And you can pick up the MSG at an Asian grocery store.
e: and at some regular grocery stores.
Not to mention the availability of natural, organic and high end products to boot. If I wanted organic produce in the 1970s, I’d either have to grow it myself, or travel to a commune in Vermont to get it. I certainly wouldn’t find it at the health food stores of the era, which didn’t have much more than vitamins and bulk grains.
Remember frozen food, frozen pizza and “TV dinners” from the 1970? The food you’ll find today in the freezer aisle is a few orders of magnitude better than in even the recent past.
My mind is cast back to an era when getting an orange at Christmas was considered a big deal. It was all warm and simple and homy and virtuous, but it was still a god damned fruit and it was only great in comparison to the preserves and root vegetables and venison* you were living on the rest of that season. Now I can eat mangoes any time I want and I’m damn grateful for the opportunity.
*(Yes, I like preserves and root vegetables and venison. I don’t like dietary monotony.)
Even home cooking has gotten better, now that the people who boil it 'till it’s mush and boil it some more and boil the remains are largely cooking for themselves. Aided by modern grocery stores (yes, even Wal-Mart) and modern cooking shows (yes, even Rachel Ray) the American palate has been both broadened and improved immeasurably.
Don’t get me started on how much better home computers are these days. Even if you ignore the vast improvements in RAM, disks, and CPUs, we no longer have to deal with IRQ conflicts or jumpers or misbehaved programs that squat on the hardware directly and can’t be dislodged short of rebooting. We’ve even gotten rid of those slow, unreliable floppies in favor of thumb drives. (Floppies were always of variable quality, and I think the worst ones were made in the late 1990s when it was clear they were on their way out. However, even in the golden age of the format they were physically fragile and sometimes could only be read reliably by a single mis-aligned floppy drive.)
Nah, it’s been gone for years (hey, some parts of the past were better!) but reruns play now and then, and it’s probably at comedynetwork.ca or something.
Another improvement in the world of medicine: diabetes treatment. Both of my grandmothers were dependent on injected insulin that was pretty much a crapshoot to know what the correct dosage should be. The only home test for blood sugar available was litmus test strips for your urine. These were only accurate insomuch as they told you that you had a high enough blood glucose that the sugar spilled over into your urine - well above a healthy blood sugar level. They both kept candy around for the inevitible low blood sugar caused by taking too much insulin.
I have a handy-dandy little meter that tells me in 10 seconds what they had to wait a couple of days for the blood tests to come back from the lab after a doctor’s visit. I have oral meds that are light years from what was available back then. With good care, I stand a much better chance of keeping my vision, toes and kidney function up into my senior years and having more of those to look forward at that.
No, if I have to have diabetes, I sure as hell am glad that it wasn’t in the good old days.
That clip made me smile
:rolleyes:
Also:
- My landlord is far less likely to try to kick me out of my house for being gay.
- If he did try, I can call the wrath of the Commission des droits de la personne on his ass.
- Same re. applying for a job.
- I’m also not going to get arrested for it.
- Or put in an insane asylum.
I appreciate these things very, very, very, very much.
You would be amazed at how many younger kids these days have no idea how things were just a few decades ago. They take all of what you just mentioned for granted. Even the straight kids in my college classes don’t see what the big deal is, and 99% of them see no reason to ban Gay marriage. I suppose that is a good thing, but how quickly people forget.
I can still remember as a kid seeing two water fountains at the train station and my mother explaining that one used to be for colored people and the other was for whites. It is like those days never existed anymore…and yet, it too was a huge struggle that caused immeasurable grief.
Well, this being Montreal, you could be holding daily human sacrifices and he’d still have to fight to evict you.
Today we are awaiting what we are told will be a large snowstorm, starting tonight, continuing through most of the day tomorrow. We bitch about the weather forecasters when they are wrong, but it wasn’t that long ago when monster hurricanes, blizzards, what have you, were completely unexpected upon arrival, and thus deadly.
When I was a child, we saw a weatherman on TV called, I kid you not, Uncle Weatherbee. He would draw on a map to show the reported high and low barometer settings, draw in funny jiggly lines with pointy or curved edges to show warm fronts and cold fronts, and explain what it all meant. My dad and I both found it interesting, and it gave folks a whole lot more info than they would have had a few decades before.
Now, even if the snowstorm misses us, we can see the satellite photos showing us exactly where it is snowing and raining, as well as radar maps. I guess a hundred or so years ago some information about a storm heading up the coast could be sent by phone and telegraph, but two hundred years ago you could only make a reasonable estimate based on a dropping barometer, certain cloud formations, and so on. Hurricane Katrina was really, really bad. Can you imagine if there had been no warning whatsoever? Jeez.
IME, people get used to almost anything, and pretty fast, too. The Bad Old Days weren’t nearly as bad as this thread would make one think. I’ve “roughed it” often and long enough to know that, e.g. cooking everything over open fire, sleeping outdoors in midwinter between deerskins, wiping one’s butt with icy sphagnum moss and eating the same, unseasoned food all week - and just once a day at that - is no big deal once the initial culture shock wears off. You laugh and love and get morning wood just the same.
