(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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I'll bet if John Kelly didn't have to worry about his boss starting World War III, he would have been more aware of the high flying cabinet.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) September 30, 2017
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Apart from amusing ourselves abusing metaphors, what’s on the agenda for the day?
(Marshall Ramsey via GoComics.com)
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NotMax
The plane flight story is one easily digestible by the media. Put in mind of a cartoon of yore.
Employee called on the carpet before the expansive desk of the head of an obviously gigantic corporation. Boss is angrily waving a piece of paper in one hand and pointing an accusatory finger at the employee with the other.
Caption (paraphrased): “Bah! Millions and billions I don’t understand. Seventy-five cents for a long distance call, that I understand!”
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Baud
@NotMax: What’s a long distance call, old timer?
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
NotMax
@Baud
Be happy to explain sometime over a round of old fashioneds.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: @NotMax: Remember ‘person to person’? Collect? Pay phones? Phone booths?
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
Come on. These days, even Superman is too young to remember phone booths.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
Also station to station, party lines and dialing the operator afterwards for Time and Charges.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: In my day, when you dialed a number, you literally had to dial a number.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Ahhh, party lines, so much fun! Just don’t do any drug deals on them.
NotMax
@Baud
Dialing two letters and some numbers. Those were the days.
Also too, separate nickel, dime and quarter receipt tones on pay phones.
Central Planning
@NotMax: Also, too, paying for touch tone service. And rotary phones.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, tick tick, tick, tick tick, tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, tick, tick tick tick.
My old home phone number: Taylor1-2813
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
Morning folks. And Fight fight fight for Washington State and vic-tor-y! :P
AnderJ
@Amir Khalid: you know who else still knows phone booths?
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Making a long distance calls on a pay phone: “Please insert 85 cents for 3 minutes.”
NotMax
@Central Planning
The oh so chic Princess phone (with the lighted dial!) came with an added monthly fee as well.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Baud: And you couldn’t unplug the phone because it was wired into the wall! Where’s my onion?
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@OzarkHillbilly: heh, I figured it’d be more than that by now. Like, bring a roll of quarters more.
hellslittlestangel
In the final scene of the movie Klute, Jane Fonda has moved out of her apartment. After checking to make sure she’s left nothing behind, she starts to walk out the front door for the last time, when the phone rings. Why is she just leaving it behind? you wonder.
Because once upon a time, you didn’t own your phone. In fact, it was illegal to own your own phone. They were the property of the phone company — Bell Telephone, sole provider of telephone service in the entire United States. Weird.
geg6
@OzarkHillbilly:
Heh. Mine was ES5-4868. Weird how we remember these things.
I remember how excited I was to get a blue princess phone to share with my sister.
Baud
@hellslittlestangel: Their screens never cracked, however.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@NotMax: I remember the first time I saw a touchtone phone with backlit numbers on it. Man that was some futuristic stuff. I liked rotary phones as a kid though, there was something satisfying about all the clicks, like typewriters.
Schlemazel
@OzarkHillbilly:
As I kid I had to travel a long way a couple of times in order to let my folks know I had arrived safely I would make a person-to-person call home asking for myself. When my folks answered they would know I was alive and simple say “He is not at home now try later”. That saved us the cost of the call. I am sure it was a pretty common trick.
@Baud:
I am sure their are kids who have no clue why they ‘dial’ a number on their cellphone
NotMax
@hellslittlestangel
There still existed pockets serviced by tiny local mom-and-pop phone companies which provided their own equipment.
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
Old, old, old joke.
Man invests his meager savings in the market and volunteers for an experiment to be put in sleep stasis.
Fifty years later he awakes and rushes to the brokerage house where he’s informed he’s now worth a million dollars.
Ecstatic, he heads to the nearest phone booth to call his now grown children to inform them they are wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
Operator: Please deposit $10,000 for the next 3 minutes.
OzarkHillbilly
@geg6: My best friend: Yorktown5-9651.
@Schlemazel: Oh yeah, we used to do the same.
Raven
You want a long distance call? Muddy does.&
mai naem mobile
I am watching Fox and Friends today (just to see what an awful person Abby Huntsman is.) Anyhoo, they’ve been talking about how they don’t want to hear what athletes think about politics, the flag etc. Then they have Curt Schilling on. Irony is a cheap shiny metal on Fox.
Schlemazel
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink:
The first ‘wierd’ phone I ever saw was in a Peter Sellers movie. The phone was a single unit like a candle stick. The dial and disconnect button were on the bottom so picking it up was the same as lifting the receiver, the earpiece and microphone were integrated into the stick part. At the time I thought that was about the coolest thing ever saw
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@NotMax: Old perhaps but I hadn’t heard it, and not a bad one.
@Schlemazel: I’m a fan of the really old school handcrank ones that relied on a relay to an operator who gave you the desired connection, but I’ve only ever seen those in movies.
Betty Cracker
@mai naem mobile: I follow F&F and Fox News on Twitter just to see what they’re up to. Robert Mueller, Javanka’s email server, the botched response to the crisis in Puerto Rico and Tom Price don’t seem exist in that universe. Only football players taking a knee and the occasional story about female teachers shagging high school students. For some reason, Fox just dotes on naughty teacher stories.
Baud
@Schlemazel: Or call collect and have your parents not accept the charges.
NotMax
@Schlemazel
Was known as a Swedish phone, IIRC. Had a large button on the bottom that served as a disconnect button when it was depressed as the phone was set down.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@mai naem mobile: They may as well do a John Rocker Summit on Race Realism and get it over with. If there was any justice, John could say his piece and then Jim Brown could stare him into shitting his pants and running for his life.
