I’ve got Mick Jagger’s lost memoir
One of my favourite anecdotes is of Mick returning unannounced to Dartford to see his parents after two years of chaotic world tours, debauchery, mayhem, riots and goodness only knows what else. ‘Oh Michael,’ says his horrified mother on opening the door. ‘Your hair….’
The Hidden History of the Laundry Chute - The Atlantic
A laundry chute is a mythic domestic space. It’s an unwatched door to nowhere, the open throat of an old home. Its reputation has as much to do with convenience as with the early recognition that a house is not solid through and through. The laundry chute is a place where stains and embarrassing odors go to be erased, and dropping linen down the chute is a mnemonic for forgetting those embarrassments, for making such accidents invisible.
Remembering Nüshu, the 19th-Century Chinese Script Only Women Could Write | Atlas Obscura
Does gentle reader enjoy being smeared? Well, I should speak only for myself. I don’t like it. Perhaps I am projecting when I guess that most members of the new administration, Stateside, don’t enjoy it either. Verily, I’ll go out on a limb, and say no normal person delights in becoming the target of vicious attack, and yet our Lord said: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.”
In the past three weeks, Trump has: staffed the White House, sent a dozen Cabinet nominees to the Senate, browbeat Boeing into cutting its price on a government contract, harangued American CEOs into keeping their plants in the United States, imposed a terrorist travel ban, met with foreign leaders and nominated a Supreme Court justice, among many other things (And still our hero finds time to torment the media with his tweets!) What have congressional Republicans been doing? Scrapbooking?
Time and again, we give away a right because we think it’ll adversely affect only those we see as adversaries. But it always comes back on you. When you give power to politicians you like in order to punish Americans you don’t, it’s guaranteed that that power will one day be used against you by politicians you don’t like, who see you as the bad guy.
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world.
Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. Smith Interrogates Morpheus Transcript
The Genetics of the American Nations
While the original colonial ancestry of the country has been overrun by subsequent migrants, the founding stock remain as a genetic undercurrent – a common genetic thread – within each American nation. This is especially true in the nations of the American South, where the colonial settlers received less subsequent migration and the original stock remains strong.
Happy 150th Birthday, Laura Ingalls Wilder
The changes that they saw in their lifetimes are nothing short of astonishing. Almanzo lived from 1857 and died in 1946; his birth predated the Civil War and his death happened after the dropping of the atomic bomb. Laura lived from 1867 to 1957; she was born during Reconstruction and died in the same year that Sputnik I was launched. She lived to see the introduction of electricity, the telephone, penicillin, movies, television, air travel, space travel, and two World Wars. She was born in an era of twig brooms and eating hard tack on the trail, and died in the age of vacuum cleaners and counter-top blenders.Posted by gerardvanderleun at February 17, 2017 9:39 AM
OK, no more Mike Rowe stuff. I dang near peed my pants laughing.
Posted by: Mike Anderson at February 17, 2017 11:42 AMI'll get you a hot towel.
Posted by: Vanderleun at February 17, 2017 11:54 AMMy home, built in 1929, still has the laundry chutes, two, to be exact. Use them daily. My good friend says his chutes are magic. He throws clothes down them, and they magically reappear clean and folded in his chest of drawers.
Posted by: John Venlet at February 17, 2017 12:24 PMModernenity traded laundry chutes for 2nd floor laundry rooms. Yep, 2 of em. The one close to the kitchen is for kitchen stuff and any guest rooms on the first floor. The big dawg, with the upright monsters, is on the 2nd floor for all them bed sheets, etc. Please don't forget to sister them joists if you don't want cracks in the ceiling below and for the sake of gaw pay $300 for that inline dryer vent booster fan if the run is more than 8' like it most assuredly is. You might see that reflected in your insurance premiums. (most house fires start in clogged dryer vents and clogged AC return vents) Go check both, right now. Yes, you'll need a screwdriver for the dryer vent, and maybe a ladder.
Posted by: ghostsniper at February 17, 2017 6:13 PMMy Ma's Mother was born in 1894 and died in 1998. She saw much of that stuff that Wilder saw but due to the acceleration of technology, she couldn't keep up with it near the end.
She lived with my Ma and a couple times a week I would stop by and check up on them. We all lived out in fairly remote country beyond cable TV and I had gotten my Grandma satellite TV so she always had a good picture. One evening on my way home from work I stopped to see them and when I went in G-Ma's room she said
"Oh I was so worried about you. Did you have a problem getting home in the rain?"
me "Gram, its not raining out there, its a beautiful day."
her "Sure its raining, I was just watching it before you came in.?"
"No, here it is, look."
Click, click and the TV turned on to WLS (or whatever it was) in CHICAGO. I spent the next 5 minutes trying to tell her that she was watching a Chicago channel until I finally gave up, kissed her and walked in to say hey to my Ma.
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