Your Most Disturbing Realizations

[Fading Fast]

^^^ But proving that our society will never let a marketing angle go by, I saw a box of chocolate Maccabees in the store the other day mixed in amidst the Christmas and, now, Hannukah chocolates.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I want a box of chocolate FDRs for Christmas.

 

[MisterCairo]

People can only recall what they once KNEW.

I'm an officer serving on an RCN ship, with university-educated officers in their mid to late twenties and early thirties.

One recently had to ask me what the flag was on the tv screen as we watched BBC news.

It was the flag of the UN.

He's the Intelligence Officer.

Another, while watching that show "Vice", wondered (at least admitting his ignorance) at how much he didn't know about environmental issues of the past and present.

Like agent orange as used in Vietnam in the 60s.

And at the Canadian Army base in Gagetown New Brunswick in the 70s.

I knew what that was when I was 12.

I did a talk about the space program and the military's influence in it, to several high school groups, last month.
They couldn't relate to just about anything. Sure, the moon landings are ancient history and I acknowledged that by saying I'm 46 and was a little kid when the last Apollo mission left the Moon to return. But they couldn't even relate to the space shuttle program and that only ended 4 years ago! Anyone in their teens should be able to recall that short a time...

 

[Harp]

Meanwhile, all baseball fans know that we're now seventy years removed from the last time anyone could say "National League Champion Chicago Cubs" and be up to date.
"Holy cow!"

Mixte dolore voluptas-unofficial Cubs fan motto (South side chapter)

___________

The Joffrey Ballet will cease The Nutcracker annual Christmas performance this year.

 

[Fading Fast]

I want a box of chocolate FDRs for Christmas.

Probably belongs in "Trivial Things that Tick You Off" thread, but over the last several years, a few companies, Russell Stovers for one (and a German company that makes brandy filled chocolate Santas, for two) no longer bother to use a reasonably good mold to make their chocolates look like Santa; instead, they just print a nice looking picture on the foil wrapper (which they always did) and the actual chocolate itself is not in the shape of Santa. The Russell Stovers' one is truly just a blob shape and the German one is kinda in the shape of a bottle. Very disappointing.

Think how sad you'd be if your chocolate FDR had a nice smiling picture of FDR, cigarette in holder cocked at his usual angle, pince-nez glasses on, but when you unwrapped it, all you had was an amorphous blob of chocolate.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Even worse, consider this: Chocolate Maccabees are really Santa Claus in disguise.

That's like unwrapping the foil off your chocolate FDR and finding Hoover inside.

 

[Harp]

Even worse, consider this: Chocolate Maccabees are really Santa Claus in disguise.

ecumenical.

 

[p51]

One reason is that half the world was watching live on tv when the Challenger blew up.

Really? How? None of the mainstream networks aired the launch of STS-51L live...

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was watching it live on CNN. In fact, as the countdown entered its final stage I thought to myself "we've never had a manned launch blow up." I don't know why that went thru my head at that moment, maybe because it was the first launch I'd watched in many years, and when it happened, there was no real awareness at first at what had gone wrong -- you just saw those spirals of vapor and smoke, and the commentators were fumbling and stumbling to explain it.

 

[scottyrocks]

One reason is that half the world was watching live on tv when the Challenger blew up. That made it terribly immediate. The Columbia was destroyed on re-entry when nobody was watching. Many only learned about it the next day. It just wasn't as intense and immediate an experience.

I remember that quite clearly from the TV. The craft went slightly out of frame, and then we saw a moving flash, and then entrails. The announcers went silent. The flight controller went on for a short while. More silence, and then something about 'a major malfunction.' There was more commentary interspersed with longer periods of silence than we are accustomed to hearing during any live broadcast.

I know I was stunned. By that point, we weren't used to major catastrophes in the space program anymore.

 

[p51]

Yeah, it was on CNN, but nowhere else. But most of what people remember from seeing the video was the countless times it was shown later on the news.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Agatha Christie wrote that when she was a girl, she thought that her family would never be wealthy enough to afford an automobile, but they would never be so poor that they couldn't have servants. How expectations change. Now everyone has a car, but hardly anyone can afford servants.

