Your Most Disturbing Realizations

[Inkstainedwretch]

Jump wings or pilot wings?

 

[Stanley Doble]

You are younger and better looking than you will ever be again.

 

[foamy]

That we (humans) are supposed to guarantee the safety of spent atomic waste for longer than we've been on the planet.

 

[Trenchfriend]

In the year 2065, I will be 81 years old and my Kappel-typewriter from Chemnitz, Saxony will be 133 years.

Then, we both can take place in your famous Smithsonian-Institute, like Zefraim Cochrane's "warp-ship".

 

[Stearmen]

You are younger and better looking than you will ever be again.

The older get, the faster I was!

 

[Stearmen]

Jump wings or pilot wings?

Neither, Aircrew 9th Air Force Airborne Troop Carrier Command, but the girls didn't know the difference! So his crew did haul 82nd and 101st Airborne troops on D-Day and several other drops.

 

[Edward]

Mn. 24/7 new channels must have seemed like a great idea, and certainly they can be when something major kicks off, but.... as with television in general, it seems, 'more' doesn't always mean 'better'.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Don't know if it's disturbing but I notice when I read the news or watch it on TV the world keeps getting worse and worst. But when I look at my own life things keep getting better and better.

It also occurs to me that every day they discover new things that are bad for you, yet people keep living longer and longer.

 

[Benzadmiral]

[QUOTE="AmateisGal, post: 2006389, member: 34.]...and has no idea what a set of encyclopedias is.

That's one that hits really hard for me. I *loved* the encyclopedia as a kid -- I'd sit leafing thru it for hours, even when I was supposed to be doing something else. There was nothing better for learning about the world and everything in it -- every page was something new that you'd never heard of before.

I suppose you can find that on the internet today, but there's way too many things I've come across online that I wish I'd never heard of. And the tactile pleasure of the encyclopedia volumes themselves is something you'll never get from a computer. Our school had a set of the World Book which featured transparent celluoid pages that showed the various organs and arrangements of the human body, and each page you'd turn would peel back a layer of the body so you could get a sense of how it all fit together. I thought that was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen.

I still have my set of the Britannica, 1937 "Coronation Edition," and I still use it, read it, and enjoy it.[/QUOTE]

I consult my 1984 Britannica often. My high school library had a much older set, and the leathery smell of the volumes was heady and intriguing, as if the people who bound them had put in a special effort to make using them memorable for us.

 

[Benzadmiral]

When I was thirteen years old, they were tearing down an old neighborhood grocery store next to my grandparents' house, and I enjoyed poking around in the rubble. Among the things I found were several magazines dating between 1930 and 1938 -- and I marveled at the fact that some of them were *over forty years old." Next year will mark the fortieth anniversary of my finding them. Oooweee.

My mother had some Yank magazines from the war years that I discovered as a kid. At that point they were some 20 years old, which seemed ancient to me at the time. It's now been about 50 years since I thought that -- 2.5 times as old as the issues were back then.

 

[GHT]

It also occurs to me that every day they discover new things that are bad for you, yet people keep living longer and longer.

Yep, just recently red meat has been public enemy number one. Doesn't seem to have dented the sales at fast food outlets.
We get endlessly harangued about recycling, a good thing when you realise that the planet's resources are finite, but for goodness sake, does everything have to be marked up when it's been recycled?
Today, whilst doing the shop for groceries and household items, my wife texts me: "We need some toilet tissue," she reminds me. No problem, well not until the purchase. "100% recycled," it proclaimed on the packet. Well, I don't know about you, but the image that conjured up, was of some poor little minion, down at the sewage treatment plant, laboriously sifting out used toilet tissue, washing it, hanging it out to dry and finally ironing it before it's repackaged ready for................................................. are some of you eating? Sorry.

 

[tonyb]

I realized today that I have been alive during the administrations of fully one-quarter of all U.S. presidents, starting with FDR.

Fully one-quarter with two to spare. If I'm counting right, you've been alive through 13 of the 44 U.S. presidencies, including the current one.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Put another way, I've lived through more than 25% of U.S. history.

 

[F. J.]

The weirdness works the other way, too. When I read that actress Oona Chaplin was Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter I thought surely this must be a mistake, they must mean great- or even great-great granddaughter. But it's true. Charlie was born in 1889 and Oona was born in 1987, when he would have been 98, had he lived. He married Oona O'Neil late in life, and their son likewise married late. Only two generations from the top silent star to the "Game of Thrones" actress.

That reminds me of John Tyler, who served as President in the early 1840's. He was born during the Washington administration and died before the end of the Civil War, but he has living grandchildren!
He remarried after his first wife died and begat children in his old age, and one of his sons did the same. He had his son Lyon Gardiner Tyler at 63, who in turn was 71 when his son Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., was born, and had Harrison Ruffin Tyler at age 75.

 

[F. J.]

[...]
I *loved* the encyclopedia as a kid -- I'd sit leafing thru it for hours, even when I was supposed to be doing something else. There was nothing better for learning about the world and everything in it -- every page was something new that you'd never heard of before.
[...]

I did the same whenever I was at my grandmother’s house as a kid, as she had a World Book set from 1970. Unfortunately, she got rid of it, but I still have the two-volume dictionary and atlas.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Put another way, I've lived through more than 25% of U.S. history.

And the converse of this is the realization that, as nation-states go, the US is still just a punk kid. The US has existed less than 25 percent of the time since the founding of the English monarchy.

 

[GHT]

Thank you for using the term, English, Lizzie. Whenever you look up something English these days, the information always refers to English as British. We have only been Brits since: The Acts of Union 1707. Wiki states that our kingdoms originated around AD 400. That coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Wiki should have turned around, when they photographed our Houses of Parliament, if they had done so, they would have seen a statue of Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, circa AD 61.

 

[MisterCairo]

Remembering the introduction of cable tv "converters", particularly those that came with the long-wire-attached channel changing boxes.

We had both kinds of tv - VHF AND UHF.

(up to) 12 of each!

 

[hottoddy]

Fun thread. One set of my great grandparents emigrated into the US from Denmark in the late 1800s. My grandparents on that side were born in 1914.

I also saw Jaws and Star Wars at the cinema. Jaws kept us kids outta the ocean the whole summer. Kids today think I'm ancient because I was alive before the moon landings. Obscure trivia: I attended a taping of Good Times; saw both Guns-n-Roses and Bon Jovi live before they were famous at small venues.

 

[Fading Fast]

Fun thread. One set of my great grandparents emigrated into the US from Denmark in the late 1800s. My grandparents on that side were born in 1914.

I also saw Jaws and Star Wars at the cinema. Jaws kept us kids outta the ocean the whole summer. Kids today think I'm ancient because I was alive before the moon landings. Obscure trivia: I attended a taping of Good Times; saw both Guns-n-Roses and Bon Jovi live before they were famous at small venues.

Might be a separate thread here - I saw Huey Lewis and the News before "Sports" exploded and Sheryl Crow before "Tuesday Night Music Club." GNR is the only real, true Rock band to come out of the '80s.