Posted on 07/20/2019 8:16:01 PM PDT by SamAdams76
OK, so I wrote my post about the heat earlier today. Yes, it was a hot day but I went for a second walk around 7PM when the temperature dropped to a more comfortable 85 degrees.
One thing I noticed, as is the case pretty much any day, is that there are zero kids on the streets. Now I know a lot of kids live in my neighborhood because during the school year, as I take my morning walks, all those big yellow buses ply the streets. During the winter months especially, you see all those idling SUV's and minivans with the kids cocooned inside. As the yellow bus pulls up, the kids dash from the heated cars into the buses with their flip flops and pajama pants.
I kid you not. Pajama pants and flip flops are now apparently acceptable for school wear. Even in the dead of winter.
Kids don't play outside anymore. They don't even appear to have bicycles. Now when I was growing up in the 1970s, a bicycle was pretty much mandatory. Especially a Huffy bike with fat tires so that we could go "off-road" and get to our hideaways in the woods and marshes where we had our stashes of Playboy and MAD magazines.
For those who are familiar with the first season of the Netflix show "Stranger Things", that was my childhood. Riding with my friends on bikes and finding exciting things to do. One thing we didn't do was hang out at home because there was nothing to do there. No video games. No computers. No smartphones. We did have TVs but our parents didn't let us watch it during the day. If I showed up at my house in the middle of a summer day, my Mom would put a broom in my hand and put me to work. So naturally I did not go home until dinner time. My breakfast was a couple bowls of Raisin Bran and lunches were sandwiches and glasses of lemonade handed out the window by mothers who didn't want us in the house dirtying things up.
I feel bad for the kids of today because on the whole, they do not have any concept of what it is like to be truly free. To get out of the house in the morning with a bicycle and not return until dark. Every moment of their lives is micro-managed and supervised by helicopter parents who need to have control over every facet of their lives. In my opinion, this does not bode well for our society.
I have not yet seen Seasons 2 or 3 of Stranger Things so no spoilers, please. Based on Season 1, this could be a decent show.
Reading the book this weekend called "Justice On Trial" by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino. Pretty amazing book about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. Was it only a year ago that this all occurred? Seems like it was 2 or even 3 years ago at this point.
Anyway, it was disgusting how the Left tried to smear Brett Kavanaugh, who is a fine man with a great family. Not only smear him but to utterly destroy his life with false accusations of sexual misconduct. These are truly evil people we are up against. But with President Trump, we have a man who will fight and thus we have Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
No doubt a President Jeb Bush would have tossed Kavanaugh off to the side and selected a "moderate" justice that would turn out to be another tool of the Left. We are so fortunate that 2016 was the year that Donald Trump decided to run for president. The alternative would have been pretty much the end of America.
I have two bicycles.
My old used 120 euros Panther I ride to places I don’t trust locking my new bicycle at:
https://live.staticflickr.com/1767/42138612265_88f273d6df_b.jpg
and my new 1,130 euro Pegasus I bought a few months ago.
Yesterday:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48328974762_70e432f6e5_b.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48328975792_1315635c63_b.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48328843506_c165ddd7e1_b.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48328973472_90164b8679_b.jpg
The real cool kids even attached a playing card to the spokes. The bike I rode didn’t even have a light or horn. The power came from just two legs and the only noise made was from the rider, panting from the hot sun.
Back in olden times, typewriters either had black keys with white letters, or white keys with black letters. Typists had their preferences, and that was obviously racist.
For my birthday my folks bought the neighbor’s used, beat up bike. No speeds, but it did have the high handle bars. I did odd jobs and saved up money for half of a Schwinn - my folks paid the other half.
While we had lots of adventures, we also got into our fair about of trouble. Thankfully rarely got caught!
My daughter’s 460 euro Sky Ride Bicycle. You think when you go to the bicycle store, 400 euros is more than enough for a child’s bicycle but you are wrong. My daughter picked Sky Ride so I wanted to make a payment and come back. Was told by a purple haired girl I don’t need to because they have plenty in back. Two weeks later I
am back and they are sold-out. There were 5 left in Germany, they shipped it from Munich.
https://live.staticflickr.com/827/41353678325_c4ac7e2561_b.jpg
Thanks for the pic.
