A thousand transistors! Amazing.
“All three channels - and PBS”
The beaded curtain was to hide the waterbed.
Not in the 1960s. In the '60s, vacuum tubes were old and lame. Transistors were the new thing, and “tiny” was the point. In truest comic book logic, if a transistor could turn this into this, then surely it could turn this into this.
Wow, i feel…atypical. i grew up with two staircases, the local Chinese restaurant we went to every week had a bead curtain (as did a friend), and i made volcanoes out of playdough and filled them with baking soda and vinegar to make them erupt. It was a toy, not a science project. Oh, and if i take a nap, i leave my bra on. I certainly don’t remove my bra when i get home. Maybe my boycott of bras with underwires is related to my not feeling the need to take them off. What i take off is shoes. I got used to not wearing shoes during the pandemic, and now i find them very restrictive any uncomfortable.
After watching my fiancée accomplish the bra trick through a long-sleeve shirt and a winter coat, I accepted my second-place status in the relationship.
I was going to mention the newish trope I see all the time where someone sends a text, then they see that 3-dot animation meaning the person on the other end is composing a text back. Then the animation suddenly stops, meaning the other person changed their mind about texting back. Leaving the person anticipating the text disappointed or worried.
Then I realized that’s totally happened to me before.
At an awful lot of science fairs, the line gets blurry.
Anything will get blurry if you foam enough vinegar+baking soda all over it.
You just aren’t old enough.
“Guess Your Weight” booths at Carnivals.
I don’t know how widespread they were in the 50s but I imagine once people started to regularly get past 200 pounds it became unprofitable since before with the +/- 10 pounds margin of error you could pretty much guess what a skinny man or woman’s weight was pretty easily.
I saw one of those at a parking-lot carnival and the guy was… not skilled – he missed about a third of the time. However I noticed the stuffed animals he was giving away probably wholesaled for less than the fee paid to participate.
I’ve seen “Guess your name” booths that employed the same business strategy.
And:
Yeah, you pay $2 or $3 to have your weight guessed, and if they guess wrong you get a prize worth 25 cents and walk away feeling like you “won”.
I have a good friend who is a retired law officer. He said that during his 20 years of public contact, he drew his gun once, and didn’t have to shoot.
Pretty much this. A friend worked in a carnival for many years–mainly because his family owned it–and he got a good look at the business side of the operation, thanks to the family ownership.
They’d buy prizes in bulk from a supply house (usually the Rhode Island Novelty Company), and by buying in bulk, would get a good price per individual prize. Say they bought 100 teddy bears for $1 each. Each bear is a prize in a carnival game that costs $1 per play. Most people won’t win on their first try, but perhaps after five or ten tries, they do, and they win a teddy bear. Winners are happy while revenue to the carnival is $5 to $10 for a bear that cost the carnival $1, so the carnival is happy too. And of course, some people will play, but never win, which is free money to the carnival.
My friend says that for every $100 they spent on prizes, they could realize $500 to $1000 or more in revenue. Of course, it’s not pure profit, as the carnival had expenses to pay (wages, fees, maintenance, etc.), but it was the buying of prizes in bulk at a minimal cost per prize that was a big factor in helping make sure that expenses could be covered and profits could be realized.
Most officers never even pull their guns, and if they do and use them, it’s usually to shoot an injured animal.
Can confirm. I hit a black cow late at night and the trooper that responded shot it in the head with his AR-15. (Might have been an M16 but I doubt it.)