(Arlo & Janis via GoComics.com)
Jesse Singal at NYMag worries about “What All This Bad News Is Doing to Us”:
… In an age when we can mainline bad news 24/7 if we so choose, what’s the psychological impact of all this exposure to tragedy at a distance?
Mary McNaughton-Cassill, a professor at the University of Texas– San Antonio and leading researcher on the connection between media consumption and stress, said the current trend of breathless, protracted coverage of tragedy and calamity can be traced back to the Oklahoma City bombings. “That was really the first event where it really went viral, just 24 hours of news coverage, and that’s really become the norm,” she said…
…[W]hen people overestimate the world’s awfulness, there do appear to be real consequences. And while, as has eternally been the case, there are certainly pockets of the planet that really are getting worse on a daily basis (Syria), on a broader level there’s solid evidence — perhaps gathered most comprehensively by Steven Pinker — that the world is in the midst of a decades-long trend of actually becoming better: safer and healthier and more humane. We just have the bad stuff shouted into our ears louder than ever before.
How can we fight back against the unnecessary coarsening of our outlook that may be occurring every time we glance at one of our gadgets? The simplest technique is, as McNaughton-Cassill put it, to “Just turn it off.” That is, take a break from the news. Switch off CNN and shut down TweetDeck for awhile and don’t sleep next to your phone.
This sort of advice isn’t realistic for everyone, though, so she had other suggestions as well. “What I tell people is that you really have to get conscious,” she said. That is, stop consuming news like a hungry teenager wolfs down a Pop-Tart — rather, seek out a bit of context and a bit of understanding as to why certain pieces of information affect you in certain ways…
Overall, of course, it’s both unrealistic and undesirable to construct bubbles that keep out the world’s bad news. But there’s a difference between being informed and being obsessive, and it’s a line that’s very easy to accidentally slide across in an age when there’s so much scary information zipping around.
That being said, it looks to be a good weekend around here for tending my neglected tomato plants, and maybe see if I’ve got enough Romas, Juliets & cracked specimens (where I can discard the unsightly bits) to cook a batch of slow-roasted tomatoes. Have to find the parchment paper, though — for whatever weakness in our crappy old stove or my own inattention, using foil means burnt tomato skins.
What’s on the agenda in your neighborhoods?
bargal20
I know my biggest concern is always about how world events make Americans feel.
raven
We hit the road for a couple of days last weekend, didn’t hurt to unplug.
Marilynd..so
Ahh, Anne! A lurker on the West Coast of S Oregon, always enjoys one last click on BJ before I go to bed, and find you are up early AGAIN!! I need the advise of the first paragraph, and wish I had the garden to tend in the 2nd. Need to turn it all off, but just can’t seem to be able. In this moment I will… just breath deeply, go to bed, and not yell thru the internet like my Great Grampa did at the radio until he passed at 102…when I was 14 in 1959…..I come by it honestly…
raven
@Marilynd..so: I fear that some of these early morning posts are launched with a timer.
Marilynd..so
@raven: You mean they CHEAT?????…..and here I thought she was that devoted!!!…I’m devistated in the best BJ tradition!!
raven
@Marilynd..so: It’s a cruel, cruel summer.
Anne Laurie
@raven: Not this time — I’m just on my way to bed now!
OzarkHillbilly
My wife just turned it all off. Listens to Books on Tape in the car now. Last week it was 3 days before she knew about the latest worstest disasterest ever. Somehow or other, her lack of knowledge of it affected absolutely nothing.
Hal
I’m looking up Amtrak tickets for this fall. I’m planning on taking a train from NY to Seattle sometime in October. Then I’ll probably fly back. I really want one of those roomette’s, but they bump the price up quite a bit. If I was still 21, I would take the greyhound like I did years ago. One trip to SF and back was all I could do. Interesting ride, lots of kids with clothes stuffed in garbage bags, some ex-cons, and the occasional crazy person. Amtrak is nicer, for sure, but not bathing for 3 days is still very gross. I may just break down and fly after all.
raven
@Hal: I was in the hospital in Atlanta with a broken back in 1975. My best friend live in Berkeley and, busted hippies that we were, he took the bus to come see me. Somewhere in New Mexico the bus made a pit stop and he found a baggie with 20 $20’s on the ground. He would have surrendered it if someone had asked but he wasn’t going to announce it. He was able to give my wife some dough and fly back to the west coast. Them’s was the days.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: That was…. cruel.
raven
@Anne Laurie: YAY! Glad to be wrong!!!
