There are 2-3 months out of the summer that I want someone in our local Amish community to adopt me simply for their home-grown tomatoes. I will plow their fields all day long just for all the fresh and tasty 'maters I can eat. The rest of the year, I get roma tomatoes since they have the sharp, fresh taste that I like, and regular tomatoes just…don’t. Sometimes it’s a trick to find romas that don’t suck, though.
E.
Many of us still buy real wood furniture and finish it ourselves. Many companies sell good furniture made out of real wood that should last decades. I just bought and finished two dressers for my daughter and the price for both was only a little more than a single piece of crap veneered particleboard dresser at a furniture store. It was actually fun doing the finishing. My daughter helped me throughout the job and will always know that she helped to make her dressers. They are very good quality by today’s standards and should last her throughout her life so that eventually she could give them to her kids.
The more difficult job, was taking her old dresser that is 60 years old and had 15 layers of paint and I used a heat gun to take it almost all the way down to wood and repainted it for my son.
The crap furniture trend started before Wal-Marts and I doubt they contribute much to it. What percentage of furniture sales are they? I would tend to blame IKEA more for this issue.
Jim
Advantages to teaching at a school that has ROP Cabnet-Making. One of my seniors just made us a very nice oak/cedar/rosewood hope chest for our bedroom. Not cheap, but the neices and nephews will inherit it.
Remember when hookers were only $20? 
I miss basic tools and electronics that can be fixed or weren’t obsolete the year after you bought it. My portable CD player has no sound from the right speaker. I think a contact needs to be resoldered, but it’s cheaper to buy a new one than to repair it. My dad’s record player still works perfectly.
The old rotary dial phone in my mom’s basement still works. When my phone stopped working, they said they couldn’t repiar it because the “computer chip isn’t made anymore”. I only had the phone 18 months. The old phone in my mom’s basement is about 45 years old and if it broke, I could fix it myself.
I miss the days before planned obsolescence.
Childhood was better. We used to actually play pick-up baseball games. You’d set off on your bicycle and go house to house to the guys that you knew might want to play. When you figured you had enough, you’d go down the the park and grab the Little League field. We even had our own field that we made on a vacant field where the bases were bits of cloth and there was no fence. No umpires, if we couldn’t agree on safe or out we’d just do it over. Nowadays, the kids will touch a piece of sporting equipment only if it is scheduled and actually play the games only with adult officials.
Saturday morning TV. Ours was great, theirs sucks.
Air travel. You didn’t shop for a fare, the airlines competed on service. You didn’t need a rectal exam to board the plane and you could even escort the person you’re seeing off right to their seat.
Baseball. No DH. Fewer teams and better pitching. Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek and not Tim McCarver. You actually kept track of the count and the outs yourself, you didn’t need the thing at the top that shows the bases occupied and the count and the outs and the score and the network logo. It’s so packed with stuff you can’t read the score. You could go to Tiger Stadium and sit in the bleachers for $1. You could be a big spender and fork over $4 for a box seat, which were really in boxes (well, actually pipes but there were individual folding seats)
College. Tuition was $16 a credit for me. Football tickets cost students $4. It was a big deal for your team to get on television. There was only one set of blimps and it was mega big deal if it came overhead. You could go to the basketball arena the day of the game and get a ticket and have a row of bleachers to yourself. (though one Earvin Johnson soon changed that at my school).
No . . . nor do I remember the time when five dollars could buy enough marijuana to fill a shot glass, but I’ve read about it. [sigh] 
Looking back on all the things mentioned in this thread . . .
I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about any of it, is there? To bring back the Good Old Days, just in a few bits and pieces?
I go back to early early 70s on that. Like 1970. And that was never true. I remember a nickle being basically one doobie, and hard to get. Because dimes sold well anyway. And dimes were sold in these tiny little manilla packets. Maybe two doobs. Three or four, if you rolled 'em thin. Plus, it was shitty weed. All that said, the good stuff, like oaxacan or sensi, was sold in ounces and halfs. I think a half was thirty. (Twenty for friends of direct contacts).
Erm… uh… this was what I was told by people at the time.
The book I read that in was describing the 1950s, IIRC.
Oh. Sorry. I didn’t talk to people much back then.