My bike was more like the one on right, gold in colour. Thinner seat, longer backrest, and, like the bike on the left, a “three speed stick shift” on the main cross bar
All the electronics keep the kids inside now.
Dude, pajama pants and flip flops have been the norm for at least 15 years.
Several years ago, our great-nephews visited and we had all sorts of outdoor activities for them. Archery, flint napping, hiking, swimming in the river and the pool, geocaching, the usual yard games, aired up the bike tires, got fresh batteries for the RC toys, day trips planned for the cavern and Six Flags and countless other activities that might catch their fancy. Nope. All we got were sullen faces and noses stuck in their iphones. They refused to even run errands down the street to an elderly relative, get a tomato from the garden right outside the back door or play with the new kitties that were born in the attached garage because the garage door was open which made it too close to being in the big scary outside. They wouldn’t even help with the bbq grill or roast marshmallows on the porch because -— it was OUTSIDE!!!! We cut that visit short and packed them off to their aunt’s and never invited them back again.
I learned to ride a bike on a very heavy old ‘50s model in loose sand and managed to find every prickly pear within 5 miles. Later, I got a white Huffy with a blue sparkle banana seat! In HS, it was a 10 speed that I spent nearly every waking hour on. When hubby was a kid, he and his friends would ride from sun up to sun down all over the county.
Sadly, our generation was the last for kids to be kids.
I would sometimes babysit a coworker’s child. The mama would insist we spend time outside but the child was not ever be allowed to get dirty. It was just sit quietly in a chair on the porch. Crazy.
“One day we came across a pile of warm tar—they were patching potholes. We found that if we walked through the tar (of course we were barefoot) we could create protective soles on the bottoms of our feet.”
It used to be a common practice to dip geeses feet in tar to protect them when driving them to market.
Mavis teaches to put only one space between sentences. That is sooooo wrong.
I’m in my 60s and have 3 bikes, from an Italian racer (Pinerello) to two different Treks. All have a different purpose.
I ride NO LESS than 4 times a week. Sometimes aggressively.
These kids with nice bikes have obviously benefitted from white privilege. Where are the girls, and children of color?
Don’t (really) want to throw a ‘damper’ on it but we must remember
Todays ‘kids’ are the kids of OUR kids and grandkids.
I basically stopped going to daughters house for meals because the WHOLE FAMILY would be into the ‘phone’ and - having been raised with some manners (as were my kids) I would ‘feel bad’ and had to apologize when asking someone to ‘pass the salt’ because they were being ‘interrupted’.
Still have that old ‘boarding house reach’ but it does seem foolish to apologize to others when they are ‘ignoring’ you.
As to the subject matter, I was one of the few boys that took typing in my Jr year 1955.,.... it was a half year course with Home Ec the other half...Don’t remember what I did about the home ec, probably cut class a lot.<: <: <:
Or maybe that is why I was somewhat independent at 15????
Ditto here, and usually only two hours of TV, one glass of soda a week. However, for a nickel we could but a glass bottle of Coke at Mr. Hood's Jenny gas station, as long as we drank it there and returned the bottle. And it tasted better i think.
But that was in a town of 4,000 with 11 sq. miles, whereas where I am now in a small city of about 20,000 per sq. miles, and predominately Central Americans ("that's my cousin") , many kids ride bikes, however I think most play video games and are on their phones more than that in the course of the whole year. Sad.
Interesting sidenote, my Dad who grew up there, remembers going to school barefoot back in the 1940s. Not so much because my grandparents couldn't afford shoes but that's just sort of how they rolled down there.
These days, I pretty much go barefoot most of the summer when I'm not working. I'm talking around the house and yard, not in public. I actually sleep better at night after a day mostly in bare feet. I think there is something to the notion that going barefoot is good for the body.
Oh, I make no doubt that shoes are “unnatural” - but then, so are bicycles and cars and . . .And especially, IMHO, walking on sidewalks and pavement - in or out of shoes - is unnatural.
My basic thesis is that appearance should not be a major design criterion for the shape of a shoe. I know George Washington wouldn’t have agreed - back then, people rotated their boots between their left foot and their right daily.
A shoe should be constructed and shaped for primarily for function. Secondly, for function. Thirdly, for appearance.
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