My April 1947 Seventeen magazine includes some cute rhymes to help teens be better human beings. The threat of a $100.02 fine (or $1,212 today, adjusted for inflation) should prove effective. I’ve never paid a library fine, nor a Blockbuster fee, as I try to live my life by the rules. But I can’t imagine anyone accruing over a thousand dollars in library fees, no?
This next image warns against tardiness, a reprehensible character flaw.
I am reminded of the chorus to Genesis’ “Misunderstanding.”
There must be some misunderstanding There must be some kind of mistake I was waiting in the rain for hours You were late
Lastly, we see a milkman at sunrise, stumbling upon a woman who has forgotten her key, but somehow managed to locate a fluffy pillow.
If this was geared toward 1940s teens, I’m not sure of the implications. Surely not the walk of shame. Couldn’t she simply have knocked on the door and had her parents open it? I don’t get it.
I don’t know anything about machines, so that looks like a cross between one of my mixing bowls (which reminds me, I need to make tuna salad tonight) and a hubcap, next to some cans of motor oil. It is, in fact, a solar-powered steam engine built by noted astrophysicist Dr. Charles G. Abbot. As any fool can see, the reflector focuses the sun’s rays on the boiler tube, which generates steam that drives the tiny engine. No duh.
But Abbot was smarter than the whole lot of us, retiring as both the director of the Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory, as well as the first Smithsonian Secretary not to die in office. Furthermore, it appeared that he might never die out of office, as the bloke who was already 76 in the above image still yet had another quarter century to fiddle around with gadgets. He spent over 40 years developing and maintaining solar monitoring systems as his mission in life. Here you see him (in an almost Chester Conklin mustache) with his silver-disc pyrheliometer, which measured direct beam solar irradiance.
He invented the solar cooker, which was first built at Mount Wilson Observatory, the solar boiler, and held fifteen other patents related to solar energy. At 96, he was still going strong, holding what appears to be an extensive CVS receipt, but is actually a print-out of solar observations.
Blah. Everything tastes like cardboard, which is to say, almost nothing. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes, you’ll get an inkling of salt or of sour, but without context of other flavors, it’s just a nasty taste on your tongue. So you look like mopey Barbara here, a four-year-old hybrid gibbon, back in September of 1948, when this National Geographic image came out.
You might hate on zoos, but Barbara’s mother decided she wasn’t too keen on her offspring and refused to feed her. So without the keeper to spoon feed her, she would have certainly perished. Like a human, she sucked her thumb and played with a rattle. And I imagine she took that bottle there as well.
Cheryl gets a back-to-school perm in the early 50s, looking positively mortified by the tentacles of the electric permanent wave machine, which brings to mind an early prototype of R2D2. Twin sister Carol had hers done as well, and the results speak for themselves.
Ever since last month’s ice storm, the surviving birds have been in search of food. Normally at this time of year, trees would be budding, flowers blooming in the sea of verdant spring to which we are accustomed. Not this year. Everything is dead or brown. Or both. Our palm tree lost all its dozen fronds. Our oaks remain frozen in time, covered in ugly brown leaves that will not fall. The earth itself doesn’t know what season it is. It’s the ugliest I’ve ever seen Texas in my life because it was the coldest and the iciest it had ever been.
However, the cottonwood tree has begun putting out these yellow pods, for which the birds have gone crazy.
I’ve never seen so many birds on the branches of our cottonwood before. They stay for several minutes, then fly off, just as another drove comes to feast.
I do hope things will soon return to normal, in every sense of the word.
Wondering why you’ve never heard of Tanganyika? Well, much like Istanbul was Constantinople, Tanganyika is now Tanzania. You’ve heard of that, yes? As stated in this editorial, triplets were unusual in Africa. Frankly, triplets are always unusual. But what’s most unusual is a white couple giving birth to black triplets. That happened.
How? Well, much like the recent news that Sofía Vergara will not allow her frozen embryos with former lover Nick Loeb to ever grow into human beings, couples with fertility problems often have leftover embryos after successful in vitro. Some are donated to research and some, like Sofia’s, will die. The Halberts, missionaries who had previously adopted two children of color, decided to implant leftover embryos from the National Embryo Donation Center into Rachel’s uterus. It took! And took, and took. She delivered triplets of her own, and now they are a happy family of five.