Raven
@Raven: said Muddy, another mule is kicking down your stall. . .https://youtu.be/OD9fRI_SgAg
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@Betty Cracker: Given their culture I’d say naughty teacher stories would constitute an editorial priority bordering on its own genre.
Raven
@Baud: I called home from Australia when I was on R&R. It was collect and my old man never forgot it!
Baud
@Raven: I bet. How much was it?
Schlemazel
In the 70s I was at a party and was introduced to this guy who went by the name of “Capt’n Crunch’ He started doing party tricks. One was to dial the number of the phone you were using so you got a busy signal. Turns out anyone getting a busy signal was hearing the exact same sound so if you shouted into the silence everyone getting a busy signal could hear you. He didn’t make contact with anyone but he said his kind of people actually exchanged info that way sometimes. He did the long distance trick of dialing an 800number, whistling 2600 Hz and gaining free calls. He called a switch in Canada and with some other magic accessed a special part of the switch were there were several other phone hackers sharing information about various equipment & where other spots like the one they were using still existed (the phone companies were trying to stop them.
I had no idea who this guy was but he did a lot of other nifty tricks. Then about 91 or 92 I was at a security conf. in DC with a lot of government investigators. I told this story and I could tell by the looks on their faces I did not know I had been in the presence of a legend. He was the guy who realize the free Capt’n Crunch whistle was exactly 2600Hz
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@Raven: I’d try that sometime here on my folks except I’d have a very, very hard time finding a phone booth here anymore. They started getting pulled out about 10 years ago.
CarolDuhart2
At work, when I started 20 years ago (stylish green onion on my belt), we had phone booths everywhere-all the bathrooms, in the front lobby, near the cafeteria. It was those or make a call in the manager’s office. They are all gone now-only the niches remain. And the niches remain because they are pointless to remove.
My last landline was somewhere back in 2010.
different-church-lady
I tell the kids this, but they don’t believe me: there was a time when you only had to dial five digits if you were calling someone else in the local exchange. And I remember doing it…
NotMax
@CarolDuhart2
A thousand years from now when future archeologists dig up the ruins, they’ll soberly announce that they’re sure the niches were used for religious purposes.
bystander
I’ve never eaten at a Jose Andres restaurant, but I always enjoy him on tv. Andres stood up for Mexicans and severed a contract to start a restaurant in a Trump facility after Trump’s smears on Mexicans.
But you have to admire his work to feed people in Puerto Rico and show Trump that immigrants get the job done:
From Washington Post.
Raven
@Baud: I wonder too. When you were in country you did this:
Cermet
No one has recalled the famous “Dick Tracy” phone that was a wrist watch with a video screen? While this concept was developed long ago, it is still one of the few devices that was supper Sci-fi that has finally been achieved as imagined; still waiting for that levitating skate board … ok, I’d settle for the warp drive space ship … .
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@NotMax: No way they last a thousand years. The Romans may have done themselves in with lead pipes, but they built shit to last. Most of this stuff now will be gone in 500 max. Except the plastic, of course.
Baud
@Raven: Yeah, it’s nuts how often people were incommunicado for significant periods of time. Nowadays, you can stay connected even when you’re on a cruise.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Cute story from when an acquaintance moved and has her new phone installed at the same time as the local phone company upgraded their equipment.
Asked what her new phone number was, she always replied “Nothing.”
The last four digits of her new number were 0000.
Raven
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink: when we had Olympic Soccer here in 96 the installed banks of pay phones all over Athens. Like all the other bullshit about the gold rush here it fell flat. People were anticipating thousands of people flocking here. They did but they just went home after each game. A lot of people lost there asses here by being greedy.
mai naem mobile
@Betty Cracker: Tom Price was a quick 2 minute story. They had Corey Lewandowski on who looks like a Nazi. A lot of people in this administration look like Nazis. Turn the pics black and white,and put on the appropriate Nazi uniforms and you wouldn’t know the difference. Ivanka with her 3 kids looks like a prototypical Nazi leaders wife.
OzarkHillbilly
Had lunch with a long time buddy yesterday when I was up in STL. His mother died a few months ago (94 yo, one of the sweetest women I’ve ever known). He’s been going thru his father’s WW II stuff. A waist gunner on a B-24, he was shot down over Yugoslavia. My buddy found a card from the Perfect Silk Parachute Co.. It said, “Thank you for using our product.”
My buddy also found his father’s Purgatory card from their family’s Catholic church. A Purgatory card was for instructing the family of the deceased (when he was MIA it was assumed he was dead) in how many hours of prayer to shorten the soul’s stay in Purgatory.
Funny stuff now.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Human sacrifices at that.
Raven
@Baud: my parents got so concerned about not hearing from me when I was in Korea that they contacted the Red Cross. They reached our battalion chaplain and he made me write a letter while he sat there!
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s right up there with “front toward enemy” on claymores.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: You’ve got it backwards. It’s nuts how people stay connected even when on a cruise. Whatever happened to “getting away from it all’?
Amir Khalid
Speaking of Superman and phone booths … Remember when they started replacing enclosed booths for outdoor payphones with those metal or fibreglass hoods? There’s a moment in the 1978 movie when Clark Kent is walking down a street, looking for a place to change into his Superman outfit. Chris Reeve pauses by one of them new hooded phones, and you can see him thinking, “Nah …”
Chris
@mai naem mobile:
And then there’s the ones who aren’t marching down the streets with uniforms and swastikas…
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: What’s that they say about “Army Intelligence”?
efgoldman
@OzarkHillbilly:
I believe my very first comment post on this here blog was a “when I was your age” rant about phones.
