the good old days

We wanted to refinance our existing mortgage with Wells Fargo, but despite very polite and helpful customer service reps who assured us a broker would get in touch and sympathized that it was taking so long, nobody from them has gotten in touch with us about refinancing in the five months we’ve been inquiring. (Yesterday we phoned to get the exact payoff balance, and the customer service rep asked if we were interested in refinancing. Buzz politely declined.)

In order to refinance in sometime before 2036, we had gotten in touch with a mortgage broker who was extremely eager to work with us. We got through the initial qualification, were constantly assured we could get the rate we wanted without needing to buy-down points or whatever weird mortgage magic makes house sales work. But we weren’t going to refinance unless we got a good enough change in rates, and Buzz had made that clear. So it was rather odd when Mortgage Lady flipped out when he declined to get the house appraised until rates were what we wanted.

Mortgage Lady: You need to get the appraisal done!
Buzz: We don’t want to do the appraisal until the rates are where we want.
Mortgage Lady: The rates are going down! They’re on the way down right now!
Buzz: Who has to pay for the appraisal if we just never go forward with the loan?
Mortgage Lady: The rates are going down!
Buzz: Umm… who pays or the appraisal, us or your company?
Mortgage Lady: The rates are going down!
[Repeat conversation two or three times.]

She told Buzz to talk to me and see if I agreed with his decision. I laughed and told him to tell her something rude. To his credit, he kept it polite.

Despite that, we still got to the point that we were going to close on the refinance this morning. South Carolina requires attorneys for closings, and so a nice attorney named Jason came to our house, documents in hand. Documents with closing costs thousands more than we’d expected, all bundled into the vague category of “Points Buydown” or something like that. Jason was happy to sit and chat while we tried to reach Mortgage Lady on the phone. Eventually Mortgage Lady called us back, but wouldn’t/couldn’t explain how she’d calculated the closing costs.

Mortgage Lady: I’m not making any money on this.
Buzz: I just want to know where the number came from.
Mortgage Lady: I’m not making any money on this.
Buzz: When you say “you’re not making any money” — no offense, but I don’t care whether it’s you or your employer getting the money.
Mortgage Lady: I’m not making any money on this! It’s a good loan! It’s a good rate!

It may forever remain a mystery just who was going to be making the money, if it wasn’t us and it wasn’t the attorney and it wasn’t Mortgage Lady…

I feel pretty bad for people who either aren’t thorough about reading what’s put in front of them, or are so desperately in need of refinancing that they’ll swallow whatever crap companies like this try to pull.

In the spirit of finding another broker who isn’t quite so… erratic, we’d like to share with the charming 1959 The Road to Better Living. It’s 24 minutes long, but I strongly recommend it…

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

One day Five-Year-Old Daughter declared she’d been in a knife fight. She told a long, long story about how when her day camp took a field trip to the “Bounce House” (a place with lots of those huge inflatable slides and bouncy castles and such), one of the counselors took them in a back room and gave them all knives with plastic handles and told them they had to be in a knife fight. She picked a knife with flowers on the handle. It was about fifteen minutes before she admitted it was all made up…

If you like the silliness we produce here — well-edited, and plenty of things vetoed — you might enjoy the silliness that otherwise ends up on the cutting room floor, such as Daughter’s apparent fascination with hand-to-hand combat. Buzz is starting another blog to chronicle some of it.

Y’know, when I’m out of time, I just tell my kids, “No dessert.” That takes a lot less time than even instant Jell-O pudding! (I should market these genius ideas some time…)

Commercial found via Kitchen Retro, with a nice recipe for Strawberry Sparkle…

This is the food pyramid.

This is not.

Seriously, the food pyramid was developed to emphasize that different types of food were appropriate in different amounts. The “classic” Four Food Groups placed grains, fruits and vegetables, dairy, and meat on essentially equal footing, which was ridiculous. In fact, the last of the four can be dispensed with entirely. (OK, by the 1980s, beans were half-heartedly acknowledged as belonging in the “meat/protein” group, but they didn’t get much mention in my elementary school health classes—and none in my parents’.)

The food pyramid fixed that, with the foods we should be eating more of filling out its broad base. Foods we ought to eat less are situated higher up. However, as I discovered on a recent visit to Ed Venture, the current pyramid has slid back to being nothing more than the slightly more nuanced version of 1956’s Four Groups that I head about as a kid. Sure, the “Meat & Beans” wedge is narrower, but that’s a lot less effective than relegating it to the upper tiers. No doubt the Beef Board is very happy.

Image from Shorpy

Oxydol is the brand of soap that I grew up using in Ohio. Oddly, despite its early- and mid-century nationwide appeal, by the 80’s and 90’s it seems to have been available only around Cincinnati, where Proctor & Gamble (the manufacturer) is based. I am unable to find it in stores elsewhere in the country (Boston, South Carolina, and even Indiana), and Buzz (who grew up in Michigan and Oregon) had never heard of it before I started gathering tidbits for this blog post.

I was actually curious about that for a while, since it seemed unlikely my very brand-loyal mother would have switched to a “local” detergent once she moved to Ohio after growing up in New York; Oxydol must have been sold in many more places earlier in the century, like when Mom would have done laundry with Grandma in the 50’s and 60’s… and it turns out Oxydol was one of the brands that were responsible for the term “soap opera.”

