Vintage Things That Have Disappeared In Your Lifetime?

[GHT]

This page has been something of an eye opener about law and it's interpretation. Can any of you lagal eagles throw any light on why Mrs Anne Sacoolas was whisked back the US? She had killed, in a moment of forgetfulness as to which side of the road she was driving on, a young motor cyclist name of Harry Dunn. At first, Mrs Sacoolas was cooperating with British police but then she was gone, it was claimed that she had diplomatic immunity. You can read the story here: https://www.diplomacy.edu/blog/sacoolas-affair-diplomatic-immunity-or-special-immunity

 

[Harp]

This page has been something of an eye opener about law and it's interpretation... it was claimed that she had diplomatic immunity.

I recall reading about this and diplomatic immunity allowed her return.
It is most unfortunate when such immunity involves tragedy and a miscarriage of justice.
__________
Dovetailing said; during the Thatcher era, two Special Air Service sent to USA to assassinate
an IRA connected American were caught after accomplishing assignment.
These men were quietly repatriated back to London.
________

Law as writ, law as lived.

 

[Tiki Tom]

I have personally known people who have flaunted diplomatic immunity in small ways... and also known people with diplomatic immunity who have voluntarily waived diplomatic immunity, again, in regards to small potatoes like traffic tickets. (<— this is, of course, the more honorable path.). Reasonably, there are valid reasons that diplomatic immunity exists... but give it to the lawyers in a high profile case and everybody will double-down.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

I can remember when in the late '50s or early '60s when the son of the Irish ambassador went on a drunk-driving spree and killed several people. He was hurried out of the country under diplomatic immunity. As a kid I was outraged. My parents tried to explain to me why diplomatic immunity existed and why it was necessary, but I was too young to understand. Nobody has a more easily outraged sense of justice than a young kid.

 

[Harp]

Diplomatic immunity can be abused or misunderstood in application.
While passing through TSA security screening I stood next to a Danish diplomat waiting for my
bag to exit Xray, and the Dane had a small brief cuffed to his wrist. He presented credentials
which confused the checkpoint screening staff, so I offered explanation that while the diplomatic
"bag" could not be screened his physical person could be screened. The Dane was none too pleased
and I told him politely that a diplomatic pouch was several while he was not, privilege has its limit.

Another instance of diplomatic immunity occurred when the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Boston
committed perjury before a grand jury. I told a priest of my acquaintance that someone in the
Boston DA office would telephone the Papal Nuncio in Washington and suggest the Holy See issue
his eminence a diplomatic passport, yesterday. Cardinal Law is now stationed in Rome under immunity
from extradition. Ex post facto diplomatic cover but law like politics is a practical profession.

 

[Seb Lucas]

I can remember when in the late '50s or early '60s when the son of the Irish ambassador went on a drunk-driving spree and killed several people. He was hurried out of the country under diplomatic immunity. As a kid I was outraged. My parents tried to explain to me why diplomatic immunity existed and why it was necessary, but I was too young to understand. Nobody has a more easily outraged sense of justice than a young kid.

Your instinct as a kid was correct. If the drunk driver didn't face consequences then this was an outrage.

 

[Just Jim]

Another instance of diplomatic immunity occurred when the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Boston
committed perjury before a grand jury. I told a priest of my acquaintance that someone in the
Boston DA office would telephone the Papal Nuncio in Washington and suggest the Holy See issue
his eminence a diplomatic passport, yesterday. Cardinal Law is now stationed in Rome under immunity
from extradition. Ex post facto diplomatic cover but law like politics is a practical profession.

Cardinal Law died in December 2017, following a long illness (reportedly, complications of diabetes, liver failure, and heart problems).

 

[Harp]

Cardinal Law died in December 2017...

I vaguely recalled this after posting earlier.
His eminence is entombed inside the Basilica of St Mary Major, Rome.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Vintage things that have disappeared in my lifetime? Good old paper newspapers. Now, I know that they haven’t completely disappeared. But in my social circle they are very nearly completely gone. Sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and a copy of the rag from the nearest big city used to be a much enjoyed ritual. Now I get all the news I need for free, on my iPad. Not really the same. And I know that I have only myself to blame.

 

[Turnip]

You don’t get all these news for free, you just pay with a more modern currency, your data.



Still my weekend ritual, gathering with all the boys at the bakery, buying my favorite Brötchen along with the local news paper and enjoying both at an extended kitchen breakfast.

 

[Zombie_61]

Vintage things that have disappeared in my lifetime? Good old paper newspapers. Now, I know that they haven’t completely disappeared. But in my social circle they are very nearly completely gone. Sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and a copy of the rag from the nearest big city used to be a much enjoyed ritual. Now I get all the news I need for free, on my iPad. Not really the same. And I know that I have only myself to blame.

You sound very much like my best friend. Even when we were kids...well, pre-teenagers...he enjoyed reading the newspaper every day. Even as all of the newspapers became a minor percentage of their former selves and nearly every article was absurdly abbreviated and ended with, "For more information, visit 'insert_newspaper_web_address_here'...", he'd seek out the remaining coin operated street newsstands just to obtain a hard copy of the daily news. Eventually he realized that driving an hour or more out of his way to spend $3 or more for only six to ten pages was a ridiculous waste of resources, and he surrendered to modern technologies for his daily news fix. Truthfully, I think computer/Internet technologies befuddle him and that's the true reason he held off for so long, but he'd never admit it. He'd had his first tablet for so long (a gift from his younger brother) that everything about it was obsolete by the time he finally took it out of the packaging it was given to him in. Now that he has a working device that can access the Internet he's a bit more comfortable with the whole concept, but he still bemoans the loss of printed physical material and the daily "ritual" of reading it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'll never give up newspapers. Online news-consumption just can't beat the relaxation of settling into a chair and snapping open a fresh paper, going thru it page by page front to back and then dropping the paper on the floor for the cat to play with.

