I’ll refer you to Wikipedia. The article explains.
We had a wringer washer when I was a kid (electric, not hand-cranked). My parents traded it in on an automatic, and the old one sat on the loading dock of the hardware store for months … until the store burned down. That washer was the only thing left.
Decency,kindness,peace,and manners. If you do you’re in luck. I guess I’m just surrounded by assholes all the time.
I had a black and white Polaroid camera that you not only had to peel the print off the negative, you also had to spread a liquid coating on the print to protect it.
Six or so years ago I realized I was taking more bad checks than the national average, and a high percentage were never paid. I decided I’d rather lose some business than accept checks. Within six months my competitors followed suit.
Polaroid should stick with cameras. A woman I know bought a little speaker, Polaroid brand, from BigLots. The third time she plugged her usb cable into the speaker the connection failed. She returned the speaker for a new one, which was dead right outa the box. The third try was defective; staticky. She didn’t even bother returning it.
re: Arcades
I think a big reason why arcades have gone out of style is that no one makes arcade games anymore, it’s all gone to consoles. I remember when my mall had an arcade I would go there so I could play things like Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct (!), Primal Rage (!!), The X-Men game (!!!) and things like Silent Scope. Now when I want to play these I just download them to my Playstation.
The closest thing to arcades we have now are Chuck e Cheese’s and Dave and Busters. Any new games will go straight there.
Oh, there is also the wonder known as Disneyquest, that’s another place with the older arcade games
Thank you much, folks.
My mom had to learn semaphore in Girl Guides back in the 50’s. I never understood when you’d use that in real life.
Do you guys remember Participaction Days? That one day in school (in Canada, anyway) when you had to do all these physical fitness tests and earned either a Bronze, Silver, or Gold patch? There was one higher than Gold, I forget what it was called, and if you really crapped out you got the dreaded “pin.” I know they stopped doing that for years but didn’t they revive it recently?
Most of the time I can’t see jackshit anyway (too much cloud cover. I do always watch on takeoffs and landings. But, when I am in the air, it’s very pretty, but I can’t tell one thing from another. It just looks like nice little checkerboards, or trees, or rolling plains. And that gets boring pretty quick.
I haven’t seen stuff from the air enough - despite having flown a lot - to really recognize it.
How about shorthand? or, when I got to this office, the admin had a “tickler” file. I’d never heard of such a thing, despite being a very good admin.
Which can be a good thing, too: on one flight, I could see a circular rainbow on the cloud cover tracking along with us.
The worst, though, was a red-eye out of Seattle about sixteen or seventeen years ago. I had a port-side window seat that gave me a perfect view of Hale-Bopp. I could barely stop looking at that thing, watched it slowly turn toward the sunrise as we came into Minneapolis. Bad because the window was a tad too low for me, I got a sore neck.
Fuji Instax cameras are for all intents and purposes identical to older Polaroid cameras, and they’re sold, along with their film in Wal-Marts, Michael’s and other places like that. I think the main market is for scrapbookers and other crafters to put little photos in their stuff without having to get a digital photo, rescale it, print it, etc… Their photos are maybe 1.5" x 2" or so, so not full 3"x3" Polaroid size.
We had a photography center at work for a while and one day one of the guys took the Polaroid-type film like that and put it under his arm (in the pit area) while it processed. Took me right back to when I was a kid and my father did that for all the family pictures – right into the pit it went until the magic moment when he peeled it.
Anytime I break out the medium format camera. It’s either that or send the roll off by mail for developing (remember that?).
I still have my dad’s classic Graflex SpeedGraphic, as well as the enlarger and perhaps some trays and cans for developing. I think my brother may have taken some shots with it, but I cannot remember doing so myself. We only ever developed and printed B&W in the closet (darkroom) in the basement, color was too finicky.
The delayed gratification of “getting your pictures back” was fun in some ways. You would vaguely forget the details of a trip or event (having not immediately seen them, posted them and shared them) and have a nice little trip back flipping through the prints.
I’d love to have a Graflex, or even a Singer. IIRC, the sewing-machine company bought Graflex but killed the camera soon after. I bet heads rolled for that purchase.
Buncha years ago, while visiting relatives in northern Alabama, my Dad and I took the Jack Daniels distillery tour in Lynchburg, Tenn. At one point, they take a group picture near the charcoal pit and mail you a copy to your address. We forgot all about it, then 2 or 3 years later the pic arrives in the mail. Must have been pasted to the back of The Post-turtle.
I wish we had known about all these Polaroid alternatives when we were doing the show!
I’ll freely admit that the view tend to more interesting in lumpy terrain than in the flatlands. But the US has plenty on the former, principally - but by no means exclusively - in the west.
I once was on a flight that crossed southern Greenland on a rare clear day, presenting terrain that is well beyond spectacular. And again, almost no one could be bothered to look at it.