OzarkHillbilly
If anyone cares, Michael Sam made his NFL debut last night. Did well, even if it is only pre-season.
Ramalama
@Hal: OMG took a Greyhound from Chicago to Montreal. Worst rides ever because why? Had to keep getting off of the bus to get back on another one. Never got a chance to fully sleep longer than 2 hours. Took me 25 hours to get there.
Is there a direct bus ride for your destination?
On the plus side, I got to stay within a new and gated bus terminal in Detroit. It was gleaming, while all around me the city looked a little war torn.
Also, note to self: change socks. I was able to brush my teeth at one point but noticed a smell emanating from me that I couldn’t pinpoint until I got home and … let the dogs out.
OzarkHillbilly
@Hal: Memories…. Took my first X-country bus trip at 17. Had my bag stolen in Chicago. Found it a half hour later, with everything still in it, under the seat of some guy who suddenly became very cooperative when confronted.
Once found myself confronted with a 22 hr layover in Duluth due to a scheduling change. Ended up hitchhiking the 150+ miles to International Falls in sub-freezing temps. Tried to sleep in the ditch until a logging truck roared by at 70. Best ride of the night was from a newspaper delivery man who turned around and came back for me. I figure his daughter (?) took pity on me and talked him into it. I remember being on the edge of Ely hearing, looking up and seeing by the light of a street lamp, a flight of snow geese winging their way south.
Best/Worst bus ride ever: The 24 hours it took to get from Dallas to El Paso in July. The worst because it was Texas… In July. The best because it was Texas… in July. (one can not hhike in TX)
MattF
Read the last of Lev Grossman’s ‘Magician’ trilogy– fantasy for adults. An admiring review in yesterday’s NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/books/book-review-magicians-land-ends-lev-grossmans-trilogy.html?ref=books&_r=0
Lots of characters who appeared in the first two volumes play a role in the last, so reading just the last one would be problematical.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
After a night of fitful sleep, I have come to realize that I am neglecting some activities, and hindering my spiritual progress. Need more meditation and yoga, if not prayer.
PurpleGirl
When I turned on the computer this morning I opened Cassie’s kitten cam first. Four of the larger kids were playing and romping around on top of the blanket and under the blanket. Such silly kitties this morning. My BP readings were on target.
When neighbors I talk to complain about things being bad all over, I try to tell them that it’s just the news. Things aren’t that terrible compared to earlier years, or at least that they never heard the bad stuff before. They don’t believe me.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Worst ride. My friend and I had gone out to LA, winter of 70. We hitched to San Diego looking for an Army buddy who we couldn’t find. Taking to a bunch of people we realized it wasn’t such a great idea for a couple of longhairs to head south so we decided to head to San Fran to see another pal. We found a place to crash in Newport and then made it up to Santa Barbara. We ended up on a stretch of 101 that ran through town and was a good place to hitchhike. So here we are, two wild ass hippies in black leather Chicago motorcycle jackets trying to get to the bay. People showed up in front of us and behind us and go picked up. No one came near us so, after 24 hours we stumbled to the Grey dog station on got on a bus. Unfortunately we didn’t know what it meant “a local” and we stopped at every fucking intersection in the San Joaquin valley! Took us for fucking ever to get to the city.
hilts
Some stories about a disturbing new app
Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods
http://valleywag.gawker.com/smiling-young-white-people-make-app-for-avoiding-black-1617775138
There’s An App That Directs You Away From Sketchy Areas, And The Company Swears It’s Not Racist
http://www.businessinsider.com/sketchfactor-app-directs-you-away-from-sketchy-areas-allison-mcguire-2014-8?op=1
jayboat
Thanks for this post, AL. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately- seems like a neverending funnel of negativity if you tend to hang out on political sites.
