Perhaps the biggest change is young people marrying later, if at all. Used to be at least a couple of couples would get married soon after high school. Now my nephews are still single in their thirties. A longer childhood, I suppose. I am happy to see more “special needs” people out and about in America. I am proud we finally have made public infrastructure more accessible. Here in Saudi a person is a wheelchair is an unusual sight. Hunting has died out, or at least it has in my suburban neck of the woods. I have not “gotten my deer” in thirty years.
I am disappointed that housing in the US is still mostly segregated by race. I have few neighbors not of my ethnic group. I am also sorry to report my neighborhood in a zoning monoculture. Kids cannot walk to the local store or even to school as I did.
I could walk down Haight Street and hear chants of “speed, acid, lids… speed, acid, lids” every few steps. No more.
To Melbourne and his innocence on the subject of talking petrol bowsers…I have come across them in Brisbane. They exactly as hateable as you fear. All intrusive, facile and useless as you expect, wrapped in that rich, fruity voice of cinema ad voiceover guys.
My three offerings re the OP:
-
Chokes on cars.
-
Rust on cars. They all used to have rust at the bottom of the doors after a very few years. You took a magnet to buy a car which you ran along the bottoms of doors to check if repairs had been made cheaply with filling compound. I have driven my current car through seawater. Clean as a whistle.
-
The authorial voice of the print media. Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff described the authorial voice of the media as a “proper Victorian gent”. I live in a town where the dominant newspaper is a Murdoch rag. No-one, apparently, ever has respectful and polite differences of view. The only vocabulary for disagreement is “slamming” and “blasting”. And all stories are sprinkled with trigger words, like “taxpayer” and “secret”. “Twenty million dollars spent on new buses” is an anodyne story. But by the magic of adding one word - “Twenty million taxpayer dollars spent on new buses”, no new information is provided, but somehow the story is now a sneer at the spendthrift bureaucracy at City Hall. Same with the word “secret”. Its presence in a story is designed to trigger paranoia and recreational outrage, but all it usually means is that the person or institution didn’t trouble to make a press release about it.
It is all deeply annoying and exhausting to read, and coarse a discourse. I have no problem with newspapers thundering when it is warranted, but every anodyne story is presented this way.
Albert Maysles said that “Tyranny is the deliberate destruction of nuance”. When every story is a slamming or a blasting or snide editorialising, nuance is impossible. It wasn’t always like this.
(Not the 1970s - 80s but perhaps relevant to us anyway…)
ISTM when mentioning a poster here by name, it used to be customary to use boldface, but that practice seems to have faded.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
I had 310 for 26 years, and only changed it when I finally switched to another carrier.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
Didn’t you try the park? 
At least it must be easy enough to find cannabis now, and legally at that.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
Yeah, but do people still sell it by the lid?
The decrease in the membership of many associations is discussed in the 2000 book Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam.
That’s an ounce. At the dispensary I usually buy grams, but I can buy 3.5 gram packages which are 1/8 of an ounce. Pennsylvania legal weed goes for roughly $20 a gram, $60 for 3.5 grams.
It was called a “lid” because sellers used the lid of a mayonnaise jar to measure it. Do any marijuana sellers still use the term?
Regarding lids, a lid was supposed to be about an ounce of MJ., and this was about a liter in volume, hence “lid”. In effect, it was the whole mayonnaise jar, not just the lid. Back in the day a lot of pot on the market was low grade schwag and a jarful of that wasn’t necessarily expensive.
I hesitate to provide a cite for this due to board rules with respect to federal law, but it’s easy enough to Google for.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
No.
Here’s another car thing: Flat tires are extremely rare now. It used to be that a flat tire was a routine thing - not every day or every week, but common enough that it wasn’t a noteworthy occasion. You expected pretty much every man to know how to change a tire without hesitation, and women who weren’t ‘traditional’ would too. Now they’re just not as common, and even nail punctures tend to be slow leaks that give you plenty of time to get to a tire shop. Not only do most people not have experience changing a tire, but cars have moved down to the donut and many now don’t have a spare at all.
Truth, every word. I never have flats any more (I’m a lot more likely to get a “low tire” warning from the sensors failing over time) but that was one of the first car maintenance skills one learned as a teen in the seventies’ countryside. And some of those memories are pretty ugly. I’m still worried about getting flat tires because of my bad old rebuilt knees but they’re surely less likely to happen now.
Or the little mini-tire. My gripe is the toy-like lug wrench provided is too small and inadequate to the job of breaking the lugs loose or re torquing them properly. I long for the massive cross-shaped cast-iron lug wrenches of yore that would loosen a nut with a gentle twist.
I have one of those big cross-shaped lug wrenches in my trunk. Actually, it was mt Dad’s lug wrench, which I “appropriated” when I was a teenager. At some point I threw it into the trunk of my car thinking it might come in handy someday, and it just stayed there when I left for college, and got moved to the trunks of subsequent new cars.
And it just hit me today reading this thread that having that lug wrench in my trunk now is completely useless. My car is one of those that doesn’t even have a spare tire, just an electric compressor and a can of sealant. So if I did get a flat there would be no reason to remove the tire from the car. Come to think of it the car doesn’t have a jack either, so I don’t even have a means of raising the car to get he tire off.
So I am on the road up to the pass, where it climbs along the side of the big deep valley between the tall foothills, and I fail to spot a rock in the road, about the size of a loaf of bread. My tire is toast, and the rim itself is done banged up good. No cell reception up here, and the nearest place I can have my car towed is about sixty miles away, once someone comes along willing to stop and help me. That setup you describe is going to help me real good.
And of course, these days more and more cars are going to those “run flat” tires with the 3" sidewalls, which might survive a bagel-sized rock, if you are lucky.
I may have mentioned this before, but in another online community I belong to the old meaning of narc (“drug enforcement officer”) has been completely supplanted by “narcissist”. This troubles my linguistic sensibilities because, since the original word has the /s/ sound, how do you pronounce it? Narse? But the people using the word write “narcs” for the plural so that can’t be right…
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk