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DARE and "very special episodes". I got reminded tonight that it's just not a thing these days for kids to get hammered with propaganda to not do drugs.
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Oct 9, 2019 08:20
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I don't think it is. I always wondered as a kid how he was managing to change that fast in such a small space without banging his elbows on the sides, though (and then accidentally destroying the booth).
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Oct 18, 2019 11:16
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I can see the logic to using "on accident", instead of "by accident", because the counterpart is "on purpose". You would never phrase it as "by purpose". So someone assuming that English is a sensible and reasonable language would think that if it's "on purpose," it must be "on accident" too.
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Dec 2, 2019 17:16
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Sanford posted:I don't know if it fits the definition of "media" but we really don't know how ancient battles took part because the people writing about them assumed everyone knew. Bronze age texts (mainly Greek) have multiple references to battles where forces faced each other, charged, and met "in the usual way". Was the usual way pushing together and trying to break the opposing line? Stopping a few yards apart and chucking stuff at each other? Smashing into each other and fracturing into dozens of largely independent combats? No-one knows. There's a whole kingdom whose location has been lost, because no one actually wrote down where it was. It was just assumed that if you mentioned this place, your reader would know where you were talking about. We know that it traded with Egypt, and that it was (if I'm remembering right) somewhere to the southeast, but that doesn't really narrow things down much.
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Jan 11, 2020 18:58
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FreudianSlippers posted:Is a SSN not something you get automatically upon birth? From what I recall, your parents have to specifically send in a set of forms to get you an SSN. This comes as a rude surprise for kids whose parents have gone off-grid, because they might not have anything to prove they really exist legally.
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Jan 19, 2020 01:06
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Jack B Nimble posted:Here's an outdated thing: That's not outdated, everyone I know with a car will run it to let it warm up first when the weather gets below -10C or so. Admittedly, part of that is because it's just more comfortable to be in the car once it's warmer; modern cars, you can drive right away if you have to, but it's better for them to warm up first. Also, some of the cars my family owns are generally old enough that you do still need to let them warm up first.
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Feb 12, 2020 13:20
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Leperflesh posted:Do kids know what a paper route is, anymore? I think paper routes, as something done by kids, were starting to be transitioned out by the time I was in my teens (early 2000s). A combination of "kids Today don't have time", "kids need to rely on parents for any transportation if the route takes them beyond walking distance of their home neighborhood", and probably more than a bit of "collecting money from customers can be more difficult for kids". I did the neighborhood paper route for about a year or two, before I think mom got fed up with both me being the only one to actually do any work reliably (it was supposed to be split between me and my two siblings, but I came home from school a lot to find that neither of them had done it yet, so I'd have to do it before dinner so people wouldn't complain about not getting their evening paper) and with being the one who had to deal with the paper office for getting the money to them and us getting paid (...allegedly paid, anyway, I don't recall ever actually being given any money for the thing), so we passed it on to another kid on the block.
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May 10, 2020 06:48
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torgo posted:I'm super surprised that there were actually paperboys in the early 2000's. I always assumed that was a thing that died out in the 60s or 70s, and just continued on in media as a useful archetype of a kid's job. My town's newspaper had gone down to a "once in the evening, just get it there before 8 pm ffs" level by the time I was doing the route, and I was doing a very small route at that - just my street and the street behind ours. That's about all that made it sustainable for me to do it, really. If it had required getting up for a morning delivery, or doing a larger neighborhood that actually required using a bike to get around (instead of hauling a little folding cart with the papers in it), it would've been out of the question entirely. I think the tipping point for mom was when I needed to sub in for someone else on a different route, and she had to drive me halfway across town to do a morning delivery on the weekend. Also, I'm talking very early 2000s - I don't think I was still doing it past 2004.
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May 10, 2020 08:26
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Jeza posted:This is the second reference I've seen to this on SA recently. When exactly did it become the norm in the US for kids to generally be disallowed from roaming around? But Son of a Vondruke! posted:I was born in the 80's and I'm from Canada, not the US. But I wasn't allowed to roam around town freely. I wasn't supposed to go much farther than the school yard, or the corner store. Which was two or three blocks in either direction from my house. This was a small town too. same here, really. Any time that I was further than a couple blocks away from the house, I was generally under some sort of adult supervision. Cemetry Gator posted:Your town sounds like it was anachronistic even in the early 2000s. The idea of an evening paper is just something that didn't exist for me. And a paper that only came out in the evening too! Yeah, probably it was. I don't know if it was specifically an evening edition? I just vaguely remember that they offered subscribers an option of getting a morning delivery, an evening delivery, or both (which implies that there were supposed to be some differences between the two, since who would want to get the exact same newspaper twice in the same day?). It was a small town, and largely populated by boomers and their parents. So 'anachronistic' or at least 'slow to adapt' would not surprise me; it's largely dying now, because of the lack of any jobs or housing for anyone who's Millennial-aged. Krispy Wafer posted:Zoomers are going to struggle with is the idea that everyone just had old newspapers laying around to line birdcages, wrap fish in, or clean windows with. Old newsprint was so cheap and plentiful that it had all sorts of secondary uses. There isn't really anything comparable. This keeps catching me too. There's nothing better for wrapping dishes and fragile stuff, when you're packing to move, except...there isn't a ton of newspapers just lying around any more. You have to hope that your area has a free newspaper delivered (unlikely) or find some other form of wrapping material. If you're really unlucky, you might have to pay for packing paper. Leperflesh posted:Anyway. My parents still get a newspaper and it's this pathetic little thing. Even the sunday paper is just small. I remember when I was a kid, the sunday paper was this inch-thick bundle stuffed with ads and various sections and a complete color sunday comics section like six or eight pages. If you didn't actively dump your newspapers you'd wind up with stacks of them. We'd roll up rolls of newspaper and burn it in the fireplace instead of logs. I remember the same thing. My parents and grandparents would save up newspapers for fire-starting, come winter, and there'd be enough that you could have done a whole fire with just rolls of newspaper if you wanted to. (Granted, I think part of this is that my grandparents lived through the Great Depression, so they didn't really throw away anything if it was arguably still useful somehow.)
