Open thread 8/31/22
I’ve been in houses with most of these things:
My mother said that the house in which she grew up had a horse trough in front, and when she was a child there were still plenty of horses who would take drinks there.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
My aunt had a summer kitchen next to her house, and neighbors down our street had a root cellar. We had shelves under the cellar steps full of home-canned food. There was a washing machine with hand wringer on the other side of the room. Of course, the clothes then has to be carried upstairs and outside for hanging. The aunt with the summer kitchen also had a wooden wall phone that you wound to tell the operators who you wanted to call. It was her house where we also made a huge cast iron pot of apple butter every year. She also churned her own butter. They had a grate above their cast iron wood stove to allow heat to go upt to the girls’ bedroom. We still slept with about 4 quilts in the winter.
Just another open-thread comment.
Three related articles worth thinking about. Quick reads.
Governments use internet shutdowns as a form of control
(https://tinyurl.com/2s3ednkj)
T-Mobile subscribers can connect to Starlink satellites
(https://tinyurl.com/2ha9c5d9)
China threatens to destroy Starlink satellites
(https://tinyurl.com/4ay2u6df)
Cornflour:
“All your base are belong to us.”
Can Do! continues its usual behaviour regarding the rest of the world.
Houses in Milwaukee had a hole in the side of the house with a little door on the outside for the milkman to deliver the milk, and a door on the inside for the customer to retrieve the milk without having to go outside. It was common for kids to get stuck trying to get through the milk box.
When I was growing up, we had a clothes chute.
For about 6 years we had rented a home with vaulted ceilings and triangular windows under the ceiling. It looked something like this.
The town had banned street lights in most residential areas, so the nighttime was usually quite dark, and seeing the stars and especially a full or nearly full moon through those upper windows was very nice.
I lived an older apartment in Oakland that had a service stair and off of the service stairs, there was a little door to deliver ice directly into the ice box in the apartment. On the stair walls, they had been drywalled over, but in the ice box (which were built in, and still in the apartments), you could see them. There was also an iron board that folded up into the wall. The apartment still had transoms over the doors, but they had been painted and/or nailed shut.
Speaking of hitching posts: There are a lot of Amish where I grew up, so the local stores and restaurants have hitching posts. I always find it amusing to see the buggy going through the McDonald’s drive-through
I remember many of these.
My current house, built in 1998, has a central vacuum. I love it! The motorized carpet attachment stopped working, and we were still able to get a replacement. All the dust and dog hair go to the canister in the garage, where I only have to empty it every few months.
One more open-thread comment. This one barely falls within the bounds of decency.
At her blog, Neo has vainly(?) worked to encourage an interest in dance. If not for that, I might have passed by Steve Sailer’s recent essay entitled “My Lesbian Dance Theory” (https://tinyurl.com/5n8rkz53).
Sailer’s essays are usually full of statistics and data that no one else will touch. To call him politically incorrect would be a gross understatement.
“My Lesbian Dance Theory” has no basis in exhaustive statistical treatment of open-source data. Instead, there are impressions, observations, and theories full of wrong-think. I thought it was hilarious, and mostly not untrue, but if you’re easily outraged, then this one’s not for you.
Lots of nice yesteryear stuff here, we had an attic fan when I was kid and sleeping next to an open window was great. My grandparents lived in an older house with the concrete carriage step out front, they had a root cellar, a cistern to collect rainwater from the room as well as a well, grandma had a wash house a separate building out of the kitchen door set up for laundry and further out the chicken house where about five years old it was fun to climb over the fence and let the chickens chase us.
My daughter and her husband have a nice big old 1920’s house in Grosse Point, MI that has the butler pantry, service stairs at the back and out of the servants room an electric bell that would ring and a light would light showing the room that rang the bell. There is a large old refrigerator built in the wall with the compressor in the basement still working, the doors, now sealed where coal was put into the basement and also the milk delivery door. Those old houses require a lot of upkeep but they are neat.
“Justice Dept. says Trump team may have hidden, moved classified papers”
-headline WaPo this morning.
Would the “Justice” Dept be happier if the classified papers were left around in the open for any and all to see?
Insert shocked face here.
I lived in a house in Utah which did have a root cellar, underneath the house. It was just a bare earth cave, with shelves suspended from the joists. I kept sacks of potatoes in it, and they lasted very well.
One of my parents’ houses did have that little ironing-board closet in the kitchen, which my parents converted to a spice cupboard.
One household item at my grandmother’s house and in the yard of a small cottage where we lived when I started school was a trash incinerator. It used to be customary to burn household trash in such an incinerator, usually one day a week. (Thursday, IIRC) Household trash burning was one thing that contributed to the awful smog problem in Los Angeles, and it was outlawed sometime in the early 1960s.
So the DoJ is concerned about the security of top secret and classified documents at MAL. They are so concerned they take pictures of said documents and then publicly release those photos.
Sgt. Mom, when I lived in western India in 2006-2007, households all over the city burned trash every morning at the edge of the street, including plastics.
Trump team may have hidden, moved classified papers
Translation “We didn’t find what we were looking for. He still has goods on us”.