People set their expectations according to what they’re used to. In the bad old days being cold was normal, getting warm was a nice bonus. Being hungry was normal, getting a warm meal was a special treat. We are tough critters adapted to hardship. The real advances in the medical field have truly improved life. But relatives dying from treatable illness, tooth ache turning into life-threatening infection etc. are absolutely terrifying to us in part because they aren’t expected. In a world where they’re a common occurence, less so.
And all married couples slept in twin beds. I know that for a fact, I saw it on Leave It to Beaver.
My parents didn’t, but they must have been preeverts. 
Toxylon, you’re right that we can get used to anything, and we don’t miss what we never had. However:
When I was a small child my dad was nearly killed in a car accident. Needless to say it was decades pre-seatbelt. Part of his convalescence was during one of the hottest summers in these parts in quite some time. He had many broken bones, and had casts and traction slings and Og knows what. Imagine being in encased in plaster and there being no air conditioning! Yukko. The nurses did their best to help him be more comfortable by having a fan nearby that blew over a slab of ice. Then when he was near to getting well, he developed hepatitis, almost certainly from an insufficiently sterilized needle. Not to say that couldn’t happen now, but I bet it’s much less likely.
I’m so old that when I had an operation when I was 10, they used *** ether*** to put me under for the operation.
Ether!!! Barf inducing ether!! With a mask! And dripping liquid!!
They don’t use that any more, do they??
The same stuff they used in the Civil War and WWI!
AFAIK nobody uses actual ether any more. Today’s general anaesthetics are worlds improved just within the last couple of decades. The first time I had GA, I remember struggling to come out of it, like I was clawing my way out of a black pit that was trying to suck me back in. I thought I was going to die. The last couple of times it was just lights out - nothing - lights on - oh, two hours have elapsed.
My mom told me that when she was giving birth there was a *rule *, or at least a standard procedure, that women in labor were to be anaesthetized. She didn’t need it. My sister was mostly born before they could get the ether mask out. But they put her out anyway because, um, because that’s what the procedure was. So for no valid reason at all she had to go through puking and whatnot.
If you will look at any old black and white movie made before 1950, (I call them Men With Hats movies), the men did, indeed, wear suits, ties, and hats all the time - to the movies, to the park, to a carnival. Only working class men and farmers dressed casually, but even they dressed up when they went into town. That was the uniform of the day, there wasn’t much ‘casual wear’, and it wasn’t until after WWII and later that jeans, tee shirts, and loss of fedoras came about…As for women, hell, yeah, losing the girdle, white gloves, and stockings was sheer heaven! What on earth did they do back then, when air conditioning wasn’t very prevalent? What on earth did they do back in olden times when women wore corsets, layers of petticoats, and a heavy long sleeved dress all year round??? I always wonder what Atlanta summers were like for Scarlett O’Hara - not to mention the poor slaves, but I’ll bet even they wore corsets. That was the uniform of the day for women.
I am grateful every single day for the internet. Anything I care to research is right at my fingertips. Back in days of old, if I wanted a recipe, I’d have to go to the library and look up cookbooks in the card catalog. If I wanted to know the lyrics to a song on the radio, I’d have to go to the drugstore, search for a magazine that had lyrics to popular songs (and they did have such magazines, but NOT all the time!). Movie reviews? No such thing, really - we all just ‘went to the movies’ and watched anything on the screen, good, bad or indifferent. Now I can read a hundred reviews and opinions and spend my $10 wisely!
It is less likely these days because someone would be sued. I know that people are down on lawsuits now and that I’ll be treated to stories of how much better things were before all the ‘frivolous’ lawsuits, but they do prevent really stupid mistakes because they encourage everyone to be careful.
As for your other post: It seems the weatherman was Tex Antoine and “Uncle Weatherbee” was his wooden sidekick:
Oh, yeah: The Internet, the Web, and Google are all much better than anything we’ve ever had before. 
Yeah, that’s exactly who it was. Tex Antoine. I didn’t know about him being fired; when that happened I was probably paying attention to Other Things.
And you’re right about how in some cases institutions are more careful because of the danger of a lawsuit. In my dad’s case, it would probably have been justified. However, given that (a) he and my mom were just glad he survived, (b) they would not have been knowledgeable about that sort of thing and © he also got enough money from the bus company whose driver ran him off the road to pay cash for a new house three times the size of their little tract home, they didn’t.
I think generally things are better now. However, I think the quality of the environment was somewhat better in the “good old days”, with less traffic, congestion, and development. To me more people = less quality of life.
My grandmother speaks of her father’s farm needing nothing from the grocery store except coffee and sugar, and they usually traded eggs or other farm produce for that. I think it’s great to be self-sufficient like that, although they had to have 6 or 7 kids to keep up with everything.
Want to know how bad it was in the old days? You had to watch the 10 o’clock news–the godawful, happy-talk, drivel-filled local ten o’clock news–because it was the only way to get sports scores.
If you missed the news, you had to wait until the next morning’s newspaper. Unless the game was played on the West Coast, in which case you had to wait until the second following morning newspaper.