I miss movies costing $2.50 for kids under 13! I loved that! I could go to a movie with $6.00 and get a popcorn, coke, and have some quarters to play video games afterwards!
I also miss watching movies on a screen so big you felt like you were in the movie. Multiplex’s make screens so small today, drives me nuts. I would rather watch movies at home, my TV is almost as big as some of those screens!
Word! A movie used to mean immersion into a thing larger than life. Something that surrounded you and sucked you in.
[Lewis Black] It was so big and heavy that if a puma came at me, I could kill it. [/LB]
Nah, You can’t blame Wal*Mart for that.
It’s just another example of the “Vimes’ boots” dilemma. Remember when the average middle-class family with kids got by on only one person’s income?
And the rosy idea that the developing world would one day be, you know, developed, instead of merely providing a nearly infinite supply of near-slave labor.
Not entirely true, because the “Saturday morning TV” we remember from our childhood no longer exists.
When I was a little rugrat, there were three networks, and they actively competed for the Saturday morning interest of children. Every network had a 6-to-11 lineup designed to suck you in and keep you glued. A lot of it was crap, but by God, it was our crap, and the parents let us have it, for those few hours a week. It was nirvana.
And then came Fox, the Fourth Network. Fox wanted kid viewers, so they started airing cartoons in afternoon time slots, when kids were coming home from school. This was the era when “latch-key kid” was entering the common lexicon, and most of us got home before our parents did. We found ourselves with a few unsupervised hours to spend on something other than homework. Thanks to Fox, we had cartoons every day from 3 to 5, so our weekly mega-dose didn’t matter quite as much.
Then cable and satellite TV exploded, and there were channels that were entirely devoted to cartoons, all day long. The networks weren’t interested in competing with that. Why should NBC struggle to come up with cartoons that can beat out the Cartoon Network, Boomerang, Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, Toon Disney, NICKToons, and whatever else is out there? So, quietly, the Saturday morning cartoon fests dwindled from the entire morning to an hour or two, and finally to nothing. Most of the networks now just show weekend editions of their morning weekday news shows during the Saturday morning timeslot. There ain’t no “Saturday morning TV” anymore.
I’m not really sure where Sesame Street went wrong, but I do know that ADHD is the problem. Actually, I think it’s the perception of and over-concern about ADHD that’s the problem. Think back to when Sesame Street was first produced: TV was booming, and because kids watched it a lot, there was a strong push to make it educational. A group of television producers and educators had noticed that kids were learning from TV, but what they were learning was catchy commercial jingles. The attention span of children didn’t hold to an hour-long program, but in fun little bites, they learned new things very quickly. So, the reasoning went, let’s make a show that’s styled a lot like an advertisement, broken up into little commercial-like segments. But, instead of selling snacks or board games, we’ll sell the alphabet and numbers and other pre-school concepts to get kids ready for school! It was freakin’ brilliant. Kids gobbled it up like popcorn.
Now, move to the modern era. Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder seems to be everywhere. Kids are being prescribed drugs so that they can pay attention in school. What the heck is going on? Must be the media they watch, say some; all those neat little commercials weren’t just formatting the information in a way that meshes better with kids’ learning styles, they were actually reinforcing bad habits and creating an inability to pay attention for long spans. Well, to fix that, we need to muck about with the format that has worked for 25 years: instead of breaking up the “street” segments over the course of an hour-long show, we’ll have one long segment at the start, about 20 minutes or so. Then in the middle, maybe a few of the fun interludes and cartoons, but not too many. And we’ll give the last 25 minutes to Elmo, since the kids love him so much.
So, that’s where we are now. Sesame Street lost its edge because they strayed from the original concept. And of course because they lost the immeasurable talents of Jim Henson on the same day we all did.
I want to say in closing, though, that I don’t think that Elmo is as evil as most seem to. He’s squeaky and annoying, true, but that’s infinitely preferable, in my book, to Telly. And before Elmo came along, the show was in real danger of becoming Telly-centered, which would have sucked even more. Telly is a spineless whimpering nimrod who’s afraid of his own shadow; kids raised on that would be twitchy twerps who never go outside.
We used to have bees.
JFK BLOWN AWAY! What else do I have to say?
Ahem. Sorry.