News from my neck of the woods-
Project Veritas got one of our progressive educators on record:
Assistant Principal Jeremy Boland caught admitting that he doesn’t hire Catholics or even interview older teacher candidates because they may have conservative opinions, then goes on to explain how he and the teachers he does hire go around parents to get their children thinking Left.
https://www.christopherfountain.com/blog/2022/8/30/holly-st
Fun memories. Seen most of them. Someone mentioned milk boxes in the wall. When we were young, in the early 1960s, we would go through it to get in the house when our mother was late. What we didn’t have was a coal shoot. My parents had them growing up. I remembered one in my great grandmother’s house – a huge house built in the 1890s or so. We would, of course ride in the dumb waiter. And go down the laundry shoot in our house with the milk box in the wall. Our last couple houses have been two story, but the washer/dryer are up on the 2nd floor.
When I was a child, my family lived in a shotgun house that was built in the 1860’s. Every room had a transom window over the door and they all still worked back when we lived there.
There was a cellar under the house that was accessed by a trap door on the back porch. Us children were constantly being admonished to never go in the cellar. (The trap door was kept locked.) Just before we moved out, I found out why. There was a well in the floor of the cellar that one of us kids could have easily fallen into.
Beneath the front of the house, was an old decommissioned coal bin and chute. (The furnace had been converted to gas long before we moved in.)
Out in the back yard was an old, long unused outhouse. By the fifties, the house itself had indoor plumbing, and the bathroom was an obvious add-on.
The house was in the middle of the city. Back when it was built, property owners were taxed by the amount of street frontage of their lot. Therefore all of the house lots in that part of town were long and narrow and the houses were one room wide and three or four rooms deep. They are called “shotgun houses” because all of the doors, from the front entryway through to the back door lined up, and the saying was, “you could fire a shotgun through the house all the way through the back door.” They are very common in older big cities. The exception to this setup was the kitchen. In ours, it was offset to the left, but the door through the kitchen to the back door still lined up.
Some of those houses had an upstairs above the kitchen and back bedroom. Those were called “humpback shotgun houses”. Ours was a humpback, but the room upstairs was unfinished, like an attic. My mom had clotheslines up there and used to hang the wet laundry up there during winter and other inclement weather. She also had a wringer washer that lived on the back porch.
In 1961, when I was seven years old, we moved from that house into a bungalow style house a few blocks away. It was built in 1921. There were no transoms, but it had a real upstairs and a concrete walled basement. The house also came with an old decommissioned coal bunker that had been converted into a storage room.
In the attic you could still see the remains of old “tube-and-post” electrical wiring that had been upgraded sometime before we moved in. Needless to say, the house had fuses in a fuse box rather than circuit breakers. Also notable was that each room downstairs had at least one old non-functional DC electrical outlet to go along with the modern AC outlets.
Both of those houses still exist. I have thought about paying the existing owners a visit, but no, it’s a really bad part of town nowadays.
Attic fans… In both of those houses, my dad would install a window fan in the warm months. Window fans blow outward drawing air into the house through any other open window. Because of that experience, in every house I have ever owned, I have installed a whole-house attic fan – even though I have central heat and air. Around here (central KY), in the spring and fall – and some days even during the winter – they are wonderful machines to have. (…especially if you like electric bills less than $50 for a few months of the year 🙂
I grew up in a little post WW II housing development. We had a laundry chute, a milk box, and an incinerator in the basement so you could burn your trash (the EPA is having vapors now) In the Fall, my father would also burn the leaves that fell from the trees on the front lawn. What a wonderful smell.
My current house is a late Victorian. Before some remodeling it had a kitchen that was the maid’s domain including a back stars up to her private quarters. There was also a stove in the basement. The third floor was for the nanny and other help and appropriately spartan. There is a brass door knocker on the front door too, but I put that on because a house of this style is incomplete without one.
PS: I forgot to mention. The first house I spoke of – the shotgun house – had one of those milkman doors right next to the front door. Indeed, for the entire time we lived there, we had a real milk man who delivered a couple of bottles to us every day except Sunday. My mom had five kids at the time so she needed it. (…she had seven before she was done. I am number four.)
PPS: My mom is still with us. She will be 92 in November.
My house, built in 2006, has half a dozen working transoms.
Paul, that bungalow house I spoke of had a big beautiful maple tree in front right by the street. It would turn bright orange in the fall and drop prodigious amounts of leaves. When the leaves fell, us kids would rake them into a big pile on the front lawn and play in them. Later, we would rake them into the street right next to the curb and my father would burn the pile right there. This happened all over the city. Of course, nobody in the city does that nowadays because of the smoke – and there was a LOT of smoke. But still, to this day, the smell of burning leaves brings back that childhood memory.
My grandmother’s house didn’t have a milkman door, it had a galvanized insulated box that stood beside the back door, provided by the dairy and with its logo painted on it – and the milkman delivered twice a week what ever was ordered.