Such simple advice… just pull the plug. Easier said than done for me- I am such a creature of habit. I often wonder about the long-term effects on the younger generation. Hard to imagine having a smartphone at the age of 8 or 10 and what that does to a developing mind, or having access to all your friends all the time as a teenager. Will anyone have an attention span longer than 2 minutes?
HeartlandLiberal
This past weekend I had so many tomatoes, over 20 varieties producing strongly, large and small and heirlooms, that I filled a large stew pot with chopped tomatoes, and cooked them slowly for three hours. Once reduced, I added shredded carrots, chopped celery and onion, herbs, and two points of cooked, browned fresh ground pork from a local farm. For three days we ate some of the best spaghetti I have ever had.
Yesterday, I had to cook another full pot down. This time, after it cooled, at wife’s request, rather than leaving in chunky, I ran the whole batch through the blender. Today it will be packaged and frozen for future use.
In other words, when you plant 28 tomatoes plants, and they do well, you cannot give them away or eat them fast enough, so for the next few weeks, we will be cooking and freezing. There are two baskets on the counter brimming with half dozen varieties of grape and cherry including heirlooms, and the second full of a dozen large tomatoes, from traditional to dark heirloom, to still green when ripe zebras, and a bright yellow variety grown for first time this year. Makes for some fun colorful still life pictures for our family blog for friends and relatives.
I want to make another spaghetti batch, and this time try using ground bison meat. We use it all the time for burgers now, superior to beef in taste and leanness, but tender and delicious. Hopefully it will go well in spaghetti.
satby
I’ve noticed the disconnect for a long time, crime is down but people are more paranoid than ever; and from what I’ve observed it does make people more reactionary.
And living in a red area lets me see a lot of it up close. One weird MI thing, about 1/2 the people using credit cards around here don’t sign them. At all. I hear various reasons: someone could copy their signature, if they lost the card someone else couldn’t use it because it wasn’t signed, etc. But they always thank me for asking for additional ID because I’m usually the only person who has. And then when I try to gently point out that a bad actor would just sign the name on the front and charge up a bundle till the card got reported lost, it comes as a revelation. Then they STILL don’t sign the credit card, because whatever. Makes me slightly crazy.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: That stretch of 101 was the only place with a stop light between LA and San Francisco. It’s now all freeway through Santa Barbara.
WereBear
I know I’m not going to look up and see Mongols invading my village.
This gives me incredible perspective.
Hal
@Ramalama:
Yes. I noticed my feet on day 2. Went to a local drugstore, bought foot powder and handy wipes, and wiped my feet and changed socks. Next best thing to showering.
Sleep is the one major downside, and why I really want a roomette this time. When I took the Amtrak in 2009 I think I slept a few hours a day. My cousin picked me up at the station, I went to her house, showered and then fell sound asleep on her couch. It’s funny watching the people traveling cross country slowly start to look crazy eyed and disheveled.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@PurpleGirl: There’s supposedly a primitive part of the brain that treats each iteration of news about the same incident as different incidents. Our overall sense of how the world is going, if we’re news junkies, is based on some terrible thing happening twelve times, not the same terrible thing being mentioned every half hour for six hours.
Ever since I heard that, I’ve tried to make a point of unplugging once the initial rush of information is done. It does make a difference.
Raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: yup, I still have the sign we made. Big Sur on one side and San Diego on the other.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Raven: That stretch of road had a big fig tree by it. The tree’s still there, next to the freeway.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Heh. At the end of that X-Texas bus ride, I found myself standing in the shade of an overpass for 16 hrs and the temp hit 114 (but it was a dry heat). Shared my water with a fellow hher who had none. Finally got rescued by 2 college girls heading home to Santa Fe. When we hit town he and I had to hide on the backseat floorboard because they were afraid their father might see them with us in the car. I wasn’t real sure that was a good idea.