I could do it again; nothing much has changed except I’m 10++ years older and phones still aren’t “phones” any more.
Damn. I was still working, then, and so were my kidneys, more or less.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@efgoldman: I figured you for a telegram or carrier pigeon man myself
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve always said, connectivity that can’t escape you is great; connectivity that you cannot escape, not so great. Not everyone understands me.
MomSense
@Raven:
Muddy is the best.
Raven
@MomSense: McKinley Morganfield!
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: And be cut off from Balloon Juice?!?!
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink: Whatever happened to the plan to bring back couriers?
efgoldman
@Schlemazel:
And yet, if you sit the average 10-20 month old down with a play telephone they’ll start playing as if they were using it to talk. They all do it, they all know, and nobody knows where they learn the behavior.
Cheryl Rofer
The Orange One is tweeting:
The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.
…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.
The military and first responders, despite no electric, roads, phones etc., have done an amazing job. Puerto Rico was totally destroyed.
Plus some retweets of DoD accounts of what they are doing in Puerto Rico and one of Melania’s account saying that talking about opiod abuse is a way of helping.
Cheryl Rofer
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: Also, when they were getting ready to jump, one of the crews’ parachute opened in the plane. They all looked at each other like, “They never covered this in training.” They gathered it up and the guy jumped with it in his arms. Miraculously, he survived.
MomSense
@OzarkHillbilly:
We had a party line! It’s not as fun as it sounds.
ETA I see everyone got their first. We’re a bunch of oldies.
Chris
Random old phone anecdote: some time ago I was watching a TV show from the eighties. Partway through the episode, the need to call the cops arises, and the main character has to send the slow-witted sidekick to a pay phone to do it. The sidekick quite reasonably states “I haven’t got any change,” and the main character just looks at him incredulously and says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “just dial 911! It’s free!”
Having had a cell phone since teenagehood, I was like “… oh. Wow. I never knew that! … of course, who still uses pay phones nowadays?” (I’ve done it, of course, but they were on their way out even when I was a teenager).
And then there’s the “I haven’t got any change” observation. Fewer and fewer people do, now that everyone uses plastic, myself included. Which must be murder on the “spare some change, sir?” community: most of the time, when I say “sorry, haven’t got any,” I’m telling the literal truth.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
When my grandparents moved to California we went from seeing them almost every day to letters every few weeks & phone calls on holidays. I am sure when the Westward expansion was happening families would lose touch entirely. Hard to imagine that now
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: too cool
Steeplejack (phone)
@geg6:
What did the ES stand for?
Perry Mason’s phone number was Madison 5-1190.
Cheryl Rofer
@Chris: The pay phone sequence from “Dr. Strangelove” is mandatory.
Chris
@OzarkHillbilly:
Is it “military intelligence is to intelligence what military music is to music?”
No, wait, that’s “military justice.”
@Cheryl Rofer:
Hey, speaking of old things, I’m so old I remember when “heckovajob, Brownie” was a presidency-sinker. Whoever thought that not getting into a twitter-slapfight would be all it took to be comparatively presidential.
Baud
@Chris: Trump’s presidency came pre-sunk.
CarolDuhart2
Thinking of all the old songs with phone numbers:
867-5309
864-5789
Beechwood 45789
MomSense
@Raven:
got my mojo workin’
Divf
A running gag in Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam” is Tony Roberts constantly calling into his answering service to tell them where he could be reached. Now utterly incomprehensible.
OzarkHillbilly
@Amir Khalid: I despise the whole 24/7 connectivity. And I really despise people who think they have a right to talk to me anytime they want to. “Where were you yesterday? I tried and tried to call you.”
“I was at home, ignoring you.”
Sometimes I answer the phone with, “This had better be fucking good.” or “If you’re calling to tell me somebody is dead, they’ll be just as dead in the morning.” or just a simple “What?!”
@Baud: A silver lining in every cloud. You might even be productive. ;-)
CarolDuhart2
And the postal stuff: Please Mr Postman, Take a Letter Maria, Strange I Know.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Schlemazel:
Ericofon. Those were cool.
jayboat
@OzarkHillbilly:
I like your style.
MomSense
@different-church-lady:
That’s how I called my best friend.
OzarkHillbilly
@MomSense: Oldies but goodies.
CarolDuhart2
Before I got the job I have now, I was looking for a job with an answering service. Good hours, 1-9pm. I didn’t get it, and was so disappointed. But now , looking back, those jobs disappeared pretty quickly.
Divf
@OzarkHillbilly: I like idea from “a Thousand Clowns” of answering the phone with “Is this good news or money?”
PsiFighter37
@Cheryl Rofer: What a motherfucking asshole. It’s a gorgeous weekend here in NY, and now I start it off being pissed off. (and that’s on a personal level. Imagine how the people in PR must feel)
Are there any adults in the GOP who will call a spade an asshole? Rhetorical question, I know…
ThresherK
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink: I don’t know about others, but I needed to pass a Morse code test for my amateur radio license. That was (mumble) years ago. Now ships on the high seas don’t even require code operators.
NotMax
@CarolDuhart2
Pennsylvania 6-5000. Perhaps the granddaddy of ’em all.
TS
@different-church-lady:
I grew up in a very small town – we all had 3 digit phone numbers – our number was 267. To ring anywhere outside of the town you had to contact the exchange operator. We eventually had a 3 digit prefix added to the number.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
I feel naked when I leave the house and forget my cell phone. How did I ever go around for decades without being constantly connected?
OzarkHillbilly
@Cheryl Rofer: “You’re gonna have to answer to the Coca Cola Company.”