In some of the old Texas towns, you will find that the curbs are terribly high – sometimes almost 2 ft high in places, and also they’ll have iron eye-bolts installed at curb’s edge with an iron ring, about 4-5″ in diameter, installed loosely through the eye. It’s for hitching horses, and the high curbs were to facilitate mount/dismount.
For the past week I’ve been doing a deep dive on Peter Zeihan, whom I mentioned in an earlier OT. He’s got a light touch, but he’s a serious guy asking serious questions and proposing frightening answers.
Essentially, the post-WW2 Pax Americana and global boom is ending due to a demographic crunch and America stepping away from safeguarding free trade.
Most advanced nations now have more old people retiring than young people replacing them. Americans, both Republican and Democrat, are increasingly unwilling to spend blood and treasure maintaining global order so China, say, can import food and energy, then export manufactured goods.
According to Zeihan, the Golden Age peaked in 2019 and is now unraveling. Covid and the Ukraine War have accelerated the process.
Zeihan has made many specific predictions. In 2014 he said Russia would invade Ukraine by 2022. Not bad!
In the immediate future, he sees breakdowns in food and energy supplies in Europe and Asia becoming obvious this winter. So we can grade his report card soon.
Here are a couple starter videos:
–“China’s COLLAPSE Is FAR Worse Than You Think, | Big Financial Crisis is Coming – Peter Zeihan”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bhE04082bk (10min)
–“Peter Zeihan: The end of the old world order, and what happens next”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zt66z_F8Ns (15 min)
What good news he offers is that the US is in the best position to weather this storm. Our boomers had more children than other nations. Plus we are fabulously wealthy when it comes to resources and arable land.
Nowadays, instead of watering troughs people leave out bowls of water for dogs (and sometimes bowls of biscuits).
Our loss. You can’t ride a dog, though I suppose a team of dogs could pull a sled or even a cart.
Instead of hitching posts we have anti-carbomb posts that some people are learning to call “bollards.”
Those bowls of dog biscuits soon become possum and coon biscuits.
huxley,
Thank you for the information about Peter Zeihan. I’ve just got back from his website and will watch the two videos you linked. Demographics is such an obvious thing, yet it struck me recently how rarely I think about pure, demographic statistics in trying to guess what the future will bring.
A few months ago podcaster, Andrew Heaton interviewed Ken Gronbach on his, “The Political Orphanage” podcast. (Andrew Heaton is good, and I highly recommend him.) Mr. Gronbach makes his living as a professional demographer and had some interesting things to say, so I borrowed his book, “Upside” from the local library.
It’s simply astounding how much that our media and politicians focus on are topics that go against what statistics suggest. Gronbach is less focused on international politics, but, like Zeihan, he sees potential trouble for China. Gronbach is optimistic about the U.S., although he focuses primarily on statistics and tries to avoid politics and policy.
I read Mark Steyn’s “America Alone” 15-20(?!?) years ago. As Steyn writes, “the future belongs to those who show up for it.” Most of the western world seems to be working hard to ensure they will not be there.
Rufus T. Firefly:
You’re welcome!
Yes, it’s easy to forget demography as a crucial aspect of human society. The power of the boomers wasn’t that they were young with disposable income and had the Beatles on their side, but there were so damn many of them.
Back in the 70s I had a conversation with a friend who had become an economist. We worried about the population explosion, as boomers did in those days, and he remarked that economists had no models which weren’t based on continual growth.
Peter Zeihan says that’s still true in 2022. He is not apocalyptic about it. Civilization will go on. We will develop economic models to work with the new reality. In the meantime there will be some rough sledding, likely even famines.
I’ll check out the Heaton/Gronbach podcast.
huxley,
Here’s a link to Heaton’s podcast: https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/
The Demographics episode is June 8, 2022, but you may want to try another first, to see if Heaton is your speed. The June 16 and June 22 episodes were interesting and well done.
Rufus T. Firefly:
I’m already there and listening. I like Gronbach’s dry, matter-of-fact delivery.
Right now he’s discussing China’s dire situation. Heaton asks him what China will do. Gronbach replies that the government, like North Korea’s, will move to ultra-nationalism to distract the people and keep them loyal. Hence, all the saber-rattling over Taiwan.
Zeihan goes farther and speculates that the Biden administration has figured out that the Chinese are bluffing. So Biden’s people are planning to recognize Taiwan formally and unveil it as a big foreign policy coup.
Which explains that weird Nancy Pelosi trip to Taiwan better than anything else I’ve read.
October surprise!
My house, built in 1975, has a whole-house vacuum. It’s actually quite handy for doing the upstairs. I don’t have to lug the vacuum up there.
Our previous house, built in 1988, had an attic fan. We rarely used it, since we had central air, but it did work.
Both of these are in Kansas City, MO.
We saw. We suspected. But Steve’s got the good: Covid19 vaccines are killing us some 5 months after second does, thus accounting for the observed 40% rise in all cause mortality.
Steve Kirsch brings SS death data to bear, courtesy of an inside source. And this matches data from Europe.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/this-one-graph-tells-you-everything?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Anyone got a better hypothesis to explain this?
THIS discussion should have legs.