@HeartlandLiberal: You need The Original Squeezo Strainer. May seem pricey at $200, but processing tomatoes got a whole lot easier for me this year.
Raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: I think the Isla Vista Bank of America was right there, no?
Raven
Ok, I’m gonna piss everyone off. Are there NOT places where you don’t go? Do you tell your kids not to go?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Raven: Isla Vista’s out by UCSB(Goleta), I talking about downtown SB.
WereBear
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: That makes a lot of sense. Back in the day, you’d hear about the nearby Mongol invasion only ONCE.
Esme's Mom
Paso Robles. 1980. Driving from LA to visit a friend in Santa Cruz. Power outage hit the town right as we pulled into a station to gas up the bug. We tried to get a snack somewhere, and the weirdest moment was finding a restaurant with the door locked and people inside with candles who wouldn’t respond to us when we knocked. Slept in the car for a few hours, then the lights and everything else roared on about 1 am and we vowed not to return. I’m sure it’s a pretty town.
Anybody have experience with non-toxic flea treatments? I’m trying to get the Capstar/Program stuff for poochie but the vet recommended Advantix, which seems very toxic. Just reading the directions I’m having a panic attack.
Raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: We were where you noted, I just wasn’t sure about the bank.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Raven: I try to avoid going to the west of my place down my street at night. It’s a commercial area and no one’s there at night doing anything productive. I’ve seen some folk getting high there and the neighbors say that there’s some selling going on as well.
Raven
@Esme’s Mom: capstar is just one day I think. We use Trifexis but I don’t think a flea med exists that you can’t find a horror story about.
Raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: racist pig! We never went out the goddamn gate after dark, Charlie was out there.
WereBear
I’ve normally been sleeping in until 8 AM on weekdays, 9 or a little after on weekends! It is a tremendous relief after so much vicious insomnia over the past year or so.
Today Mr WereBear needed me to get up early, but I got eight hours anyway… I should be okay.
The brain needs four hours of total darkness to make melatonin and create a true sleep cycle. If you aren’t sleeping in a totally dark room, or using a sleep mask, you are missing a great chance to get better sleep. This is what I learned from being terribly sick. (I’m getting better.)
When I was a kid, my mother would put on a nightlight if we had a nightmare, because the house was so incredibly dark at night. That’s not true anymore! Every single thing in your bedroom has a light on it now.
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: Well, there is an NRA dinner in Sullivan tonight. I am definitely NOT going to that, way too dangerous with all those guns I am sure will be in attendance.
JPL
@hilts: Obviously the app can be misused but my son is looking for an apartment closer to where he works. When online reviews mention car break-ins or even murders, I’m leery. It seems like an easier way to rule out certain apartment complexes.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: Thank you for the link. Michael Sam was a great college athlete and hopefully he can bring his game to the pros.
tybee
i’m taking the 100′ net to the north beach to annoy the sea life.
always a hoot to see what we drag up.
MattF
@WereBear: I’ve always preferred a dark-as-possible bedroom. No lights, except for the alarm clock display. No phone, no computer, no mini-fridge, no nothin’.
JPL
@hilts: Trulia.com lists local crime when researching homes. Wanting to live in an area with little crime has nothing to do with race, imo.
Raven
@tybee: nail em, I didn’t do shit last weekend but I had fun.
Raven
@JPL: I don’t know about great but I sure hope he does well in the bigs.
Raven
@JPL: UGA had to be forced to publish their crime stats but now they do.
satby
@Esme’s Mom: I have used Capstar for immediate flea kill, but it only lasts a day. I’ve also used Advantix and Frontline, now available as generics for 1/2 the cost. Yes, they’re really chemical, but since I do rescue I can’t let fleas get a foothold with 12 dogs and cats on site (no, not all in the house, I have a kennel).
Anything you use will be a pesticide, I’ve been through alternatives that failed and bug bombing for fleas is no fun either.
WereBear
@satby: True. When I have only cats who don’t go out, organic methods work well enough. But with dogs, you have to step it up.
