So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[HudsonHawk]

That said, I'm not arguing a point at all - every house and its computer usage / set up is different - whatever works for you makes sense to me.

Not arguing a point at all...just an anecdote from my house.

I would suspect the NYC yellow pages are quite voluminous as well...do you have smaller "local" versions for your neighborhoods and such?

 

[HudsonHawk]

Sears and Monkey-Ward catalogs are among the most valuable windows that exist into how ordinary people actually lived for most of the 20th Century. You can get a very close picture of what any part of that century was like just from a close reading of a sampling of those catalogs, and when you'll do so you'll find some things that will surprise you. For example, you could buy birth control products and vibrators in the Sears Catalog in the 1930s. What, you mean your grandma didn't tell you about that?

I recently did a DNA test...there's apparently quite a bit my grandmother didn't tell me about.

 

[Fading Fast]

Not arguing a point at all...just an anecdote from my house.

I would suspect the NYC yellow pages are quite voluminous as well...do you have smaller "local" versions for your neighborhoods and such?

No exaggeration, I haven't seen one delivered in over ten years. NYC has five boroughs and, I think, I remember a Manhattan one (which implies each borough had one) - but embarrassingly, my memory is just not clear on this one. Part of that is - to your point about overwhelming size - I did buy (and some where free) neighborhood-specific guides - restaurants, services in specific neighborhoods - back in the pre-internet days that I remember using more than the phone book itself.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Sears and Monkey-Ward catalogs are among the most valuable windows that exist into how ordinary people actually lived for most of the 20th Century. You can get a very close picture of what any part of that century was like just from a close reading of a sampling of those catalogs, and when you'll do so you'll find some things that will surprise you. For example, you could buy birth control products and vibrators in the Sears Catalog in the 1930s. What, you mean your grandma didn't tell you about that?

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 commercial electricity. There were also "doctors" who set up practice to treat "hysteria" by "manipulation of the womb." Three guesses what that entailed.

 

[Stearmen]

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 commercial electricity. There were also "doctors" who set up practice to treat "hysteria" by "manipulation of the womb." Three guesses what that entailed.

There is a funny movie entitled Hysteria (2011)

 

[EngProf]

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 commercial electricity. There were also "doctors" who set up practice to treat "hysteria" by "manipulation of the womb." Three guesses what that entailed.

I bought one of those early vibrator versions at a flea market. It was powered by 110V AC, which still scares me concerning where that much voltage was applied. (I'm male, so using it myself was not an issue. The idea of *anyone* using it was scary.)

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

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, observes and whacks off. This movie is, shall we say, one of a kind.

 

[Fading Fast]

How sites try to trick you into clicking on ads:

• Having the text shift up and down (sometimes rapidly and multiple times when you first get to a site) so that when you go to click on a link or the next page or something, instead, you click on an ad.
• Generally making it confusing enough so that you think you are clicking a legitimate link or the next page in a story, but instead, you click on an ad.
• And a new one, now that a lot of sites have gotten us used to using "continue to the site" as a way to bypass an ad, some (the NYT just started doing this nonsense) now put a "continue" link that looks like the old link at the bottom of the ad, but when clicked, takes you to the ad.

Internet advertising will work or not / will generate enough click throughs or not, but tricking people to click through seems like a bad strategy as those people will click off the advertiser's site in seconds most of the time (and that can be measures) and they develop an antipathy toward the original site and the advertiser - that can't be the goal.

Once again I'll argue, treating people like fools to be duped is a bad business model that explains why so many businesses are held in such low esteem by the public.

 

[ChrisB]

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, observes and whacks off. This movie is, shall we say, one of a kind.

That was Dr Spitzvogel, practitioner of the "Handhabung Therapeutik". The treatments portrayed in The Road to Wellville, bizzare as they may seem, we're not fiction and were in vogue in the early 1900s.

 

[tonyb]

That was Dr Spitzvogel, practitioner of the "Handhabung Therapeutik". The treatments portrayed in The Road to Wellville, bizzare as they may seem, we're not fiction and were in vogue in the early 1900s.

You mean it went out of fashion?