That said, it's hard to find a paper today that isn't a weak shadow of what it used to be -- I regularly get the Boston Globe, and less regularly the New York Daily News, and neither paper is much like what they used to be, either in terms of format or in terms of content, and it makes me sad. They aren't transferring the reporting and the features to the internet -- they're just dropping a lot of them entirely, and that's a real loss. Our local weekly is even sadder -- it used to be a tri-weekly, with a squad of reporters covering the area like a blanket. Now it's a thin, narrow thing one step up from a shopper, with just one real reporter left, and he's getting old. When he goes, the paper will probably go with him. And that is heartbreaking.

 

[Tiki Tom]

^^^I agree with Lizzie. Most of the stuff I read today reads like it was written by high school journalism students (who don’t realize that the profession is as dead as the bullfighting profession.)

 

[Harp]

I'll never give up newspapers. Online news-consumption just can't beat the relaxation of settling into a chair and snapping open a fresh paper, going thru it page by page front to back and then dropping the paper on the floor for the cat to play with.

That said, it's hard to find a paper today that isn't a weak shadow of what it used to be -- I regularly get the Boston Globe, and less regularly the New York Daily News, and neither paper is much like what they used to be, either in terms of format or in terms of content, and it makes me sad. They aren't transferring the reporting and the features to the internet -- they're just dropping a lot of them entirely, and that's a real loss...

I second this, entirely. Love opening a newspaper on the evening train. And I regret the shadow cast
across modern journalist practice. A lack of acumen, analysis, fair play objective perception. I reluctantly
canceled my New York Times subscription due to a lack of intellectual grasp of rational truth, though I
will occasionally scope out its Arts and Book section. Surprisingly, the Times sports section does a fair
coverage of the United States of Baseball.

 

[tonyb]

There’s some good reporting and good writing online, but sometimes a person has to sift through a lot of crap to find it.

The bigger problem is how easy the Internet allows a totalitarian government to choke off the free exchange of information.

Is there something in the digital world analogous to the clandestine basement printing press? Is such a thing possible?

 

[Jeffrey Westcott]

Really dark interior furnishings. Fake dark walnut wallpaper trim, brown and burnt orange pizza carpet. Pine furniture stained dark brown. Grandfather clocks. The only well-lit room in the house was the kitchen. Everything else was a smoke-filled hazy place. The 1970s.

 

[Jeffrey Westcott]

Little league team sitting in the back of a pick-up truck, headed to a pizza place. Pizza places had pictures of the ball-clubs they supported for decades in the lobby

 

[tonyb]

Really dark interior furnishings. Fake dark walnut wallpaper trim, brown and burnt orange pizza carpet. Pine furniture stained dark brown. Grandfather clocks. The only well-lit room in the house was the kitchen. Everything else was a smoke-filled hazy place. The 1970s.

Some things really are left in the past.

My folks acquired c. 1970 a matching set of end tables and a coffee table with plastic face panels made to mimic the look of carved wood. Bumping into those tables with the vacuum cleaner, say, or a shin, might have those popped-on panels popping off. Just crap, it was.

Contrast that with another pair of side tables my dear old ma acquired from a co-worker. They weren’t “fine” furniture, just factory made (in the ’60s, I’d guess) stuff, but solid hardwood and with a simple stylishness. I still have one of them. My sister had the other.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandparents' house, built in 1920, had that dark varnished woodwork, and living in a house with white enameled woodwork I wish mine had it too. It was a lot easier to keep clean, and I imagine that was why it was so popular -- in a time when you heated your house with kerosene or coal stoves, cigarette smoke was the least of the grime in the air.

As someone who has no housekeeping gene whatsoever, and who couldn't care less about scrubbing walls and woodwork, I couldn't live in one of these modern whitey-white-white places. In about a week it would look like it had been dragged twenty miles behind an old truck.

 

[Haversack]

I nearly weep when looking at real estate sites in San Francisco. Edwardian era and post WWI houses that still have their polished gumwood 3/4 high wainscoting, built-in bookcases and sideboards, coffered ceilings, and carved newels and bannisters. All recently painted white. Not that this is anything new. The 1877 house that became the California Governors' Mansion in 1903 has 12' high panelling and carved moldings all out of solid rosewood on its main floor. In 1911 The wife of newly elected Hiram Johnson had Gumps of San Francisco redecorate the mansion in the then popular Colonial Revival style. All that polished rosewood was painted light grey.

The other thing I just shake my head at is when these older houses are renovated into an open plan where the living, dining, and kitchen are all combined into one big entertaining space. And the kitchen is full of fancy equipment: professional ranges with a pot faucet and wok burner, wood-fired pizza oven, indoor grill, etc. If any of this gear is ever actually used to do any real cooking, their entire open plan is going to covered with a patina of cooking oil in short order.