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After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.
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$1 in 1939 equals about $18 today
How can we deal with the national debt, soon all the taxes we collect will be need just to pay the interest?
I know kids, lets get off the gold standard, clean up that old building over there, call it the Federal Reserve Bank and print more money!
I had a piece on my blog last year on “Fifty is the new twenty”. I kept a twenty tucked up over the visor in the car, just in case.
Then last year my girlfriend and I went down to the beach to watch the sunset and on the way back had the urge to stop for a beer each and a small shared appetizer. But my wallet was still at the house and the twenty from the car didn’t cover the tab, even with five bucks in quarters from the stash for tolls.
Now I tuck fifty up there.
Public telephone. Operator, give me PR5-1325. That’s PRimrose5-1325 for you kids. That was my Grandparent’s actual phone # and you couldn’t dial direct. Ours was SE2-5183, or SElden2-5183.
Good times….
That 79 cent wind up alarm clock would probably still be working today is someone hadn’t thrown it away for a cool new digital one that cost $15 and required 2 AA batteries and then gets thrown in the landfill a year later.
A dollar in 1912 was worth a dollar but today it is worth 3 cents.
Said another way, that which cost a dollar in 1912 costs 97 dollars today.
Where’d it all go?
On a 1950’s Perry Mason episode last night the dood told Perry he kept $5000 in his home safe and Perry asked if he always kept that large amount on hand. My wife remarked that $5000 isn’t THAT much and I reminded her that $5k in 1955 was about $50k today. In 2055 that $5k will be $200k. (it’s exponential, in case you were wondering)
When I worked at McDonalds in 1970 a Big Mac cost 45 cents and sales tax was 4%, how much are they today? You could buy 5 hamburgers, at 19 cents each, and get change back from a dollar. How do you cure a thieving gov’t?
Large Box Bath Powder $0.09
Ebay today. 3 pack bath powder. Japan $0.99
NYC subway: 1972…25cents, 2019…$2.75.
Ten times higher.
minimum wage: 1972.. $1.50, 2019…$15.00
Volkswagen: 1972..$1,300.00, 2019…$30,000??
Certainly brings back memories. Our medium sized town had a well stocked Five and Dime, complete with a lunch counter. If it wasn’t there, you could probably find it at the Woolworth’s—complete with its trademark wood floor. If anything was marked “Made in Japan”, back on the shelf it went. for that was synonymous with junk. No worries though, as so little wasn’t made in the good old USA. What a time it was—late 50’s up to the hippie era, which was the beginning of the end.
Who broke the Merry-go-round?
https://tinyurl.com/y245jx38
Dollar stores are the five-and-dimes of today.
@Richard, the noninflationary version:
https://archive.org/stream/pdfy–Pori1NL6fKm2SnY/The%20Creature%20From%20Jekyll%20Island_djvu.txt
pdf –
https://ia802609.us.archive.org/14/items/pdfy–Pori1NL6fKm2SnY/The%20Creature%20From%20Jekyll%20Island.pdf
Ooh, I haven’t read that Patricia Wentworth!
Don’t know the rest of those books.
I second (or third, or fourth, or whatever) The Creature from Jekyll Island. It is one of the most influential books I’ve read, to the point that I bought copies for each of my children as well as my brother. None of them have read it, but I’ve tried.
Regarding the inflation of our currency, I’m no economist, but the Adjusted Monetary Base is just about the scariest chart I’ve ever seen.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=nWyb
We all know that we went through a crisis in 2008. Banks were closing, and the value of your home, your 401k and other investment accounts took a hit. Since then, things have recovered….or at least we’re supposed to believe that they have. Yes, things aren’t crashing like they were 11 years ago, but look at that chart closely. The AMB is now roughly 4 times what it was in 2008. Has the value of your home or 401k quadrupled? Mine has improved, but not to that degree, and I don’t think I’m alone. If the value of your assets hasn’t kept up with the increase in the number of dollars, then you haven’t recovered. I’m just an amateur, but I think that we’re in a deflationary period that they’re (“The Fed, The Powers That Be, Whoever”) are trying to mask by increasing the number of dollars in the system dramatically.
I like to think that if you flip that chart upside down, that will tell you the value of the dollar in your pocket.
Vitamin G!
The illustration on the cover of the “Fingers of Fear” paperback looks alarmingly like the alien characters in the Roddy Piper classic Sci-Fi film, “They Live”, where humans were turned into mindless consumers by the alien’s hidden subliminal suggestions.