People picture the most-ballyhooed developments as representing "the 60s." Hippies, communes and drug culture were restricted to a tiny minority but the publications of the time would have you thinking they were taking over the culture. The Pill, on the other hand, wrought vast changes...
Not exactly a "thing" that has disappeared, but it occurred to me today that it's been years since I heard a car backfire. I guess cars burn fuel more efficiently these days, but it was once a common sound.
It's always a disorienting moment when people who establish their reputations as rebels against the establishment are honored by the establishment. As one of the old rockers who hit it big said, "It's hard to stay a rebel when you're pulling in seven figures."
In Texas when I lived there as a boy, many houses had a "screen porch." This was exactly what it sounds like, a roofed porch surrounded by window screening. Few homes had AC, and we slept on the screen porch on warm summer nights. There is no better sleeping than on a screen porch when it's raining.
The defining thing about FDR was not that he died when he did, but rather that, like many another immensely powerful and vain man, he thought he would never die. No matter how sick he was he wouldn't admit that he was mortal. He should have acknowledged that each breath might well be his last...
Another funny movie is "The Road to Wellville" (1994), about the Kellogg - Post cereal wars of the early 20th century. It includes one of the hysteria doctors, who at one point simultaneously treats Bridget Fonda and Camryn Manheim (he has two hands, after all) while Colm Meany, another doctor...
I've lost touch with GI slang. Do they even still call themselves GIs? We still did in the 60s. Do they still eat chow (dates from the Boxer Rebellion)? Is the First Sergeant still the Topkick or First Shirt? Is the CO still the Old Man? I won't even say what we called the old fore-and-aft...
I was at a science fiction convention in San Francisco some years ago. The women's shop Good Vibrations had a large, and I mean LARGE display of vintage vibrators, some of them dating to the turn of the last century. It was, it seems, among the first appliances devised with the arrival of...
Heh. That reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson as Major Marquis Warren in "The Hateful 8." He was in "Wellenbeck Prisoner of War Camp, West Virginia." It was a Rebel camp. Pretty good trick, considering West Virginia was a Union state. I don't know if this was supposed to be an alternate time...
"Timeless," pilot episode. An update on the 1966-67 series "The Time Tunnel," A woman history professor is dragooned by the government into using a rickety time machine to chase a better time machine that some terrorists have hijacked to, for some reason, keep the Hindenburg from crashing. I did...
Corn is naturally sweet and when fresh has a high sugar content. This quickly turns to starch so the best corn is right off the stalk. I've been places where, when the corn is ready for picking, they got the water boiling before picking the corn, then they (usually the kids) ran to the kitchen...
Sometimes the Boys hit a homer. A few decades back, fruit merchants experimentally imported a fuzzy little Asian fruit that looked odd but tasted good. It was the Chinese Gooseberry and they couldn't give them away. Americans weren't about to eat something that looked and sounded so funny...
Where the Beatles excelled at songwriting was in writing songs that nearly everyone could sing. Sinatra and Dean Martin and Perry Como and everyone with a recording contract in those days all sang "Yesterday." You'd hear the Mantovani Strings version playing in every elevator in America. Most...
The difference between the Beatles and the Stones is that the Stones were primarily performers while the Beatles were primarily songwriters. How many people and bands have covered "Satisfaction"? (Jagger and Richardson) How many have covered "Yesterday"? (Lennon and McCartney) or "Something in...
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