Your Most Disturbing Realizations

[BlueTrain]

Geez, I thought everyone here got their news from the papers and nowhere else?

 

[2jakes]

Geez, I thought everyone here got their news from the papers and nowhere else?

Nowadays....

book !

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Anyone know what's happened to Lizzie ? the old gal hasn't posted for a while, just hope there hasn't been any complications with her recent op.

 

[2jakes]

Anyone know what’s happened to Lizzie ? the old gal hasn’t posted for a while, just hope there hasn’t been any complications with her recent op.

The lady posted yesterday on another topic somewhere else.

My thoughts & best wishes for a speedy recovery for her.

She’s one of the reasons I always come back to this forum.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

She’s one of the reasons I always come back to this forum.

Indeed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I had my stitches removed today. I'm recovering nicely -- only worked a 45 hour week last week, which for me is practically a vacation.

 

[Zombie_61]

Geez, I thought everyone here got their news from the papers and nowhere else?

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed.”

Attributed to Mark Twain, but the actual source is unknown.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I always prefer the newspaper to any other news source. It's impossible to wrap used cat litter in the Internet -- although that doesn't stop a lot of people from trying.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

For the record, if LizzieMaine leaves and never comes back I will have very little reason to return. Furthermore, I mat be forced to move to Maine so that I can continue to receive awsome tidbits of vintage information.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Apparently Maine has the largest forest cover of all the states so you probably wouldn't see the Lizz for the trees.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Problem with news & from any source, is that it's biased. I never read newspapers so I get my info from the TV or radio, sometimes I triple check on the net if there's an interesting story & then I strain it through my own biased filter.

 

[Fading Fast]

I had my stitches removed today. I'm recovering nicely -- only worked a 45 hour week last week, which for me is practically a vacation.

Glad to hear all is progressing well on the recovery front.

I switched to working for myself over four years ago, in part, to get away from the bureaucracy, politics and political correctness of Corporate America, but also to not have to work 80 hour weeks. I now work 40ish hours spread over seven days which feels like I'm not working anything close to a full-time job as my shortest weeks in Corporate America were 60 hours.

 

[Fading Fast]

Problem with news & from any source, is that it's biased. I never read newspapers so I get my info from the TV or radio, sometimes I triple check on the net if there's an interesting story & then I strain it through my own biased filter.

I agree all news is bias - some blatantly intentional, some unavoidable as editorial decisions have to be made - but the answer I go with is to read a lot from a lot of different sources including those that have biases opposed to my inclinations.

It's really fun to see a truly new story break, then to read the liberal slant and conservative slant as they are just forming around the new news. I have found by reading both biases, I usually feel I'm getting closer to the truth as it becomes easier to spot the "stretching it to fit my view" nonsense when you see how much twisting each side needs to do to fit the news into its narrative.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's interesting to look at the media from the Era with the same critical eye as is common today -- the biases and slants were just as obvious, despite the notion that some people have that somehow "media was neutral then." It very much was not, and the more of it you examine the more obvious it is. The Chicago Tribune was as much biased in one direction -- or even more so -- as The Daily Worker was in the other.

It wasn't just "news sources," either. All of the popular general-interest magazines of the Era had a perceptible slant -- for example, the Saturday Evening Post, home of Norman Rockwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earthworm Tractors, and Florian Slappey, was explicitly a house organ for the National Association of Manufacturers, publishing nothing in any part of the magazine, from its editorial columns to "Post Scripts", that contradicted the NAM party line. This was true from the early 1900s until the magazine folded in 1969, but was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, when Walter Fuller, president of the company that published the Post, was also the head of the NAM. When you read the Post, or when you cite articles from it as historical references, you have to keep this in mind: you're getting constant, straight-up hard-right propaganda along with your essays and your entertaintment.

There was no mainstream general-interest magazine of the Era that had an equivalent leftward slant, even though the political left in the 1930s was far more muscular than it would ever be again in the 20th Century. For left-oriented news and views you had to go to the rough-paper/low-advertising opinion journals like The Nation, the New Republic, or New Masses. The only general-interest magazine that had even a slight left-of-center orientation was Look, and then only for its first eight years or so.

Even comic books had a slant. Originally the DC line of comics were ardently pro-New Deal -- the earliest Superman stories portray the character as a tough working-class-oriented character right off a WPA poster, who spent his time fighting slumlords, war profiteers, and other Economic Royalists. He was also explicitly interventionist, which led the Nazi elements to condemn him as "a Jewish gangster." Siegel and Shuster weren't above having a little fun with that particular accusation.