 

[2jakes]

Sears and Monkey-Ward catalogs are among the most valuable windows that exist into how ordinary people actually lived for most of the 20th Century. You can get a very close picture of what any part of that century was like just from a close reading of a sampling of those catalogs, and when you'll do so you'll find some things that will surprise you. For example, you could buy birth control products and vibrators in the Sears Catalog in the 1930s. What, you mean your grandma didn't tell you about that?

Are you kidding?
Grandma never ever mentioned the “birds & bees”.
In my pre-teen years, I thought I was the most perverted kid on the block
with thoughts as to why girls were built different and puzzled why I was interested in such things.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
I took the silence as an indication that it was all somehow unmentionable and therefore shameful. But I got over the sense that I was demon possessed fairly early, leastwise not uniquely so. Still, I got a taste of the shame to which you allude, so I can relate.

I was raised under the tutelage of a fellow who couldn't resist any skank who would get horizontal with him. And I shared a bedroom with two brothers. And I was in a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps.

Horny? You bet I was. And so was everybody else.

Gore Vidal's essay "The Birds and the Bees" is a real hoot, and well worth your time. It agitated scolds on the left and the right when it was first published, something like 25 years ago. And it still does.

It was Vidal who later noted, on the occasion of one of his later birthdays, that among the few advantages of an advanced age is that it frees a man of "the tyranny of the male libido."

 

[ChrisB]

You mean it went out of fashion?

Indeed, some of them have a following today. Although the term "autointoxication" is no longer used, the concept Is still in use among some of the people who believe frequent enemas are the foundation of good health.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Are you kidding?
Grandma never ever mentioned about the “birds & bees”.
In my pre-teen years, I thought I was the most perverted kid on the block
when thoughts as to why girls were built different and puzzled why I was interested in such things.

Many is the Mom who sat down with daughter to have a little talk about the birds and bees, and boy, did Mom learn a lot!

 

[2jakes]

^^^^^
I took the silence as an indication that it was all somehow unmentionable and therefore shameful. But I got over the sense that I was demon possessed fairly early, leastwise not uniquely so. Still, I got a taste of the shame to which you allude, so I can relate.

I was raised under the tutelage of a fellow who couldn't resist any skank who would get horizontal with him. And I shared a bedroom with two brothers. And I was in a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps.

Horny? You bet I was. And so was everybody else.

Gore Vidal's essay "The Birds and the Bees" is a real hoot, and well worth your time. It agitated scolds on the left and the right when it was first published, something like 25 years ago. And it still does.

It was Vidal who later noted, on the occasion of one of his later birthdays, that among the few advantages of an advanced age is that it frees a man of "the tyranny of the male libido."

I grew up with five sisters.
As bad as it may sound about my youth in these matters, it was many times worse for my them.

One related to me recently of the first experience with the changes that occurs in girls.
And not given an explanation by the grown-ups as to her condition.

Part of my introduction to this subject in elementary school was the “jokes”
during recess.
I pretended that I knew what they meant.
But it took a long time for the picture to get into focus.

I could never imagine or accept that my folks would do such things.


Ain’t life grand?

 

[LizzieMaine]

^^^^^
I took the silence as an indication that it was all somehow unmentionable and therefore shameful. But I got over the sense that I was demon possessed fairly early, leastwise not uniquely so. Still, I got a taste of the shame to which you allude, so I can relate.

I was raised under the tutelage of a fellow who couldn't resist any skank who would get horizontal with him. And I shared a bedroom with two brothers. And I was in a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps.

Horny? You bet I was. And so was everybody else.

Gore Vidal's essay "The Birds and the Bees" is a real hoot, and well worth your time. It agitated scolds on the left and the right when it was first published, something like 25 years ago. And it still does.

It was Vidal who later noted, on the occasion of one of his later birthdays, that among the few advantages of an advanced age is that it frees a man of "the tyranny of the male libido."

One of the more interesting things one learns in studying the social history of the 20th century is that the 1930s, by and large, were far more open about such matters than the 1950s, and the 1920s were even more open than the 1930s. You could buy Havelock Ellis's 1933 book "Psychology Of Sex" in the Sears catalog thruout the late thirties, a book which spares absolutely nothing in its discussion of the stuff that goes on in heads and in beds -- among other topics, it is extremely open about homosexuality and extremely critical of those who condemn it. But this book, and other similar works, disappeared from the catalog by the end of the war.

