the good old days

I know that the risk of exploding from a minor gas main leak is pretty low (especially if you sensibly avoid lighting fires in the vicinity), but it was a hell of a shock to hear the “BOOM” when they ruptured it, followed by the public works team running away. But all told, it was only a few hours of work and everything was fixed, re-buried, and the heavy equipment was gone. (They need to replace the sidewalk segments still, but considering that minor project was interrupted with a major project, I’ll let that slide.)

• 00:00 Gas line punctured by backhoe.
• 00:30 SCE&G shows up and looks around.
• 00:40 Gas gets turned off.
• 00:45 Fire department arrives, looks around, leaves. (Presumably, therefore, I’m not at any risk of blowing up.)
• 01:00 SCE&G comes to the house and states our gas won’t be working for a while. I cheerfully thank him, it’s ok because we’re all electric. He smiles and says he hopes that’s the case for the whole neighborhood. Nice guy.
• 01:15 A road saw shows up. I start to worry about the future of my driveway.
• 01:30 The road saw crew set up a tent and started digging in the big hole — first with shovels, then with the small backhoe section of the road saw. (The driveway is safe.) The tent is a very good idea, considering the temperature is over 90°F and rising.

After two hours, they’d dug a big hole and laid some new pipe. It was interesting to see that it was only a couple inches in diameter — when you hear “gas main”, you picture a foot-wide pipe. Obviously, even a “main” for just a suburban neighborhood wouldn’t need to be that big

Even if we HAD exploded, you probably wouldn’t have noticed — I’ve got a few prewritten posts, and after that there would have just been silence. Just another blog that tapered out with no notice… just another statistic.

Literally rather than figuratively, for a change.

The public works guys who were replacing part of my sidewalk this morning have ruptured a gas line and it’s going “WOOOOOOOOOOSH” right in front of my house…

The public works guy’s advice… don’t light any matches. (durrr….)

UPDATE: 20 minutes after the gas line is first ruptured, SCE&G (electric & gas utility) arrives, and stands around pointing at sidewalks with the public works guy. 30-40 minutes after, the gas is turned off. (Or, all the gas in NE Columbia has gushed out my front yard and we’ve used it all up.) The large truck noise which I thought was a fire truck arriving was actually the regularly scheduled garbage truck.

When we inherited some of my husband’s grandmother’s cookbooks, one of the few we were interested in was Maine Coastal Cooking. It’s a small, cheaply bound collection of “Down East recipes dating from 1664″ and published in 1967 by the Courier-Gazette in Rockland Maine. (It’s not entirely clear why she had it, since she was originally from Canada and lived most of her life in Connecticut, but there you go.) The contents are fairly standard and dull cookbook material (although the percentage of lobster recipes is ridiculously high) except for a small section in the back:

The final 24 pages of Coastal Cooking takes one back to 1664 in what is now Massachusetts, and even back to England. The recipes contained there are taken from “The Accomplished Cook: or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery.” This rare and valuable cookbook, perhaps one of the first to be printed, was loaned by Mr. Ralph W. Bartlett of Bremen, Maine whose forebears came into possession of it upwards of 300 years ago.

(Actually, cookbooks were being compiled in Europe from about 1390 onwards, so I doubt this is truly one of the first ever printed… but whatever.)

Included are such gems as “To farce [sic!] a Lobster”, “To make a Muskle Pie”, “Another way for a grand Sallet”, nine weird ways to cook eggs, and a few lovely woodcut illustrations — not to mention occasional advice on how to work with “tainted” (i.e. rotting) meat. [A 1685 edition of the book is online at ibiblio, if anyone truly dedicated to extremely old cooking wants to read it for themselves.]

For an extra level of fun, the original recipes are photographed, not transcribed — so all the words have the long s which looks so much like a f. (This always made me wonder whether I was supposed to be sarcing the lobster instead of farcing the lobster. But in that word it’s definitely an f, you can see the crossbar; besides, I wouldn’t be much better off trying to sarce something rather than farce it…)

One of my favorite comedy takes on the f/s problem was from The Vicar of Dibley, in which a lovely vintage King James Bible is donated to the church and hilarity ensues when the verger reads a passage… (start around 6:50 if you’re short on time)

HIV-deniers (among many other things) seriously annoy me with TEH STUPID, so it was nice to hear a study has proved that people with HIV are living longer on the latest anti-retroviral therapy. Not like the link between HIV and AIDS is in doubt in any reputable scientific circle, but the more evidence the better, eh?

