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  1. Inkstainedwretch

    Your Most Disturbing Realizations

    This is especially true if your family, like mine, is from Texas. "Gone to Texas" was a common inscription following names written on sheriffs' wanted lists. Texans like to romanticize the practice and claim their ancestors had to run because of killing someone in a duel or robbing banks. In...
  2. Inkstainedwretch

    What missed opportunities do you regret?

    In the Army you have a lot more spare time than most would imagine. When I was stationed at Ft. Bragg in 1968 I could have gone to a flight school at nextdoor Pope AFB. For the modest price of the fuel used in training, I could have learned to fly and got a small-craft license which would have...
  3. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have APPEARED In Your Lifetime

    In my South Texas boyhood I hated the outhouses on relatives' farms and ranches not because they were primitive, but because they always featured black widows and scorpions for your amusement. I never encountered a rattlesnake but I was assured that they favored outhouses, too.
  4. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    John D. McDonald's detective Travis McGee drove a Rolls pickup.
  5. Inkstainedwretch

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    I use "Yr Mst Hmble & Obdnt Srvnt." The last word should be pronounced "Sarvant."
  7. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    In most of the towns I grew up in, the trolleys were long gone but you could still see the tracks here and there. In one town, Mt.Vernon, OH, they just left the tracks there because the streets were red brick and tearing up the tracks would have necessitated painstaking patching the streets...
  8. Inkstainedwretch

    Cinematic & TV Chases That Stir The Blood.

    Friedkin's "To Live and Die in L.A." (1985) has a freeway chase where the cops are chasing the bad guys while going the wrong direction i.e. they are chasing westward in an eastbound lane. I have no idea how they set this up but it was virtuoso car-wrangling.
  9. Inkstainedwretch

    Your Most Disturbing Realizations

    I've worn an M-65 for winter ever since being issued my first one in Oct. 1967. I disliked most army stuff except for the M-65, the black leather gloves with wool liners, the lensatic compass and the M-14 rifle. The M-16 was okay, but the 14 had real class. Last of the wood-and-steel battle...
  10. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Nobody seems to have mentioned the ultimate scandal rag, "Confidential, " which specialized in the sexual and political pecadillos of celebrities. James Ellroy used it as inspiration for his "Hush - Hush" magazine in his LA Quartet and Underground USA series of books, imitating it down to its...
  11. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    A fellow writer and sometime editor of mine, the late Robert Jordan, smoked a pipe defiantly through the most militant anti-smoking years. Just to rub it in, he was known to wear a bandolier of pipes across his chest and a big leather pouch of expensive tobacco on his belt. He and Joe Haldeman...
  13. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    I always liked (wincingly) the way Archie described the law firm he employed should he have to sue somebody: "four savage Jews who'll strip your bones bare."
  14. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    Al Swearengen was a real man who ran saloons and brothels in Deadwood in the 19th century. The appropriateness of his name was pure serendipity for the series writers.
  15. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Newsstands like that were my favorite hangouts in the little towns where I grew up in the '50s and early 60s. They were always jammed with magazines, comics and paperback books and they all had that pervasive scent of cigar and pipe tobacco. Thursday was my favorite day because that was when the...
  16. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    The once-shocking sexual and scatological swearing that was absolutely forbidden in polite conversation and popular media when I was a boy has become so common we scarcely notice it now. Instead, the shocking words and phrases are racial or otherwise derogatory to a particular group. The N-word...
  17. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    "Pegging," has come to have a different meaning. Don't look it up if you're at work.
  19. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Billboards began to disappear with Ladybird Johnson's "Beautification of America" program. She got billboards banned from federal highways first. In fact, the situation was getting intolerable. There were long stretches on the Interstates where it was impossible to view the scenery because of...
  20. Inkstainedwretch

    What was the last TV show you watched?

    "Richard III" on Great Performances, closing out the "Hollow Crown" series. Nothing says Christmas like a tale of multiple murder, infanticide, boundless greed and a world totally awash in evil. And all of it genius in harness to propaganda to legitimize the rule of the treacherous Tudor family...
  21. Inkstainedwretch

    Season's Greetings From The Boys From Marketing!

    Notice all those ads say "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings." Not one says "Merry Christmas." Godless atheistic socialists!
  22. Inkstainedwretch

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    In the early 60s my father started paying our cleaning lady with cash when he learned she was charged .25 cents to cash a check. That's several dollars in 2016 money. He used a saying he knew well from his childhood: "They have their hands in the pockets of the poor."
  23. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    I don't believe anyone has mentioned Ernie Kovacs. Along with Sid Caesar, he was the rare experimental comedian. Most of the comics brought their old vaudeville, radio or movie acts to tv. Kovacs thought tv was a new medium and that new acts, skits and schticks should be tried out. Like most...
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