Vintage Things That Will NOT Disappear In Your Lifetime

[tonyb]

^^^^
That slick paper is the worst. Phone books (remember those?) are the, um, good s**t.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And you can even pick out the pages listing people you don't especially like.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Famous last words: "I bet we can crack this bad boy open with a blow torch."



I rode on one of those once! Would make for a great Mr. Bean skit.

Here's another thing that makes Americans shudder. Haven't lived in a house without one in 18 years.

View attachment 317411

Bidets, funny thing!
Very uncommon in old Germany, outside of hotels, because of our small average bathrooms.

And I always thought, it must be freakin', when first time sitting on the porcellain without having a toilet seat. I would bet, that hotel guests nearly never use it! I wouldn't in a german hotel, too. Yuck!

 

[Harp]

With or wihtout washcloth?


Bidets, funny thing!
Very uncommon in old Germany, outside of hotels, because of our small average bathrooms.

And I always thought, it must be freakin', when first time sitting on the porcellain without having a toilet seat. I would bet, that hotel guests nearly never use it! I wouldn't in a german hotel, too. Yuck!

I once stayed overnite at a hotel in Munich where the rest room facilities were inside a communal room.
Took a shower, most cramped arrangement ever.

 

[Turnip]

Bottled potatoes...

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Premium Qualitat." What do the cheap store-brand ones look like?

 

[Trenchfriend]

"Premium Qualitat." What do the cheap store-brand ones look like?

"EDEKA" is the premium storebrand sortiment of Edeka. This stuff is partly indeed better than the basic storebrand "gut & günstig".

But I never had the peeled potatoes in the glass. With a fine todays peeler from supermarket, beeing straightrazor-sharp, peeling is the easiest, fastest thing.

 

[Haversack]

A fry-up of canned new potatoes was always a part of breakfast when we were camping while I was growing up. My father, who's summer job in college was fire tower look-out in Southern Oregon, had a passel of no-refrigeration, no electricity cooking tips. Sardines and Saltines for lunch was another.

 

[BobHufford]

Tilt-A-Whirl (since 1926).

You can still buy them new:

https://larsonintl.com/the-tilt-a-whirl/

 

[Trenchfriend]

The 90s (East Germany)!

 

[LostInTyme]

Well, changing up, hotdogs, gotta lovum'.

 

[Harp]

A fry-up of canned new potatoes was always a part of breakfast when we were camping while I was growing up. My father, who's summer job in college was fire tower look-out in Southern Oregon, had a passel of no-refrigeration, no electricity cooking tips. Sardines and Saltines for lunch was another.

Sardines and saltines with mustard, cold tuna ditto, some cheese perhaps and vino if available were college staples.
Canned corned beef hash and spam I love heated, grilled, microwaved. Canned Polish ham; all the things on the cheap
I still relish today for convenience and taste.

 

[Fifty150]

The induction cooking technology was first patented in the early 1900s. Over 100 years later, a lot of us are still using gas. The future will be for homes to be built with electric appliances. Electric heaters. Electric clothes dryers. Electric cooktops.
Gas lines feeding into homes will be obsolete. Natural gas will be diverted to feed cogeneration units to produce electricity. It would be more efficient to produce electricity where it is used, than to produce and then transport the electricity for hundreds of miles. We will see a future of small scale energy production facilities, localized to supply the immediate area, to supply the demand from electric vehicles.

In the future, we'll all be cooking on some sort of electric cooktop. From my own experience, having used electric stoves with heat coils, hot plates, and induction - induction has my vote. With gas stoves, what I want is a lot of BTU. A high heat. Induction seems to do that. Everything seems to get hotter, and heat up faster. Even water boils faster.

 

[Zombie_61]

The induction cooking technology was first patented in the early 1900s. Over 100 years later, a lot of us are still using gas. The future will be for homes to be built with electric appliances. Electric heaters. Electric clothes dryers. Electric cooktops...In the future, we'll all be cooking on some sort of electric cooktop. From my own experience, having used electric stoves with heat coils, hot plates, and induction - induction has my vote. With gas stoves, what I want is a lot of BTU. A high heat. Induction seems to do that. Everything seems to get hotter, and heat up faster. Even water boils faster.

I hope I'm dead long before that day comes. When my wife and I got married our first apartment was all electric; electric stove, electric heating, and so on. We hated it, and in the three years we lived there never got used to it. Now, that was 40 years ago and I would assume the technologies have evolved into something better during the intervening years, but I'm still not convinced all of this electric rubbish is better than gas.

 

[tonyb]

I damned near started a house fire by letting a pillow fall onto an electric baseboard heater. This was in either late ’68 or early ’69, shortly after moving to Seattle. We’d all gone up to the mountains for a few hours of frolicking in the snow. Came home to a toasty smell. The pillow was good and scorched.

I trust the newer baseboard heaters are safer. I mean, I couldn’t have possibly been the only person to ever let something combustible make contact with one of those things long enough to create a fire hazard.

 

[Zombie_61]

...I trust the newer baseboard heaters are safer...

That was the other thing about the electric heating in that apartment--the "coils" (or whatever they were) were in the space between the first and second floor apartments. Yep. I don't know about the rest of you, but I was taught that heat rises. That means every time we turned "our" heater on we, being on the first floor, were heating the apartment above ours. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

 

[tonyb]

… It would be more efficient to produce electricity where it is used, than to produce and then transport the electricity for hundreds of miles. We will see a future of small scale energy production facilities, localized to supply the immediate area, to supply the demand from electric vehicles.
…

I’ve long speculated that the future is in micro-generation. It appears that time is bearing that out. Residential rooftop solar is EVERYWHERE around here, and more is going in all the time. A nearby park-and-ride lot is covered with overhead photovoltaic panels and numerous parking spots double as charging stations.

The technology may no longer be in its infancy, but it ain’t out of elementary school yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how it grows.

Yogi said something to the effect that it’s dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future. But some trends are so obvious a person would almost have to try not to see them.

 

[Fifty150]

Some new developments are electric only. Having all those gas lines is supposed to be dangerous. Just like the old days of a burning furnace, incinerating garbage, and a boiler feeding hot water to radiators for heating.

The only problem is the increased load on an electric grid not designed for the demand.

Environmental footprint is also subject to interpretation. Solar and wind can't produce the electricity we are currently using, so we have to look at how to produce more electricity for future increased demand. And how to service the end user because the existing grid is close to overload whenever everyone turns on the air conditioning in the summer.

 

[tonyb]

We have a gas furnace and water heater. I’ve been tempted to run a gas line from the basement utility room, where the furnace and water heater are, directly up to the kitchen, to put in a gas stove to replace the glass-top electric POS that came with the house. But I’ve heard so many good things about induction stoves that I’m tempted to go that route.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Natural gas doesn't exist here, so if you want gas it's "Suburban Propane," "Pyrofax," or "Maingas" or whatever other name they call it that comes in a tall metal cylinder hanging off the side of your house. We had a propane stove when I was very small, and my sister nearly burned the house down with it. So I'm very happy to stick with the safety of good old Calrod, where the only risk is that a chunk of white-hot metal will fly across the kitchen when the burner shorts out against a saucepan full of ravioli.