Feathers
@Baud: @Schlemazel: I had a professor who told us that behind every moral panic is a technology shift. This new wave of immigration to the US, with cell phones and jet travel and the internet is so different from the last wave that it seems an entirely different phenomenon.
I think people are underestimating the degree to which the “assimilation” into American society was made possible by the fact that the family in the old country knew nothing about it, that you were certain you would never see them again. Yeah, your grandfather changed his name, but your great-grandfather wasn’t there to know about it.
Diaspora is weird and we don’t recognize that enough.
Schlemazel
@CarolDuhart2:
Pennsylvania 6-5000
edit
@NotMax:
I should have known someone would beat me to it
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Belmont 1-5042. I also remember Maude the operator at my dad’s job handling those mysterious cables.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@Steeplejack (phone): I could go without more easily if cell phones didn’t double as web browsers now. My phone is primarily for keeping up with current events on the web during breaks at work, and text messages with the wife about grocery lists or sentiment or “your lucky our daughter is still alive” or what have you. I don’t use facebook or twitter; they’ve never appealed to me.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
You mean naughty women teachers, right?
TS
@Cheryl Rofer: The idjit is truly insane – to make a massive human disaster about himself – everything that happens in the world is all about trump. It is previously unheard of that a country’s leader would act in this fashion.
I weep for what used to be.
Schlemazel
@Feathers:
It was a shock when I learned that the immigration people at Ellis Island included people who spoke the languages of immigrants. If your great-grandfather went from being “Genovski” to “Goff” it wasn’t because the intake officials couldn’t understand Freedonian, he WANTED to be Goff.
Cheryl Rofer
@OzarkHillbilly: Colonel Batt Guano would have been a Trump supporter.
Feathers
@Divf: When I was an intern on Capitol Hill, there was a sign out sheet where you listed where you could be reached. There were certain legitimate sounding agencies which were actually codes for nearby bars.
Also, this has been going on for a long time. In the early 80s, we had to teach one of my kid sister’s friends how to use our dial phone. Her family was fancy and only had touch tone. In the nineties, we actually had to have the phone company come out to put a jack in the wall, because they were doing away with rotary dial and our apartment still had a hard wired rotary. I just recently upgraded to an iPhone 6. Lagging edge consumer forevah!
CarolDuhart2
And one phone per household with one number. The princess phone was simply an extension unless you were rich enough to get another line.
And phone extension cords. (I had one until 2 years ago when someone finally helped me set up my wi-fi).
And you went to the phone company to buy your phone and make an appointment to turn on the servicel
Sab
@Amir Khalid: Not exactly phone connectivity, but when I go to a commercial site on my Nook the next day my husband will ask me why is he getting ads for whatever on his Nook. Very creepy.
Frankensteinbeck
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink:
I recommend ‘Motel of the Mysteries.’
ThresherK
@NotMax: No phone number, but they don’t get older than Hello Central, Give Me Heaven, I think.
I chose a 1934 recording, as all the old wax cylinders sound like crap. Composed in 1901, this is almost the perfect Victorian-era story song. All that’s missing is something about Demon Rum, or a disease that my grandmother last had to worry about.
MomSense
@OzarkHillbilly:
The best.
Now that we’ve thoroughly discussed phones we could reminisce about typewriters. Try explaining carbon paper to a young- blows their mind.
rikyrah
My mother refused to get with the new technology.
She never had a cellphone.
She had a landline…
With no call waiting
With no voicemail
She refused to get an answering machine.
She just wasn’t having it.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@Feathers: Being an early adopter means paying for the privilege of being a beta tester, because shiny. Nothing wrong with being a laggard.
NotMax
@debbie
Pictorial history of operators.
debbie
@MomSense:
I saw Muddy at Paul’s Mall in Boston in, I think, 1971 (front row table!). Music-wise, it was life changing.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@MomSense: The white copy was for the national office, the blue copy goes to the customer, the yellow copy goes in our file… I actually love that whiteout is still a thing that people can buy.
ThresherK
@MomSense: “Uncle, can you put an onion on your belt* and tell us why this is called a carbonless copy?”
(*I’ve never been addressed that way by my nephews and niece out loud, but I know they’re thinking it.)
debbie
@NotMax:
Yeah, who needs horseplay with their phone call??
HinTN
@Betty Cracker: Betty, Betty, Betty. How positively old school of you. Shagging, indeed.
JPL
@Cheryl Rofer: The attached article discusses what Trump was doing while the hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico..
Lost weekend: How Trump’s time at his golf club hurt the response to Maria
At this point, I doubt that the mayor of San Juan cares about Trump’s feelings.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
My mom finally broke down and got a flip phone but she’s not happy about it.
Frankensteinbeck
@debbie:
Naughty men teacher stories do tend to get a different reception.
Schlemazel
@MomSense:
How about mimeograph sheets – AH! The smell of new tests at school!
Tazj
@NotMax: That’s funny I didn’t know that. My great aunt Maimie got fired for accidently saying the line is bully instead of busy. She later became a nurse.
Feathers
@Schlemazel: And the names were taken from the ship’s manifests, not writing down and mangling what an official heard the immigrant say. Interesting how the fantasy of their forefathers facing American racism and prejudice plays into that. And probably excuses their feelings about being able to police the behavior of newer immigrants.
Betty Cracker
I don’t remember party lines or phone numbers that had NAMES in them (which always struck me as cool when seen in movies). But I do remember our family sharing ONE phone that was bolted to the wall in the kitchen. It had a super-long cord, so I could take the receiver into my room and shut the door (on the cord!) for privacy. I also remember prank phone calls, a method of entertainment destroyed by caller ID.
