How I Feel When We Get AARP Mail
Category: 1980s
Rival Palm Readers Go Head To Head
Basting Belle Of The Blast
It’s April 1983, and Terri Garlitz is basting lamb during San Angelo’s annual Lamblast, while “Buffalo Hunters” look on. The event takes place at the Goodfellow Air Force Base on Lake Nasworthy, with its can’t-miss infamous leg of lamb contest, as well as games and beauty contests. The Cole Younger Band is coming down from Abilene to start the cookoff with a bang, so everyone, head out to the San Angelo Coliseum for both country and western dancing. Bring your aviators, fringed jackets, and cowboy hats. Yee-haw!
P.S. The Cole Younger Band currently has 14 monthly listeners on Spotify, so they’re evidently still kind of a big deal…
And Yet, What’s Most Disturbing Is Those Vertical Blinds
You guys, I don’t usually share images as recent as only 30-something years old, which I’m guessing this is, but we need to talk about this.
Discounting the obvious crimes of hair and use of cigarettes (and LENGTH of cigarettes; you’ve come a long, long, LONG way, baby), and plaid vest that somehow makes her more street than lumberjack, or even simply the use of THIS as their Christmas card, what bothers me most is those blinds. I remember those blinds in my first years of apartment dwelling. The way they never moved in synchronicity like Venetian blinds or their superior window cousin, plantation shutters. Just try and pull them to the side. You can already hear the swishing and slamming of cheap plastic blind crashing into cheap plastic blind. Erratic! Random!
And oh, what fun to dust them! And even better, what their very existence oft implied, which was sliding glass doors. Who doesn’t love the sliding glass door? You know, the one that only slides seamlessly for a month before catching and stuttering. Or it does that diagonal thing, where it gets off its rollers. Yes, the very same sliding glass door that a criminal attempted to break into in my townhome in the early 90s, when everyone used that same broken broom handle to shove in between the doors as a perfect deterrent. It was only good fortune that my angry queen of a roommate drew said blinds back and showed his horrified face to the thief that saved us. Damn sliding door. Damn blinds. What did they think they would get? A glass coffee table full of Madonna magazines and a TV with an enormous antenna? Hmph.
Vaquero And Mini-Me Passing Banana Lady
Nothing warms the heart like a little buckaroo, even if he doesn’t have boots to match. His shoes seem much more sensible.
Modern San Isidro shops offer smaller baskets, should you so desire to transport bananas on your head.
If you prefer a platter, that’s always an option as well.
I’ll Be Your Shelter
Miss Ruby Forsythe, 1987, Pawleys Island, South Carolina
one-room schoolhouse teacher for 50 years
Desperate Times Call For Desperate Bottled Water Alternative
Perhaps your grocery shelves are bare of bottled water thanks to the numero 19 virus . The good news is that it flows in the pipes in your home. Is it nasty? Put a couple filters on it, like we do. We have the best-tasting agua in the neighborhood.
But should your water supply run low (perhaps you are out and about, as the CDC has scolded us not to, even though it’s Spring Break, and most breaks have now become four weeks instead of one, and no sane teenager is going to stay home for a one month vacation, so off to spread some virus they shall go), remember that Coors Light is basically the same thing. Just worse.
But Why?
Another I don’t get it moment to try and comprehend…
Real Life Large Marge
Toots Holzheimer knew her rig inside and out. After 20 years of hauling “anything and everything” more than 1.6 million kilometers over the outback of northern Queensland–and raising eight kids, she passed away in 1992. A crane unloading pylons at a wharf lost control, and she was struck by its load.
Hardworking and tough, she tackled the hurdles of remote freight transportation, including lifting full 44 gallon drums. Her truck, Toot’s Old Girl, is on display at the Winton Diamantina Truck Museum.
But come on. She does look a wee bit like Large Marge, no?
Nitpickers
Take A Seat (Literally)
Back in 1985, the ill-equipped school system of Managua (Nicaragua’s capital) couldn’t provide desks for each student. In order to make sure she always had a seat, this young student carried her desk to school and back from the barrio she lived in.
Lest you think this is a thing of the past, a 2012 article reported on Central China’s Macheng City in Hubei province, where the elementary schools had 2000 desks for 5000 students. In some cases, grandparents helped bear the burden.
Fortunate families strapped them to the backs of scooters. I guess the police don’t fine you for that.
Makes a simple classroom chore seem like nothing.
Hybrid Cats & Hybrid Corn
Four-year-old Trent Petersen enjoys three parts corn to one part cat at his family’s farm in Exira, Iowa.
I Don't Get It 