So, hooray for modern medicine. We now return to our regularly scheduled mulling of retro miscellaneous…

Ah, the 80’s… All the annoyance of karaoke — with the added “fun” of relying on the drunken singer’s memory of how a song’s lyric and tune are supposed to go. Whee!!!

While I imagine you probably did need to sit that close to the radio for the teeny FM transmitter to work, it should have created awful feedback. (And the price — $14.88? Why eighty-eight cents?)

But price aside, nothing says classy like driving by Ms. Good Lookin’ and letting her know you’ll pick her up later (presumably when you’re done with the current carload of hot things, one of whom just smacked you for being a total douchebag).

Via Retro Thing

What the hell was wrong with the fifties? Lots of middle class people with modern kitchens (meaning, theoretically, lots of housewives with time on their hands) AND lots of processed food. “How can we merge these two?” And thus the was born the horror of the brand-based recipe.

Life is better with the convenience of modern appliances, but what’s a woman to do when Husband is too stingy to spring for an upgrade? Make him use the old shit himself for a while, of course. Complete instructions are found in A Word to the Wives, featuring a daft husband, his tired wife, and her shopping-mad/golf-mad friend.

Let’s concentrate on just the recipe portion of this delightful appliance commercial, as Alice (the friend) cheerfully chatters to her guests (Daft and Tired) to lull them into a false sense of security before the meal.

What’s she making? Why, just a sweet potato casserole with shredded pineapple (off the back of a can of shredded pineapple), as a side dish for the ham and its sauce: equal parts grape jelly and light [white?] mustard, simmered (obviously invented by either the jelly company or the mustard company).

Of course, Alice isn’t content to just serve middling-to-poor food; she also keeps up a running commentary about her beloved appliances, and later drags her spouse into the hard-sell as well. Poor Daft ends up being roped into buying a whole new set of modern conveniences for Tired. With friends like Alice, who needs stores?

Imagine you’re a stay-at-home mom. Daughter’s paper napkin keeps falling off her lap. How on earth will you address this horrifying situation?

The logical answer: get cloth napkins, you lazy idiot. Didn’t you take Home Ec? The “Ec” stands for “Economics”, you know, which should have taught you things like not spending your household budget on paper napkins while it was teaching you how to make cloth napkins. It’s a FREAKIN’ SQUARE OF CLOTH, how hard is that?

Oh, don’t worry though, there’s always the advertising answer: get cloth-like napkins from a startlingly diminutive butler.

The butler is named Manners… ugh…

After discovering last week’s brief, instructive advice from England about how to cross a street, we bring you another 1948 instruction film: When You Are a Pedestrian.

The main differences between the two:

• this one was made in the US
• this one is five times longer
• this one is not funny

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

This is a surprisingly graphic film for 1948 — most early safety films were blood-free — and opens with a pedestrian getting hit by a car, then still photographs of crushed cars and dead bodies. It then transitions to pleasant music and instructions on how to be a pedestrian, with a bit of stop-motion animation to move things along. It’s a little funny to hear a laundry list of ways you’ll be horribly injured when walking… but for ten minutes?

Sadly, it feels like there was pressure to meet the “mental hygiene” genre’s standard of ten-minute films. Looong pauses in narration guarantee that attention will be wandering, and big words and a lecturing tone rapidly reduce anyone’s willingness to listen. Contrast that with the British film’s humor and quick delivery of its lesson.

But, we do get the great quote:

Statistics don’t bleed or scream with pain.

Eeeeyeah…

This is far from scientific — Candid Camera just filmed funny clips. But it’s a great illustration of the principles of group psychology (or, less scientifically, peer pressure). Especially the end bit with the poor kid just imitating his elders

Via Reduced Mass

My daughter, four years old, is trying hard to learn to read. Unfortunately, she’s doing it by guessing.

Yesterday we tried to demonstrate C-A-T using the basic phonics method — take the sounds the letters make, smush them together, and you get the word cat.

She wasn’t getting it. So I drew a picture of a cat as a really unsubtle hint. And you could see the little light bulb go on over her head. She yells: “Kitty!” (sigh…)

Today, I told her she could play computer games if she could read the word P-O-W-E-R under the power button. Her first guess was “pan” and her second was “on”.

Basically, she’s trying the whole word method for herself. She knows the sounds the letters make — she’ll tell you the phonetic components easily, but won’t smush them together for some reason. This is apparently a popular critique of phonics:

Some students find it difficult to “blend” the letter sounds to produce sensible speech

Regardless, phonics is still considered the national standard for the ideal way to teach students to read.