It’s funny how ideology goes back and forth: margarine is better than butter, then butter is better than margarine. Egg yolks are good, then they’re bad. Beer is better in bottles, then cans, then back to bottles. But in June of 1938, the consensus was cans were cool. Cans, you see, did not expose beer to harmful light.
It’s July of 1936 on Boston’s Revere Beach, populated with exuberant young people of presumably many different ethnicities and many immigrant groups. It should make you smile to see such joy. “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15). However, with today’s skewed lens, it might immediately trigger folks who see too much white, lumping all of these faces into one category. Diversity is present in many ways. Retrain your brain to stop being offended. Stop being triggered. I thought judging by skin color was what we were trying not to do 60 years ago. I seem to recall a “content of their character” speech by an inspiring orator who would have been horrified by the present agenda, and how HARD IT IS TRYING to create more and more division. MLK wanted us to focus less on skin color, while today’s leadership wants us to focus 24/7 on skin color. Pedophiles, adulterers, rapists, terrorists? Turn the other way. But too little melanin? You’re the problem.
Frankly, I can’t believe this beach is even still called Revere Beach, since I’m pretty sure Paul Revere was white. His father was a French Huguenot, and that is precisely the kind of European white that you are not allowed to be. Perhaps one will soon be able to reassign or reidentify their ancestry, in essence, lie or pretend. You can imagine how hard this is on me, able only to celebrate my Cuban half, because being hispanic is celebratable, but not my Scotch-Irish half, because poor Irish folks were pink and clearly oppressors.
First off, the sins of your fathers are not your sins. Secondly, most of your fathers are being blamed for sins they never even committed, by folks who aren’t super clear on what a sin actually is. Thirdly, a father is different than a mother and has different roles to play because men and women are inherently different and balance each other out. No gender is better (out of the two that exist), and no race is superior out of the myriad that exist.
You can also imagine how hard this 2021 brainwashing is on me, knowing my love for Coke, oft-chronicled on this blog, while not endorsing their recent “be less white” training. It seems inconsistent in this world of, “You do you and let your freak flag fly,” but the truth is–only some of you can do you. And God help you if you’re a white man (I shudder to even type it) because you are exactly everything that was wrong with the former Mr. Potato Head. Maleness is shameful, and the neutering is going exactly as planned, Mein Führer. If penises are offensive now, which was only the implication of Mr. Starch Head, not the physical manifestation, then how long until the Berenstain Bears go the way of poor Dr. Seuss? After all, they DO DECLARE the reality of two genders.
At least they are brown and not polar white, like the Coke beast, which is polar-izing. Guess what, kids? Not everyone gets to be a mother, and not everyone gets to be a father, no matter how much you mutilate your body. Chromosomes tell the truth. Do we want to be authentic, or do we want to make up stories about ourselves and create “personal narratives”? Lies. How long before the cancel culture agenda takes out icons like Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross and Steve Irwin? Oh, it won’t be long, folks. History is being retold. So I’ll keep sharing these pics from the past with the reality of the circumstances before it is deleted or altered to fit the current PC agenda.
This is a picture of happy beach-goers smack dab in the middle of the Depression, trying their damnedest to enjoy life despite awful circumstances, kind of like what we’ve been doing for the last year. Most of them rented their swimsuits from the city, who laundered more than 100,000 suits that Sunday. Most of them descended from hardworking immigrants who came to this country, searching for freedom from socialist or communist or oppressive countries that devalued them. Actually, just posing for this shot was a new freedom, because even visiting the beach on a Sunday was, at one point, a crime. So just to be clear, this was not a white supremacist rally. It was not a group of Italians gathering to decide how to destroy their Polish neighbors. It was not insurrectionists storming the lifeguard’s chair. It was not a picture full of hate because most Americans do not carry hate in their hearts. Sorry to upset you, media, but we don’t. We don’t use hate speech and we don’t hate any skin color and we base our judgments on whether people are kind or whether they are jerks. Don’t fall for the pathetic attempts to divide. Don’t hate yourself for the way God knit you in your mother’s womb. He knew what He was doing when He made you, and that is nothing for which to apologize.
I Don't Get It 