My teenager has an entirely different relationship to phones than I did growing up. The most prominent difference is that the “phone” function on her device is perhaps the least used of all. She and her peers seem to reserve voice calls for emergencies or if they need to discuss something that is too complicated to text. In the latter scenario, they text first to let you know they’ll be calling.
The yoots seem to regard unannounced, non-emergency calls as an imposition, and I’ve sort of adopted that attitude myself. I was never one for yapping on the phone anyway. My sister and I used to live next door to each other, and she’d call just to talk, and I’d say, “For chrissakes, hang up and come OVER!”
NotMax
@Schlemazel
Ditto fluid had the distinctive smell. Mimeograph ink was messy as all get out but nowhere near as aromatic.
MomSense
@Schlemazel:
Ha! Back in the day I folded so many leaflets for ramshackle social justice and environmental groups using hand me down mimeograph machines. Nothing quite like that smell.
Gin & Tonic
@Feathers: It isn’t just “technology shift”, sometimes it was politics. My father spent the last 40 years of his life without seeing or speaking with his mother or his two sisters. Once a year a letter was exchanged through intermediaries. I did not see my first cousins until I was in my 40’s. This was all in the second half of the 20th century. Now my wife is “friends” on FB with my nephew.
Steeplejack
@Cheryl Rofer:
Jesus. At first I thought you were sort of sarcastically paraphrasing. But no: verbatim. What a colossal asshole Trump is. And that feels completely inadequate. Words fail.
Kay Eye
@OzarkHillbilly: Clearwater 7-7025
Baud
@Betty Cracker: I’ve set my phone so that it doesn’t ring unless it’s family.
Gin & Tonic
@Schlemazel: Wow, you met John Draper? Pretty cool. Who remembers “blue boxes”?
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@Betty Cracker: Good luck to your Gators today. Still celebrating our win over USC. Given the law of averages in that series, I’ll be around 50 the next time it happens, if football is still a thing by then.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@NotMax: I still love rubber cement. THAT stuff was aromatic.
TS
@JPL:
From the link
Trump should have had storm/damage briefings and/or meetings every day since Hurricane Harvey headed for Houston – THAT IS WHAT A PRESIDENT DOES.
I want the real President back – not this ill fitted suit and ridiculous tie that mopes around his private clubs.
Frankensteinbeck
@Steeplejack:
Classic white supremacist stuff. Minorities should be grateful for what they’re given.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
(raises hand, shields face from camera)
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel: Oh dog… The smell just wafted over me with the mere mention of them.
Baud
@TS:
But…but…but… Clinton Fatigue!
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yep.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cheryl Rofer: Twitter has erupted over this.
Donald Trump must be destroyed. There is no other way.
japa21
I don’t know how to link to a You Tube video, but I’m surprised nobody has linked to Lily Tomlin as Ernestine.
ETA: Yes, those tweets this morning may be some of the most despicable he has sent.
MomSense
@Gin & Tonic:
Weren’t they cheat sounds for long distance calls? We never had one.
I did get into talking on the busies. Anyone else do that? It was like a pre-internet chat room you could enter by calling the phone company’s test numbers. You could talk to people all over the world. The only hitch was that you could only talk in between the busy signals.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker:
Heh.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@TS: John Kelly should just send monosyllabic powerpoints directly to fucking Fox and Friends. There’s your morning briefing asshole.
Schlemazel
@Feathers:
It was a chance to start fresh so who can blame them? In the early days I am sure many people fled American towns to a new local for exactly the same reason. Maybe avoid a debt, prison, a spouse but whatever they just wiped the slate clean with a new name (maybe not even that) and started again
A Ghost to Most
@OzarkHillbilly:
Annie Potts “Whaduyawant!” Works well.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Schlemazel: There’s a story like that in our family. For years I thought Grandpa’s (Russian) name was shortened by some official at Ellis Island. A few years ago I learned that he had shortened it himself, because he found out musician acquaintances couldn’t remember his name to call him for gigs.
delk
Marshall Fields on State Street was STate 1-1000
Chicagoans of an age will remember Hudson three two seven hundred.
The two exchanges of my Back of the Yards youth: 847 (VIrginia 7) and 927 (YArds 7)
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
I didn’t know that, it was a mimeograph machine & we called them mimeographs so I don’t know anything about “ditto” fluid.
Frankensteinbeck
@Baud:
It’s a major part of our current situation. You can see it in Gamergate. Women represented were fine, as long as men were choosing when and how women appeared in games. Once women started making some of the decisions, any female representation became an unacceptable threat. Clint Eastwood had a reputation for being unusually supportive of black actors. Then a black man became president, and he started lecturing empty chairs.
Cheryl from Maryland
@bystander: I urge any Juicer in the DC area to eat at one of Mr. Andres’ restaurants. They are outstanding. In Penn Quarter, which is around 7th Street and H Street NW (near the Verizon Center for BBall and Hockey as well as the Shakespeare Theatre, there are 4 — Jaleo (Spanish), Oyamel (Mexican and not Tex Mex), Zatinya (Mediterranean) and Cafe Atlantico/Minibar (Neuvo Latinx and then the Minibar is a high end personal chef’s table). If you like soccer, Jaleo is the place to be — fancyish restaurant rocking to the World Cup. I’ve also eaten at Mr. Andres’ Bizarre Meats in Las Vegas — my spouse and I were obviously NOT high rollers, but the wait staff treated us just like we were, helping us with a balanced menu from the lower priced items as well as selecting a bottle of wine. Mr. Andres recently became an American citizen — we are lucky he wants to stay here.
SFAW
Jesus H. Christ y’all are old.