Scamp Dog
@Marilynd..so: so Great Grandpa was born around 1857, meaning he remembered the Civil War, the invention of radio and then TV, both world wars, and so much more!
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: On the slightly more serious side, back in the day I lived and worked in all kinds of supposedly “dicey” places (read, “black”) including East St. Louis. The 2 worst places I ever lived, were all white neighborhoods. Murders, rapes, assaults, break-ins, the whole 9 yards. The only time I ever saw a cop was when sh!t went sideways.
I remember one job I was working on at the old Carter Carburetor plant on N. Grand (not a good neighborhood, but not bad either) (It has since been declared a Superfund site) Anyway, my boss pulled in a bunch of cabinetmakers from the out-of-work list. Of course they were all white, and as clueless as one could be about “inner city culture” (not black, “inner city”. Even if Paul Ryan can’t tell the diff, there is one) One day they all went out to lunch and when they returned they were… disturbed, with one young guy particularly … Scared sh!tless.
Seems he got into a little argument with a black man. As I sat and listened to this poor dumb white boy of a Jefferson County redneck relate his near death experience with the first black man he had ever actually spoken to (exaggeration) (probably), I heard every caricature ever seen on TV of how things are in the Big City. At the end I just said, “You are probably the dumbest Jeffco cracker I have ever met. You were asking for it. You got big red letters all over your face saying, “Well FVCK ME!!!” He didn’t get it, he just didn’t get it, and try as I might, I couldn’t explain to him how many ways he insulted that man.
Since then I have learned that even tho there are very few places I won’t go, there are a whole lot of people I won’t go to those places with.
JPL
@OzarkHillbilly: haha… Decades ago, a friend and I went to a home tour in Forsyth County, GA. It was the heart of redneck country but we planned on just seeing a few homes and leaving. Well, I got lost and had to stop at a country store for directions. Since my friend was black, I locked her in the car with strict orders not to open the doors until I returned. Forsyth has been gentrified but still has areas I wouldn’t feel comfortable in.
gogol's wife
@MattF:
I saw two glowing reviews of that yesterday (one in daily Times, on in Sunday Times), and I’m sorry — from the plot descriptions, it sounds UNREADABLE!
But then, i find Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Narnia unreadable too.
Mike J
@Raven: I would be interested to see how they compile their maps. It seems like it would be trivial to automatically match crime stats with location on a phone. I would have less problem if it were done algorithmically rather than frat boys reporting that they had a feeling of unease.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL: My wife and I got married down in Shannon County. I had a couple of friends who decided to skip it because of their darker complexions. I doubt they would have had any trouble just because they were black, but I was once threatened with a shotgun by a drunken redneck down there. If I had been black I doubt he would have been so restrained.
MattF
@gogol’s wife: Well, chacun à son goo, as Baby LeRoy says. FWIW, there are big stretches of LOTR that I’m happy to skip over and I gave up on the Narnia books when I realized I was being prosthelytized.
Just curious– was there any specific thing in the plot descriptions that made you think “Hmm, I’m not going there.”
Betty Cracker
I’m lounging at a friend’s barrier island beach condo, waiting for the lightweights to recover from last night’s overindulgence. We’ll probably go for a boat ride later.
bemused
Yesterday I read that Bill Murray is starring in a new film, St. Vincent, premiering Oct 24 with co-stars Melissa McCarthy and Chris O’Dowd. I can’t wait to see this, big fan of all three actors.
The distributor of St. Vincent wants to honor Murray with a celebration of his work at the Toronto Film Festival but it seems that Murray is very hard to contact with no agent and no cell phone.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I wondered what time of the year you had traveled in my neck of the MN woods as sub-freezing temps have been known to happen even in what we call summer but the south bound geese narrowed that down for me. Ditch sleeping definitely no fun that time of year unless you’re in a sub-zero rated sleeping bag.