 

[LizzieMaine]

As late as the thirties, the accepted demographic definition of "middle class" in the United States was a family with "at least one servant." If you didn't have a cook or a housekeeper, you were working class.

 

[tonyb]

Tempus fugit ...

That it does. It's 10 years ago today that I signed on here. Blink.

 

[Fading Fast]

Even worse, consider this: Chocolate Maccabees are really Santa Claus in disguise.

That's like unwrapping the foil off your chocolate FDR and finding Hoover inside.

Or Reagan.

They should sell the Santa molds to Russell Stovers and use the money to by Maccabee molds. My God, maybe the small chocolate company can't afford the molds, but Russell Stovers? Kidding aside, using Santa for Maccabees is a pretty thoughtless thing to do.

 

[Fading Fast]

As late as the thirties, the accepted demographic definition of "middle class" in the United States was a family with "at least one servant." If you didn't have a cook or a housekeeper, you were working class.

It was such a differently structured world, economy, social system. Many just doing a bit better than surviving had a servant, but not in the "Downton Abbey" way more in a "we need to go to work and somehow the housework has to get done in an age before automated this, prepared food that and easy clean this" way. My dad and grandmother had lost their house in the Depression and just barely kept their small appliance store from going into bankruptcy, but they had "a girl" come in once a week to help clean, do laundry, etc. as they both worked seven days a week (store was open six and they bought inventory in NYC on the seventh). The "girl" worked a day a week for a lot of families like my dad's as she was glad for the work in the depression. When home, my grandmother worked along side her to get things done - it was far from "bring me my tea now" service in my dad's / grandmother's world. When I was growing up, my grandmother still lived in the tenement she lived in during the Depression and there was nothing, absolutely nothing glamours or even above utilitarian about the place. I have enough evidence away from my dad and grandmother's stories to know they were just surviving in the depression, but they had "a girl."

 

[Stearmen]

Yeah, it was on CNN, but nowhere else. But most of what people remember from seeing the video was the countless times it was shown later on the news.

That's the way it always is! I had to think hard during the 50th anniversary of JFKs assassination, to picture the flag on his coffin in black & white, as I saw it back then. I have seen it through the years far more times on a color TV then I ever did on a black & white set! I often ask people my age or older, what color was the flag, they invariably say, "red, white and blue." I then say, you must have been rich to have had a color TV!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Jonathan The Tortoise, still alive and well and living on the British posession of St. Helena, was born in the year 1832. When he was born, William IV, son of George III, wore the British crown, and Victoria was still five years away from taking over. Jonathan has lived thru the entire Victorian Era, the entire Twentieth Century, and the first fifteen years of the twenty-first. He was born five years before the introduction of the Morse telegraph, and now he has a presence on Facebook.

And we think we're some punkins if we make it to 80.

 

[ChiTownScion]

It was such a differently structured world, economy, social system. Many just doing a bit better than surviving had a servant, but not in the "Downton Abbey" way more in a "we need to go to work and somehow the housework has to get done in an age before automated this, prepared food that and easy clean this" way. My dad and grandmother had lost their house in the Depression and just barely kept their small appliance store from going into bankruptcy, but they had "a girl" come in once a week to help clean, do laundry, etc. as they both worked seven days a week (store was open six and they bought inventory in NYC on the seventh). The "girl" worked a day a week for a lot of families like my dad's as she was glad for the work in the depression. When home, my grandmother worked along side her to get things done - it was far from "bring me my tea now" service in my dad's / grandmother's world. When I was growing up, my grandmother still lived in the tenement she lived in during the Depression and there was nothing, absolutely nothing glamours or even above utilitarian about the place. I have enough evidence away from my dad and grandmother's stories to know they were just surviving in the depression, but they had "a girl."

For a good deal of the time when the kids were growing up we had a housekeeper come in once every 2 weeks. Never really thought of her as a "servant," more like a helper. We both had full time jobs and she was a godsend. She really kept our home from degenerating into a real pigsty.

My oldest son saw that Richie Rich movie when he was about 4 and wanted a butler like Cadbury- I suppose he thought that it would have been fun to have someone around just to pick up his toys or such.

 

[2jakes]

I want a box of chocolate FDRs for Christmas.

Cheers !