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  1. Inkstainedwretch

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    Sulphur 8 medicated shampoo no longer contains sulphur.
  2. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Coin operated scales. They used to be everywhere and some would tell your fortune as well. They were in every drugstore, five-and-dime, penny arcade (another vanished thing) and sometimes just out on the sidewalk. Haven't seen one in ages.
  3. Inkstainedwretch

    The Decaying Evolution of Education...

    This is especially true of recent history. When I look at current history textbooks I'm disheartened that events that were deemed crucially important when I was in school, such as the World Wars and the Depression, are given short shrift while things that were everyday matters to me, like the...
  4. Inkstainedwretch

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    Complain as you will, you can't say this election hasn't been fun. It's getting scary now as The Day approaches, but I haven't experienced as entertaining an election year as this one in my life.
  5. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    I just stopped by my local post office and it occurred to me that they no longer feature the FBI wanted posters that I always found so fascinating as a boy. I don't think I've seen them since the '80s. I loved to flip through them and see what people were wanted for. I was usually disappointed...
  7. Inkstainedwretch

    What happened to small towns?

    True diners were among the first prefab, purpose-built buildings. They were manufactured (the first in Worcester, MA) and trucked or towed to their destination. In the '30s they began to be styled like railroad cars, usually sheathed in stainless steel. Many people assumed that they were...
  8. Inkstainedwretch

    1940's England

    The obscure film "Merry Andrew," (1958) features Danny Kaye as an English boy's school teacher bicycling around the Sussex countryside in search of a buried Roman statue. I think it meets all your requirements.
  9. Inkstainedwretch

    What happened to small towns?

    Up until the late days of the 19th century vast amounts of timber were used in the shipbuilding industry. Prior to the switch to coal for power, charcoal was used. It was said that you had to burn half a forest to turn the other half into charcoal. As settlement moved west, the charcoal burners...
  10. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    "Frigidaire" is now a brand name owned by Eletrolux that Americans began to use as a generic, the way "Hoover"means vacuum cleaner in the UK and "Kodak" means a camera in Germany. I remember people using the term "refrigidaire" for refrigerator. There is a long history of brand names that...
  11. Inkstainedwretch

    What happened to small towns?

    In the pre-industrial era towns had to follow the natural contour of the land. You can always tell a town that was laid out before dynamite and the bulldozer were invented. Socioeconomically, the town where I was born in Ohio (the family moved there from Texas right after WWII) the situation...
  13. Inkstainedwretch

    What happened to small towns?

    Many older American towns went through three stages of growth: river, railroad, highway. Most towns, small and large, were situated on some sort of river. River traffic dominated the early 19th century, and the big river valleys developed a whole river culture. Read Mark Twain for this. Old Town...
  14. Inkstainedwretch

    Hoboes, homeless and such during WW2?

    In my travels through the British Isles I've always been touched by the war monuments and market crosses that stand at the center of every little town, listing the dead of WWI and WWII. In a little town of a few thousand souls, the list of 1939-45 will have several dozen names, a heavy enough...
  15. Inkstainedwretch

    What happened to small towns?

    My ancestral hometown, at least on my mother's side, was a very small south Texas town midway between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Like so many Texas towns that sprang up in the 1880s-90s it was at a railroad junction. The tracks defined the two parts of town. One side was Anglo, the other...
  16. Inkstainedwretch

    You know you are getting old when:

    A few months ago I attended my class's 50th year reunion. Mine was one of the first big Baby Boom classes, with 640+ kids, in a school built just five years earlier that was already bursting at the seams with two new high schools being built. It was a small Texas town just north of Dallas that...
  17. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    Does anyone still say, "Tell it to the Marines?" I never could figure that one out. What do the Marines have to do with anything? Yet at one time it was a common way to dismiss an unlikely story or excuse.
  19. Inkstainedwretch

    Science Fiction Genre - Religion vs Scientific Origins, and the Nature of Self Destruction

    Science fiction and baseball. They go together like a horse and carriage.
  20. Inkstainedwretch

    You know you are getting old when:

    In many small towns the first radio in town was at the general store. Storekeepers bought them to lure in customers. I've talked to a number of old people who said the first time they heard radio was when everybody in town crowded into the general store to listen to the Dempsey-Tunney fight. I...
  21. Inkstainedwretch

    Hoboes, homeless and such during WW2?

    In medieval Europe there was a class of people called "sturdy beggars." These were people with no visible disabilities who begged rather than working. They were commonly expelled from towns or put in forced labor. If a town was besieged the sturdy beggars and other undesirables were expelled en...
  22. Inkstainedwretch

    Science Fiction Genre - Religion vs Scientific Origins, and the Nature of Self Destruction

    Probably his most famous novel was "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and that's a good place to start. It was the source material for "Blade Runner"and the whole thing was about the nature of humanity and identity, that you could be a replicant and not know it yourself. Another is a short...
  23. Inkstainedwretch

    Science Fiction Genre - Religion vs Scientific Origins, and the Nature of Self Destruction

    HH, those questions compose almost the entire body of Philip K. Dick's work.

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