I’m half-expecting someone to start talking about “horseless carriages” any minute.
Which you were all, no doubt, lucky enough to have, unlike my family.
Gin & Tonic
@MomSense: Yes, it was a tone generator. The 2600 Hz from the Cap’n Crunch whistle essentially released the line, then the tone generator (blue box) just generated the “touch” tones to dial a number. But you needed a fairly out-of-the way pay phone to do it, because Ma Bell would eventually figure out it was being done – if you were at a college, say, where this use was widespread, it ironically just made it that much harder. Or, um, so I hear from old people…
different-church-lady
@Feathers:
I call myself “The Luddite Line”; if I have a technology you do not, you are officially a Luddite.
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
I do. He used a small box to make the tones but never named it. I am sure it was a blue box. But I find it hilarious I was in the presence of a pioneering hacker & too dense to recognize it (it was a pretty smoky party so maybe that affected my vision). Had I known I would have latched on to him & learned everything I could have. I didn’t know his name or anything else about him until I told that story & got the reaction. This was pre-web days but I had internet so I did some digging on his handle & discovered I had been in the presence of a legend.
TS
@Baud: Clinton seems to have been giving trump advice on twitter – probably what set him off against the mayor – he just hates women who see him for what he is & don’t hold back with the telling.
How come the GOP pundits aren’t suggesting that trump could sort this all out if he “had a beer with the mayor”
Republicans have voted for a monster who will make their country the most hated place on earth – if it is not there already.
NotMax
@Schlemazel
Plot device presented in more than a handful of movies. They Made Me a Criminal and I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang come immediately to mind.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@SFAW: I still remember the milk delivery guy, does that count?
Sometimes I am kind of jealous of people in stories in the era when everybody had a horse, because if you’re so tired you fall asleep, your vehicle knows the way home. Guess we’ll get back to that in 30-40 years.
OzarkHillbilly
@SFAW: “We had to live in a rolled up newspaper in a lake.” “You were lucky to live in a lake.”
Schlemazel
@Gin & Tonic:
For his big tricks we all drove out to the airport & he worked a bank of pay phones. One thing he did was to route a call around the world through various switches to the next phone over and you could talk into one then walk over to the other & hear what you just said because of the delay the trip added. Part of what made me not as excited as I should have been was that these were all just stupid tricks to me, I didn’t see anything useful in them. My limited imagination at the time. Now that I work in security it is all I ever think about: “How can this be abused?”.
MomSense
@Frankensteinbeck:
Our president is the embodiment of white supremacy and race culture. We are seeing it today in the way he is treating San Juan’s mayor. The worst person was elected to the most important job in the country.
SFAW
Although it is “chump change,” figuratively speaking, in this thread, the Marshall Ramsay comic borders on pissing me off: it wasn’t “Healthcare Reform” that the Party of Traitors was trying to enact, it was “Healthcare Destruction for the Non-Wealthy.”
I’m temporarily willing to cut hit some slack, on the chance that he was trying to be ironic with the use of “Reform” on both aircraft. Not that he would give a shit what I think, of course.
Elizabelle
Good morning all.
Fly like a weasel. Sniff like a ditto.
The smell of coffee and ditto ink in the morning.
It’s cool here in central Virginia. Crisp and sunny. Fall’s a-coming.
SFAW
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Me, too, actually.
Schlemazel
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
We used to chase the milkman down the ally begging for ice in the dead heat of summer. SOmetimes he would give us some, good times!
NotMax
@Schlemazel
Copies rolled out of Ditto machines were readily recognizable because the print was purple.
And then there were hectograph and Gestetner machines… but that’s another story.
Elizabelle
@MomSense: However, the benefit is: Trump’s characteristics are not hidden. They’re out there to see. And he is not wearing well.
However, it is awful to wake up every morning and see what else is going wrong.
WRT the mayor: People: I think I am seeing a future US Senator from the State of Puerto Rico.
Feathers
@Gin & Tonic: I don’t disagree at all. Families are complicated, even the happy ones. It is a good way to start a conversation with someone complaining about newer immigrants. “Your great grandfather would have done exactly the same if he had a cell phone.”
There are good and bad sides to the changes.
TS
@MomSense: And she’s a woman – they don’t count.
This is a GOP congressman on MSNBC saying Trump is doing everything possible to sort this out – great work by the President – blah blah blah – dear dog do they lie for him.
OzarkHillbilly
@different-church-lady: That would be me you are referring to.
NotMax
@Tazj
Brava for Aunt Mamie!
SFAW
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m SHOCKED that you did not shun them as soon as you found out they were trying to commit unspeakable acts against the wise and beneficent Ma Bell.
TS
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
We still have a milk delivery man – only comes once a week – used to be every day. I can remember the baker – and he did use a horse and cart, the fruit and veg man came each Friday & before we had a refrigerator we had an ice man delivering large blocks of ice.
I’m old as.
Gin & Tonic
@SFAW: Our neighbors across the street still get milk delivered. I’m a light sleeper in the mornings, so I hear the truck coming down the street on Wednesdays, around 0600.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@NotMax: When I was in grad school our department gave access to both ditto and xerox technology to the grad students. You used ditto for your teaching assistant stuff like student handouts because xerox copies were rationed.
I remember a student organization that had a machine to create ditto masters from any page, so you could run copies of it. Now that’s high tech!
Gin & Tonic
@SFAW: I knew a guy who made out the check for his telephone bill to “The World’s Largest Monopoly.” They cashed it, of course.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Milk delivery trucks (for whatever reason) were distinctively snub nosed. Is that still so?
SFAW
@TS:
Well, in a way, he might be telling the truth: Lying Littledick is doing everything possible that a person of his limited mental capacity could do.