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May 11, 2020 18:28
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Scudworth posted:Much of the world is already there my friend, in Canada using cheques for regular purchases was phased out by our national debit bank card system in the mid 80s. Grocery stores phased out accepting cheques by the late 90s, I think. There's probably somewhere extremely rural that still accepts cheques, but even then, it's probably only because it's easier to just wait for Little Old Lady Jones to die or get put in a retirement home than to try and make her learn how to use a debit card.
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Jul 6, 2020 11:15
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The Boomer thread has reminded me of a thing: fruitcake. Complaints about how inedible fruitcake is are a staple joke of the winter season. But the modern fruitcake - especially the kind you can buy in a store - is a very different beast from the kind of fruitcake that was originally being mailed by grandmas and aunts to relatives. The original fruitcake had a lot of alcohol in it - traditionally rum, I think - and also real dried fruit. The fruit is where the name comes from, but the alcohol was used as a preservative, since there wasn't any other way to mail a cake across the country and have it arrive in a form that was still edible. The modern fruitcake is a sad, pale imitation. The store-bought ones often don't even have anything that resembles real fruit in them, just shreds of green and red 'fruit' that don't have a distinct flavor and add nothing of their own to the cake. And the rest of the cake is a dense, sticky loaf that wanted to be a carrot cake or a banana bread when it grew up, but never got any flavors added to it beyond 'sweet'.
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Jan 6, 2021 17:52
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AmbassadorofSodomy posted:Home sick from work today, and watching Married With Children season 1 on DVD. I used them a couple times in high school, but 1) we had a payphone so that students could call home without needing to go to the office, and 2) it was on the handful of times I didn't have a quarter to use to make the call. I'd be surprised if they didn't still exist, though.
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Apr 29, 2021 23:24
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The Lone Badger posted:Opiates mostly. The muscles responsible for peristalsis stop being so lively. CoolCab posted:i would almost certainly blame dietary rather than narcotic consumption. the "better" (read: more expensive/aspirational, meat and dairy every day maybe every meal) your diet the less fiber you get and that has only changed extremely recently, if at all. not enough fiber is a one way ticket to constipation town. Also, a lot of patent medicines and quack cures had opiates or alcohol in them, because it made people feel happy, and something to make you puke or induce pooping because that made it seem like the treatment was doing something. One of the things we're really good at, from a medical perspective, is making people puke or poop.
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Nov 8, 2021 00:39
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Powered Descent posted:Checks don't actually have to be the official printed ones, they just need to have all the info on them. Technically, they don't even have to be paper. Decades ago, a TV comedian -- I want to say it was Johnny Carson but I could easily be wrong -- demonstrated this by cashing a girl. He got a volunteer in a halter top, used a marker to hand-write a check (complete with all the account numbers and such) across her stomach, then took her to a bank and cashed her. (The bank, for its part, expedited the process of returning the canceled check, so that she didn't have to wait around and get mailed back to him with his next statement.) Granted, most banks wouldn't be willing to put up with this poo poo when they aren't on the Tonight Show, but this bank doing so was a legitimate and perfectly legal transaction. Just about every lawyer-focused tv show I've seen has had at least one episode where someone gets annoyed with their bank or a utility company or something, and sends in a cheque that's written on a pig or something else that's extremely awkward and annoying to deal with, and then gets dragged to court for non-payment. And the lawyer handling the case ends up going "wait, did So And So write all the important info onto the pig? ...well, that makes it legal tender. Not their fault if the place didn't cash the cheque!"
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Apr 7, 2022 00:35
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The Lone Badger posted:Do you have to bring the actual pig into the bank branch or would a photo be enough? I'm not sure how it would play out for real, but the TV version usually goes something like "my cantankerous uncle So And So lost his temper with the power company and wrote a cheque on a pig and then went and dropped the pig off at their offices", so Uncle So And So never interacts with the bank himself, he just unleashes a very large, aggressive farm animal on an office building in a way that also makes it legal tender and creates a funny story. The process of cashing a Pig Cheque is also never detailed, but I imagine the banks would much prefer a photo rather than the pig.
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Apr 7, 2022 08:55
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King Hong Kong posted:I have to say, the reference to writing banking information on a pig as something that happens on numerous TV shows is definitely lost on me. I don't know about "numerous". At least three, I think, with one of them being 'The Practice' and the other I can think of being 'Boston Legal'. I want to say the third one was Ally McBeal, but I never watched that show and the more recent lawyer shows I can think of were all way more corporate law focused. I'd imagine 'The Practice' was making a reference to something that had been in the news, and 'Boston Legal' was referencing that.
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Apr 11, 2022 22:39
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