But after the war, Siegel and Shuster had been forced out the door, the company's editorial point of view had moved militantly rightward, and Superman was about as radical as a bank auditor.

 

[sufidancer]

Disturbing realization, I started saving to late for my retirement YIKES!!
So what if I have to work until I'm 90. It gives one a incentive to stay relatively healthy.
And I don't have to worry about leaving large amounts of wealth behind.

Oh and great inventions of singular import? I'd say Einstein. Although it's true no man is a island and great strides where made on the backs of giants, it took Einstein to come up with General relativity. And before folks go lunging for teh googlez to counter I do not mean without Einstein humanity would of never figured it out, it just may have taken longer perhaps.

 

[LizzieMaine]

104 years ago, pitcher "Smokey Joe" Wood won 34 games for the Red Sox in the first season for Boston's Fenway Park.

In 1984, I saw "Smokey Joe" Wood throw a pitch at Fenway Park. There's just one degree of separation between me and baseball's Pleistocene Age.

 

[EngProf]

104 years ago, pitcher "Smokey Joe" Wood won 34 games for the Red Sox in the first season for Boston's Fenway Park.

In 1984, I saw "Smokey Joe" Wood throw a pitch at Fenway Park. There's just one degree of separation between me and baseball's Pleistocene Age.

This may be an idea for a new topic: Degrees of separation from famous people or events of the Golden Era.
In my case I knew a guy who was a machinist for Ford back in the 1920's and '30's who shook hands with Henry Ford when he came around to visit the workers. I always thought it was a bit interesting that I shook hands with a person who shook hands with Henry Ford.

 

[Fading Fast]

The oldest person I ever knew was my great grandfather who died at 106 (as best we can tell from the incomplete documentation) in 1974. Two thoughts I alway have about him was that he was born before the Transcontinental Railroad (the internet of its day) was completed and he came through Ellis Island (my connect to an iconic American institution and moment in history).

 

[BlueTrain]

I used to think my grandmother, who died in 1971--or was it 1970?--had been born in 1876, the year of both Custer's last stand, I believe it was, and the centennial of the United States. But I was disappointed to learn it was actually 1879, when nothing happened, as far as I know. Although we actually lived with her, she never spoke of anything from when she was younger. She lived through a lot more than I ever have, historically speaking, although I doubt she was aware of very much of it. None of her children served in the armed forces and none moved any further away from home than she did. In fact, all but one of her children lived in the same town and the exception was only seven miles away, which seemed much further at the time. You actually left town, drove through the countryside on a narrow, winding two-lane road, which it still is, to get to the next town, just like the Hardy Boys were always doing on their jaunts on their motorcycles. There was no waterfront in my hometown but there were plenty of swarthy and disreputable-looking characters. I'm sure my childhood would have been a lot more interesting had there been a waterfront and a bay.

 

[LizzieMaine]

This may be an idea for a new topic: Degrees of separation from famous people or events of the Golden Era.
In my case I knew a guy who was a machinist for Ford back in the 1920's and '30's who shook hands with Henry Ford when he came around to visit the workers. I always thought it was a bit interesting that I shook hands with a person who shook hands with Henry Ford.

I once sat down and chatted with Clyde Sukeforth, the baseball scout who brought Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn to meet with Branch Rickey and sign with the Dodgers. He was also the manager for Robinson's first two major league games. And he was the coach who advised that Ralph Branca be brought in to face Bobby Thomson in that 1951 playoff game. That's a lotta history for one humble old blueberry farmer from Maine.

I knew and interviewed the sons of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, radio's "Amos 'n' Andy," for a book I wrote about their fathers.

Back in the 90s I did some audio transfer work for Milton Berle and Buffalo Bob Smith. Miltie sent me an autographed photo for my trouble, and I heard third-hand that Bob said "thanks."

I was the last person to interview radio actress/writer Peg Lynch before she passed away last summer at the age of 99.

I often interact with the sons of painter Andrew Wyeth during various events at work -- and I once stood in line behind old Andy himself at the local hot dog stand. He liked his weenies "with everything."

Radio actress Florence Williams, who appeared in a Broadway show in the 1930s with Tallulah Bankhead, was a close personal friend of mine, and she loved to tell the story of how she had no idea what a "bisexual" was until Tallulah made a pass at her.