after the invention of the light bulb.

For as long as I can remember, Andy Rooney has been befuddled by about 98.7 percent of what goes on in the world on a daily basis.

Maybe it’s my own fear of aging, but I have a negative visceral reaction when old people start talking about the “good old days.” In fact, I have standing instructions to my friends that if they ever hear me waxing nostalgic about the good old days, they’re supposed to taser me.

Actually, they’re also supposed to taser me if I ever use the phrase “waxing nostalgic.”

You know what? The good old days were disgusting.

Back in the good old pre-industrial days there was universal health care. You had a choice of bloodletting or an enema. Or you bit down on a leather strap while they sawed your finger off.

All of a sudden your lousy HMO with a $70 co-pay doesn’t look that bad, does it?

In the more recent good old days, if you wanted to carry 250 songs around you needed to have three friends. You and two of the friends would carry the turntable, receiver and speakers while the third friend got to haul the plastic milk carton full of albums, the headphones and the pot.

But perhaps the most revolting thing about our shared, not-so-distant past was the handkerchief.

I guess if you wanted to blow your nose, dab sweat off your brow or buff a speck of dirt off your roadster, it was kind of handy. But the problem with a multi-purpose reusable rag is the second, third or fiftieth use.

You might blow your nose with it, but that meant when you went to wipe off your car you’d be buffing it up with a nice, high-gloss, flu-snot shine. And you know how chicks dig mucous.

That was only slightly preferable to the reverse case where you used your handkerchief to clean bird crap off your car and then used it again later to wipe the spaghetti sauce off your lips at lunchtime.

There really is no good reason to walk around all day with a cotton petri dish in your pocket.

On those rare occasions when you found yourself in the middle of a war or a Three Stooges gunfight, you could use your handkerchief as a signal that you were giving up. Waving a white handkerchief was the international symbol for “I surrender … to your superior personal hygiene.”

In many cases, the handkerchief was a primitive source of gay-dar in a time when such things weren’t as socially acceptable as they are now in states other than Oklahoma.

Basically, if you carried a handkerchief in your pants pocket everyone knew you were heterosexual. If, like Liberace, you pulled it out of the sleeve of your sequined jacket, then everyone knew you were gay.

Except maybe my mom who would think you were just “wonderfully charismatic” and had a “delightful stage presence.”

So, I don’t miss the good old days. I don’t even miss last week — because three minutes of Andy Rooney is enough to last me for the next 10 years.