Betty Cracker
On the topic of awful bus rides: my divorced parents would sometimes shuttle my sister and me between their homes via Greyhound. Decades later, I can still recall the awful chemical stench of the bus toilet. We very often had to fend off perverts. It never occurred to us to complain to our parents about it.
MattF
@Betty Cracker: I think there’s a generational cohort who associates ‘bus ride’ with ‘circle of hell.’ I recall one ride home from college that passed (for some reason) through Scranton at night. Huge, glowing, smoldering piles of ash.
nancydarling
“Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.”
“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
Anne Frank wrote those lines during the two years she and her family spent in hiding in a couple of secret rooms in Amsterdam—hiding from the Nazis who had taken over the Netherlands.
They were betrayed and taken to concentration camps. Anne died at Bergen-Belsen when she was 15.
Ramalama
@Betty Cracker: Yeah I recall the chemical wash from trips taken years ago. Didn’t notice it on my recent 5-bus-to-Montreal, though.
Maybe I was just distracted by my feet.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: Yep to all that. I look like what I am, an Irish American decended from cops… there’s no high crime area of Chicago that I haven’t been in pretty often, but there’s places that I wouldn’t want to be depending on the street smarts, or lack of them, of who I was with. And the first time my family was hit with burglery was after they moved to the lily white ‘burbs.
Homicide is most commonly committed by someone known to the victim. That’s why it also makes me crazy when I see the inane quotes about how “that stuff doesn’t happen here” after a newsworthy tragedy. That kind of stuff happens EVERYWHERE; usually just need the right mix of booze or drugs and rage.
MattF
@satby: And rage will find a way. Even here in Bethesda, we had the case of one Lululemon salesperson beating another one to death. Next door to the Apple Store.
satby
@MattF: After a 30 year gap, I’m again working part time in retail, and given how hopped up on rage a lot of this country has become I’m surprised we don’t have an incident like that per week.
Peoples be nuts.
Edited to add: which brings us right back to the topic up top.
WereBear
@MattF: Well, you know. Lululemon.
catclub
@satby: I think the only time a signature will ever be examined is if the card owner repudiates a transaction. I also thought, at first, you meant that the cardholders were not signing their receipts.
AnneW
@Hal:
One word of warning on the Empire Builder (Chicago to Seattle): it’s been running consistently late due to heavy freight traffic in North Dakota. A friend & I took the train out to Portland in March, & we got in 7 hours late (and 4 hours late coming back to Chicago). They were supposed to redo the timetables this summer to reflect local conditions, so hopefully the schedule’s a bit more realistic now.
It’s a long trip. I wouldn’t do it without a roomette, and at least the price includes meals as well. Also, you get to use the first class lounge in Chicago, which allows you to park your carry on bags with an attendant.
satby
@catclub: not signing the cards… which aren’t actually valid without a signature. Not putting “see ID” in the signature line either, just leaving a lovely space for someone to forge their name and charge stuff up if they ever lost that card and didn’t realize / report it. And no one ever checks to verify that it’s their card until I do, is what almost all of them tell me.
The obsession with someone “copying their signature” combined with the whole “don’t remember who told me you shouldn’t sign them” leads me to believe it was one of those FB / rightwing email chain things.
Mainly because of the complete lack of logic in the whole thought process of how they decided not signing the stupid card was a wise decision. Total WTF
Seanly
There’s a certain political mindset in the United States dedicated to destroying this progress.
J R in WV
We traveled on Amtrak back in the late 80s from Seattle to Portland, then to San Francisco, then to Glenwood Springs CO, then to Denver CO, and flew home from there. The airline part of the trip was vastly more painful than the train trip. We had a roomette on the first leg from Seattle to Portland.
In and around Seattle we visited with relatives who had moved away from WV years before, drove to the Olympic National Park, Port Townsend, then in Portland we drove west to the Pacific shore and along it – everywhere was pretty deserted as school was in session, it was October.