I mean, really, would it surprise anyone if he got on Fox and yelled “Trump SMASH! Democrats (or blacks/Jews/whatever) BAD! Trump SMASH!”? And his base would LOVE it.
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
OK, the ink was indeed purple so that was ditto I guess. Everyone called the memeos though. Must be like xerox is now where every copy no matter what the machine is a ‘xerox’
SFAW
@Gin & Tonic:
I thought you lived near efgoldman, but I had no idea you guys are neighbors.
Feathers
@Schlemazel: @NotMax: I’m a serious film noir buff, and I’m fascinated by seeing the ways that identity has changed over the years. In many ways we don’t trust people any more because we don’t have to. There are so many electronic proxies. Was just watching an Agatha Christie (not noir!) the other night where a false letter of introduction fed the plot. I’m forgetting the title, but remembering a movie where a (white) guy gets out of prison, shows up at a factory in a new town, demonstrates his welding ability, picked up in the army, and gets hired.
When people say there didn’t use to be ADHD or other mental illness, I ask them how many people in their family tree just up and disappeared. It’s amazing how high the count often is. Yes, society had “better” morals, but people could also just leave and start new lives.
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: You might still see some of these around, but I think the one on my street looks more like this.
Steeplejack
Note: Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) is a buffoon. He is on MSNBC defending the tax plan to Alex Witt with every fucking discredited cliché the Republicans have been spouting for the last 20 years. To her credit, she keeps coming back at him with harder questions, and he just keeps repeating himself like a bot—which of course he is.
Just looked him up. New to the House in this session, 38 years old, commercial real estate dude—but trumpeting his military experience. ALEC tool, climate change denier. Indiana is not sending us their best!
Jesus, I have got to cut my political TV time. But I had a brain glitch and mistakenly thought A.M. Joy was going to be on. But it’s at 10:00.
MomSense
@SFAW:
Yes I am old but you have to take into account the rural factor. I spent half my time in rural Maine and half my time in NYC. When I would be home in Maine the scene with my friends was like please regale us with an account of the wonders of the modern world.
O/T Marc Maron is on this morning’s Love It or Leave It. He sounds like we did yesterday in Betty’s I hate trump thread.
The Lodger
@debbie: I was working for a company in the late 80s that had one of those cable switchboards. If you were a female employee, odds were good that they would draft you to handle calls on it for a couple of hours a week.
The crazy thing was, the company was AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Frankensteinbeck
@SFAW:
He doesn’t have to yell it. He has deliberately half-assed this, holding back the professionals who want to get in there, so as many Mexicans (how racists think of Puerto Rican’s) die as possible. We are horrified. His voters think it’s great. Finally, a president who delivers on his promises.
Feathers
@TS: My great aunt didn’t leave her house for the last 30 or so years of her life, aided and abetted by the milkman, who also brought basic groceries, breads, eggs and such if you placed an order. Lived in Ireland as a kid. Insanely unhappy that our milkman had a van, while the next over route still had a horse.
Of course, all this talk of milkmen is reminding me that I am out of milk and must head out in the rain to get some if I want my coffee.
And thanks to the thread for giving me a warning before I hop onto the twitters.
TS
@SFAW: I am just disgusted by the way congress republicans repeat every lie to support the b.s. that trump puts out. Why is it so hard for them to say – “We need to do more People are dying, the mayor is right.” Every last one of them only cares about No 1. None of them wanted trump as President – yet they cover for his b.s and base stupidity by lowering the bar in every possible way.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker:
That’s because it’s the one function the cell providers have yet to bother to make function properly. People are constantly asking me why I still have a landline. I tell them, “It’s because I want to be able to hear what you’re saying, and current cell phone technology is not capable of that basic task.”
MaBell put nearly a century of sophisticated research into making sure we could hear each other, and then we just abandoned it all so we could throw birds at pigs.
BretH
@Baud:
Was a motorcycle and bicycle courier in DC before the fax machine. So many stories..
TS
@Steeplejack: Same guy that said what a wonderful job trump was doing in Puerto Rico – they must have lessons in congress telling these dheads how to lie to the media about every issue that may be discussed.
Steeplejack
@Comrade Nimrod Humperdink:
Yeah, the amount I use my cell phone as a phone instead of as an Internet device is probably 5% tops.
different-church-lady
OMG…
http://www.officemuseum.com/copy_machines.htm
Steeplejack
Now Luis Rivera Marín, Puerto Rico’s secretary of state, is basically telling Alex Witt, “This is fine,” and whizzing on the San Juan mayor. Is he yet another Republican tool or does he have Stockholm Syndrome?
The Lodger
@SFAW: I agree. F the cartoonist’s attempts to be ironic. It was healthcare repeal, not reform. I’m sure the GOP would be happy to have the next vote be on tax repeal, too.
jeffreyw
@SFAW: Milk man! Sure! And the ice man who stocked the icebox and gave us kids chips of ice on a hot summer day. The skating rink was operated by the folks that ran the ice plant. My phone did not have a dial, you picked it up and listened for the operator – “number, please”. Onions for my belt? Didn’t have a belt, just a bit of tatty rope. Just as well, didn’t have any onions.
Kathleen
@Steeplejack (phone): I’m probably way to late to this thread but the Alpha Prefix represented the local company central office that served your location, usually a street name.
Kathleen
@CarolDuhart2: Or songs featuring operators (“Memphis”, “Operator”) and telephone workers (“Mr. Telephone Man”).
Kay
He’s still golfing, right? Him and his posse of low quality assistants. Putting God knows how much public money into Trump Family coffers.
