Want to buy or sell something? Check the classifieds
  • The Fedora Lounge is supported in part by commission earning affiliate links sitewide. Please support us by using them. You may learn more here.

Search results

  1. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    Just remember, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi.
  2. Inkstainedwretch

    You know you are getting old when:

    There are those who think the same thing of circumcision - a barbaric ritual mutilation. (Don't worry, I'm circumcised and I was born Catholic). When I talk to young people contemplating tattoos I caution them that their tattoos won't age the way their skin will, they'll be faded and distorted...
  3. Inkstainedwretch

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    My impression was that the hazard of lead paint to children was not eating paint chips fallen from the walls, but from their habit of chewing things like toys, which used to be painted with lead paint. In fact, small children will chew on anything that they can fit into their mouths and that...
  4. Inkstainedwretch

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    This is why I've never understood people who maintain that vegetarianism is healthy and meat is bad for you. I learned in Army survival training that humans can eat any part of any mammal except the liver of polar bear or banded seal, which can have poisonous concentrations of vitamin A. Of...
  5. Inkstainedwretch

    Weapons in the Movies

    The 1911 is a fascinating study. Actually, what disqualifies Warner's gun for authenticity is not that it's a 1911, but that it's a 1911A1, a development of the mid-1920s. The enlarged ejection port, longer grip safety spur and shortened trigger are clearly visible in the picture above. With a...
  7. Inkstainedwretch

    How would you earn a living?

    My father's family were Dustbowl Okies. When living conditions got too awful to stay, they packed up and left. Unlke the Joads, they didn't go west to California, but south to Texas. My grandfather was an oil driller, and had heard that there were new oilfields coming into use in south Texas...
  8. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Go to Hawaii. Still lots of Chop Suey joints, advertised as such. "Chop suey"just means something like "made quick." It was a stir-fried dish made by Chinese cooks for the early Chinese laborers from whatever ingredients they could find in California. And still pretty good stuff, if it's made...
  9. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    A few minutes ago I was in a local store and saw in the penny tray next to the cash register a wheat-ear penny. I swapped it for one in my pocket and took it outside, hoping for at least an early 50s coin. In the daylight I could read the date: 1936. Not mint, but in amazingly good shape, the...
  10. Inkstainedwretch

    How would you earn a living?

    One of the most thorough instruction books I ever read was one for a cattle crew's cook. For instance, the recipe for cooking steaks for a cattle crew in the field started with a live steer. There were clear directions how to slaughter the animal, bleed the carcass (a crane in the bed of a...
  11. Inkstainedwretch

    Terms Which Have Disappeared

    It's a similar situation with mutton. Americans won't eat mutton. They just know they don't like it. They will eat lamb. In consequence of which, Americans eat the oldest lambs on earth. It would be sold as mutton anywhere else, but Americans won't eat it if you call it that.
  13. Inkstainedwretch

    You Know You Live in a Small(ish) Town When...

    Vitanola, were your Kornbluths any relation to famed SF writer Cyril M. Kornbluth? I know he was from NYC and was of Polish-Jewish ancestry, but it's not a very common name.
  14. Inkstainedwretch

    So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

    Hey, Lizzie, I hear you Mainers just had a labor dispute determined by the presence (or absence) of an Oxford comma. That must be a first. As for your gourmet mushrooms, tomorrow being St. Patrick's day, I am reminded some Irishmen would have paid you to slip in some Death Caps among the good...
  15. Inkstainedwretch

    Weapons in the Movies

    Also, there was the Colt model 1905 .45 ACP. It fired the same cartridge as the later 1911 but had some more complicated features. The great 1911 was essentially the 1905 with the bugs worked out.
  16. Inkstainedwretch

    Weapons in the Movies

    I wondered about David Warner's .45 in "Titanic"as well, and I think it's not out of the question. A multimillionaire like Billy Zane's character might well have acquired the latest thing in personal armament for his bodyguard. Colt's always made up sample guns to send around to prospective...
  17. Inkstainedwretch

    Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

    Something that was a common sight when I was young was "Carriage steps." Already long obsolete by the '50s, they were small stone, brick or concrete steps, just two or three, set by the curb usually in front prominent houses. Decades earlier, horse-drawn carriages would pull up by them, and...
  19. Inkstainedwretch

    JC Penney Might Be Going Belly Up (Along With Sears)

    I think the idea of "walkable communities " is not that absolutely everything is within walking distance, but that the everyday necessities are: a grocery, a drugstore, a hardware, maybe a movie theater and a library, a cafe and so forth. I grew up in many such communities. Now the mom-and-pop...
  20. Inkstainedwretch

    Neighborhood theaters and Drive-in Movies

    Up north of me in Santa Fe an old friend, George R.R. Martin, bought an old, abandoned theater and spiffed it up as the "Jean Cocteau." Like Lizzie's it runs classic and art films, usually with guests like directors and actors or film scholars to run a whole program for a single film. It's been...
  21. Inkstainedwretch

    Weapons in the Movies

    In the western series "Trackdown," (1957-59), Hobie Gilman ( Robert Culp) carried a S&W break-open revolver. I'm not sure which model it was, but it was a change from the Colt '73. In "The High Chaparral," (1967-71) Manolito ( Henry Darrow) used a Remington 1875. While functionally identical...
  22. Inkstainedwretch

    Your Most Disturbing Realizations

    I have a number of scars, one or two of them fairly spectacular. Since I was in the Army and served in Vietnam, I have many fairly credible lies that I tell people about how I got those scars.
  23. Inkstainedwretch

    Weapons in the Movies

    The Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot to use a bomb to dispose of a gunman a few months back. As for that Russo-Turkish battle, I was told in a long-ago military history class that the Turks were defending a fort, so there was no problem with having two long arms. They just had the...

Latest posts

Members online

... and 42 more.
Total: 4,203 (members: 92, guests: 4,111)

Forum statistics

Threads
109,304
Messages
3,078,384
Members
54,244
Latest member
seeldoger47
Top