The food was wonderful on the coast, and in SF, and in Colorado we hiked from 8,000 feet in shirtsleeves to 12,000 feet in fluffy winter parka near Marble, an old abandoned at the time quarry in the high mountains. Then in Denver we enjoyed urban things, the Natural History Museum had a cartoon exhibit by Gary Larson, isn’t he the guy with talking cows and mad scientists? People are usually so quiet in a museum but there it was murmur, Gufaw HAHAHA. Murmurm HAHA… very big fun.
Then Northwest got us stranded in the Detroit airport way out in the tiny terminal that handled tiny commuter planes. We were pretty broke after 3 weeks on the road, too. Out first real vacation trip, a little of everything. Even the shi77y airline motel room in Detroit that we had to get mad to get, no luggage, no clean undies. Never made that mistake again!
Meepers
@raven: I’m a dedicated lurker, but I wanted to thank you for mentioning Pallookaville. I went with a couple of friends for lunch and it was very tasty!
opiejeanne
@Betty Cracker: An almost terrible bus ride:
My in-laws got the bright idea that our little boy, age 7, would have a grand adventure riding the bus between Riverside, CA and San Bernardino, CA. About 20 miles between the stations. We went to the Riverside station to get his ticket, took a very good look around and he didn’t like the idea of riding the bus by himself, nor did we, so we decided we’d drive him there since it was only 15 miles by car. We drove to the SB station and waited for them to show up so we could hand off the kid to them, We waited an hour after the bus arrived that he would have been on, and no grandparents (they were always late for everything). So we headed to their house and waited another hour, just missed them, and when they finally arrived at their house they were furious that we had made them wait.
No apology for the hour he would have been waiting in the even creepier station in San Bernardino. They blamed me for “over-parenting”. Hell, they blamed me for everything they didn’t like that my husband did.
That was 1977 so I guess I was an early helicopter parent.
opiejeanne
@satby: Not signing the cards goes back before the internet; I worked retail in the 80s and early 90s and ran into a lot of people who wrote See I.D, in the space. I did that for a while but ran into a clerk who, like you, pointed out that I needed to sign it in order to use it.
I used to ask for ID for every transaction, and I got yelled at by people with credit cards, mostly old people who said that when they got the cards they thought they were through with having to show ID. I pointed out to them that I did not know them so I had no idea if they were really the owners of said card.
I worked seasonal retail Christmas 2002 and a woman wrote a check to my store but her name wasn’t on the check. It said, “Chuck Finley”. The store was in Costa Mesa, and gee, that name rang a bell, but I had just moved back from the SF area and back then it was as if the southern half of the state did not exist. I asked for ID and she had none, and she looked at me and said, “Don’t you know who I am?” I looked at her more carefully and drew a blank. “I’m Tawny Kitaen!” she said, just ask some of the guys who work here. I had no idea who she was, but the stock clerks knew her.
After she left the penny dropped. I’m an old-time Angels fan and knew who Chuck Finley was, but I didn’t know his personal business and didn’t associate that name with the pitcher.
She had beaten Chuck Finley with her Stiletto heel in public that spring and he had filed for divorce that spring; that part I remembered, but not her name.
Yeah, Whitesnake. I have seen the video now, but at the time I was in my late 50s and not really a big fan, knew “Here I Go Again” but didn’t know who recorded it.
opiejeanne
@J R in WV: We took a train trip like that with our daughters in 1989, from LA to Seattle for a few days with a friend, then over to Glacier National Park for a week, where we rented a car. We avoided bears while we hiked, but an elk jumped over the hood of our car; we saw bison and more elk and marmots and bighorn sheep and all sorts of critters we’d never seen before. The marmots were under parked cars, contemplating the hoses, deciding which one would taste best.
We were so thrilled to see bald eagles on that trip but where I live now we see them all the time, hunting small animals and being harassed by smaller birds, and sitting on the art installations next to the 520. The tickets for the kids were free, our tickets were for a single zone with three stops for a really decent price, but we didn’t get a roomette because every time we wanted one the additional cost stopped us cold.
On the way back we spent several nights in San Francisco and watched the 4th of July fireworks from the top of a hotel, then we stopped for 3 days in Santa Barbara, right on the beach. That extra stop cost us $10.