He shouldn’t go to Puerto Rico. He’ll just fuck it up and it’s too expensive to cart his ancient ass around.
Kathleen
@NotMax: Telephone operators were not allowed to get married.
Another Scott
@Schlemazel: There was some TV story about him (or someone like him) in the early ’70s. I saw it in Atlanta. Might have been “60 Minutes”? One part I remember is that he would do some whistling and you’d hear a bunch of relays clicking and he’s say – “that’s the switches in London” … “that’s the switches in Sydney”. It was really neat to hear him explain what was going on, and it made one realize that there was lots of actual engineering going on behind the scenes and it wasn’t all just “magic” when you made a phone call.
I thought the guy I was remembering was blind, but it was a long time ago and I may be jumbling the stories.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@different-church-lady: I had a crush on a girl in a tiny town in rural Ohio in the early ’80s. They had some residual tiny podunk phone company. I think one only had to dial 4 numbers on the local exchange, there. Freaked me out when I saw it the first time. ;-)
Yeah, it really was a thing, and it wasn’t that long ago.
So, now that we mostly have to dial 10-11 numbers if we have to call someone new, will we next have to start using emojis? “My humber is: Taco Hamburger Medium-brown-Arab-woman Gator Lobster Coffee Banana-split BR-549”.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@Cheryl from Maryland:
I have eaten at Zatinya and can confirm that it is excellent. Sunday brunch or afternoon is a good time to go; it’s not crowded then.
Another Scott
@Raven: My dad played around with MARS in Georgia in the early-mid ’70s. It was kinda neat, to be able to make telephone calls over the radio – even from inside a car!!1
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
@Another Scott: Several of the early phone hackers were blind. You may be thinking of Dennis Terry (aka Dennis Teresi.)
Elizabelle
@Kay: All the sniffing about Obama golfing. Pure projection.
The Bushes are so grateful. Jeb! may have failed, but W is no longer the biggest screw up in 21st century US history. Although Cheney is still top criminal in government. Two wars.
Shalimar
@Betty Cracker: My great-grandmother living in rural Alabama still had a party line in the mid 1970s. That is when I remember it, but she lived on her own another decade and liked to listen to other people’s calls to gossip about, so she would have kept it longer if it was still available.
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
No chance. She’s shrill!
Shalimar
@Elizabelle: Iraq and Afghanistan may seem quaint if Trump succeeds in starting wars with Iran and North Korea. Same number, but the casualty totals will be orders of magnitude higher.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott: About 10 minutes ago I didn’t know this, but John Draper (Capt’n Crunch) and Joybubbles were two different people. Joybubbles was blind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking
Another Scott
@ThresherK: I remember when CB radios in cars started to take off, one of the license requirements was that people had to demonstrate some Morse Code understanding. But soon they were inundated with millions of license applications and (wisely) dropped the requirement. That was the beginning of the end, but it took a very long time for it to finally go away everywhere…
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@Kathleen:
I understand that. I wanted to know what specifically the ES stood for, like “Essex” or something.
Another Scott
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: When I was in grad school there was an office with various duplicating machines (ditto, mimeo, “xerox”). The “xerox” machine was an old IBM contraption that used rolls of paper and would cut off the sheets to the proper size when it was done. It was a brilliant design for requiring users get their paper from IBM, and it didn’t have any jambing issues when the humidity changed or when one tried to economize by using paper that was just a tiny bit too thin (or thick). But it died out, presumably because people didn’t want to pay IBM’s paper prices…
Cheers,
Scott.
Mel
@OzarkHillbilly: @Schlemazel:
This is pretty entertaining. Most of the kids are fairly baffled by how the rotary dial works.
Sister Golden Bear
@Baud: When I went to Antarctica a couple years ago the ship had free wifi in the lounge. Used it to post pictures to Facebook each evening. (And an excuse to have time away from my mother, who was driving me up the wall.)
I still marvel at that.
J R in WV
When we moved onto our “farm” aka wooded hillsides all they offered us was a party line. My wife told the telephone company that she got called out late at night for work, and the neighbors would not appreciate hearing their phone ring a 3 am. So they said they would look into it and see what they could do. We got the first private line in this neighborhood.
We still have a landline, as there is zero cell signal connectivity anywhere around here. The geography blocks cell signals, which are line-of-sight, they don’t work around corners or across a hill.
I still have a princess phone for when we have trouble with the line. You can take it outside and plug it into the incoming line, it you don’t get a good signal then they will write a trouble ticket.
My parents phone number was Clifford2-3246. aka 252-3246.
When we were first married and I took my bride to my duty station, we got a phone with a 4 digit number. It was a tiny shrimper town with a fleet of cubano shrimp boats going out before dawn every morning. Called Key West.
I’m gonna go work on my tractor now, I need to re-attach the drive shaft to the bush-hog’s gear box. Last time I mowed I hit something and broke the shear-bolt, which is supposed to prevent other parts from being damaged! HA! Had to replace the flange which slides over the drive shaft, and which bent when it cut the shear-bolt.
There’s also a clutch, spring loaded with 8 bolts compressing springs, I’m sure there’s a sweet spot for torque transmission, so I tried to count threads and tighten the nuts the same number of turns they had when I took it apart. I am not a mechanic, I just pretend and sometimes it works.
IF I get the shaft refastened, I will then mow brush and feel successful.
rikyrah
@MomSense:
You tell no lie
swbarnes2
@Schlemazel: A very old trick. In the old days in England, it was the recipient, not the sender who paid postage, so you could send a blank letter to your loved ones, and if they caught sight of your handwriting, they could just refuse to pay, and still know you were okay.