Not that, as Dr. Kinsey demonstrated, Americans gave up any of their horizontal proclivities all of a sudden. They simply decided, en masse, to pretend they didn't exist -- an odd wave of emotional repression that coincided with the start of the baby boom and continued for the next twenty-five years or so. Then David Reuben -- a talk-show crackpot -- came along and got everyone worked up again. Better they should have stuck with Ellis, who at least understood what he was talking about.

 

[Fading Fast]

My grandmother was a young mother in the '20s and my father came of age in the '30s which, based on Lizzie's ⇧ comments, might explain why they were very, very straight forward about the real world of sex and morality versus the packaged version of the '50s. It was very clear to me as a kid, before I knew much at all about 20th Century history, that whatever views those two had, had been developed in the '30s mainly.

Divorce, casual sex (not their term), homosexuality, extra-marritial affairs were just part of life in their view. They didn't actively endorse any of that behavior, but saw it all as part of the human condition where each case had to be judged on its own merits.

What does that really mean? It meant that a man or woman who had extramarital sex actively and aggressively without concern for its impact on others / on their families was wrong, but a discrete affair that "helped a marriage survive" that was "what it was -" might have been better than divorce. It meant that casual sex between unmarried people was unimportant. It meant homosexuality was "odd" but "let them be" was their attitude. Of course, today the "odd" is not acceptable, but for the time, their views were far ahead of the norm.

To be clear, I wasn't "taught" any of the above - but absorbed and heard these views indirectly. Other than "don't get 'them' pregnant" and "don't get married young" (he got married in his 30s, so this wasn't based on a bitter outcome from his life), I don't remember any other advice on the subject and never once did we have a conversation (we rarely did have conversations on anything: he said things and that was that - I learned early on that made life go much better - listen-and-say-nothing got me through the first 17 years of my life).

 

[2jakes]

I did a lot of listening, here & there.....until I got the idea of what it was all about.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Another thing that's interesting about pre-WW2 attitudes is how common "common law marriage" was. There were quite a few religious sects in the 1930s that taught that marriage was no concern of the state, and that all that was required for a marriage was for a couple to plight their troth before God, and that was it. And many people who were not religious at all, or whose religious beliefs precluded divorce simply, as they say, shacked up. Often the pretense of a legal marriage was maintained to keep the gossip down, but no such marriage existed -- perhaps the most common such circumstance was a situation where a Catholic couple married young, split up, didn't get a divorce because God Forbid or an annulment because they didn't have the pull, and one or both of the spouses then went on to quietly cohabitate with a new partner. Even when someone knew the truth of the situation, it was considered appropriate to look the other way.

Quite a few celebrities were in situations like this -- as I mentioned in another thread, columnist Walter Winchell lived with a woman who was not his wife for more than forty years without anyone catching on, due to a messy and apparently unresolved divorce from his first wife. And when the first wife of baseball legend Babe Ruth died in a house fire in 1929, it came out that they had never actually been divorced, and that Helen Ruth had been living for several years incognito as the "wife" of a quietly complicit Boston dentist. Such celebrity cases were just the tip of a vast iceberg, as anyone who's ever studied geneaology will confirm. One big reason why the divorce rate in the Era was so much lower than it is today is that a great many couples simply didn't bother.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Like water finding its level, humans will do what they want to do no matter what rules, regulations, laws, social constructs you put in their way. To be sure, those things can reduce particular behaviors, but short of severe enforcement, humans will do what they've always been doing. That's why Prohibition was such a failure IMHO.

What's interesting and different today is that a lot of the rules, laws and social restrictions that funneled people into traditional sexual rolls and institutions are no longer in place, so people have a chance to choose to do what "they really want." We are only in the early innings of this game, but when enough time has past, it will be interesting to see if less rules and restrictions, less social, religious and cultural pressures to conform has lead to happier outcomes overall. Individually, we all know good and bad examples, but I wonder if, overall, there is a way of measuring and saying - this has worked better or not?