It didn’t mean much on that December day in 1933, but the debut of OXYDOL’S OWN MA PERKINS marked the beginning of the dominance Procter & Gamble would eventually have in sponsoring the daytime serials on radio and television. With the numerous P&G soap products sponsoring the serials, the program earned the slang name “Soap Opera.” This didn’t set too well with the sponsors of drug and food products, who were also popular sponsors of daytime serials. I acknowledge the drug and food companies had a valid complaint, but when it comes to the serial’s slang name, I leave you with this thought— “would you want to listen to a Drug Opera?” — Old Time Radio

So now I’m wondering if great-grandma was the original adaptor of Oxydol, thanks to its revolutionary suds-making ability and use of sponsorship as advertising….

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Listening to this 1935 episode, there’s little of the modern tropes associated with soap operas — the show concentrates a lot more on emphasizing the everyday nature of Ma Perkins and her family’s drama rather than featuring fake deaths, evil twins, and frequent torrid sexual affairs.

And now, everybody ready for the story of Ma Perkins, America’s mother…. The homely, home-town drama. The true life story of a simple, plain, everyday woman. Ma to everyone who knows her…. Ma is a widow with three children, and a business to take care of, a business she’s had to learn by hard knocks.

Son John pitches a fit that Daughter Faye didn’t cook supper on time (and apparently never cooks supper or cleans the house), and Faye gets angry and insists she wants to go to the Big City and get a job. Take a listen for yourself at Rand’s Esoteric OTR.

Compare that to the serious melodrama from an episode of Mary Noble, Backstage Wife (sponsored by Dr. Lyons Tooth Powder, another P&G product):

Yesterday, Larry took Mary to an old rendesvous in hope of breaking down the barriers that have caused them to live apart for the past few months. Mary does not know that Larry is aware of her secret, that he is to become a father. Although reconciliation seemed near, troubles involving Larry’s half-brother Bob broke up what promised to be a perfect evening. Mary received a mysterious telephone call, warning her that if Bob Noble turned State’s evidence against the counterfeit ring with which he had become involved, he would not live 24 hours after being released by the treasury agents. Now, a short time later, Mary and Larry are in a taxi bound for Mary’s Greenwich Village studio. Realizing it was she who persuaded Bob Noble to surrender to the government agents and throw himself on the mercy of the court, Mary feels responsible for his danger, and is nervous and upset. Larry is doing his best to comfort her. Listen…

That’s more like it — secret pregnancies, half-brothers, and a counterfeit ring.

When I was driving to pick up our daughter from camp today, I was literally moved to tears by what I heard on the radio. But it wasn’t a tale of human tragedy; it was a remembrance of what happened forty years ago today at Statio Tranquillitatis.

I was moved by both the profundity of the occasion and by disappointment with what has happened to the space program since 1969. When I was a child in the early 1980s, enthusiasm about the space program was still abundant. Charles Bolden, now the head of NASA, reported that when he visited schools in the 1980s, every child wanted to be an astronaut. Now only a two or three kids in a class are interested. What was supposed to be the greatest adventure in human history has fallen out of the public consciousness.

When I picked her up, I reminded my daughter of the anniversary, and we started discussing the missions to the moon and prospective missions to Mars. She wanted to know why it would take so long to get to Mars and why the astronauts would need to remain on Mars for a year and a half before starting for home. So we got to discussing the motions of the planets and Kepler’s Laws. When I got home, I found this and showed it to her.

This is Cosmos; this is what I learned astronomy from as a child. My daughter is now the same age I was when I first watched it, and she was enthralled. Thankfully, the whole series is available for online viewing via Netflix, so she can see it just as I did.

Your Chance To Live: Technological Failures. Made some time in the 70’s by the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, it’s a strange mixture of encouraging people to react calmly and rationally to disasters, and fearmongering about the technology that is everywhere in the world and just waiting to ruin your day.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

The narrator is a graduate of the Shatner School of Timing and Inflection.

We, all of us, are caught up in a real world…. A place somewhere between the… space technology, and the diabolical machines of the silent movies. There are no, uh, space shuttles in that world…. no Tin Lizzies, either. But there is the… technology… that we so very much… take for granted.

The over-arching message of the film appears to be that technology is out to get you…. or at best, it’s baffling, uncontrollable, and incomprehensible. The narrator yearns for the days of the pioneers.

Life was much simpler then!

Yes, the days when you had to haul all your water in buckets from a spring miles away, that was so much simpler. Dying was a hell of a lot easier, too — no pesky medical intervention, just a quick shuffling off the mortal coil.

During the [November 9 1965] blackout, people stayed calm, and helped each other overcome… an incredible technological disaster.

The movie is a bizarre, rambling exploration of the ways things can go wrong (including non-technological disasters, such as fire) — randomly combined with upbeat reassurances that when modern civilization inevitably undergoes catastrophic collapse thanks to omnipresent TECHNOLOGY, we’ll be ok just as long as we stay calm. I was really disappointed — the worst danger from technological disaster is apparently a neurotic fear of the possibility of technological disasters.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday morning. It was my second this week. I’ve had eight fillings drilled out and replaced, with “composite” instead of “amalgam” fillings. According to our very personable dentist, this should last me for the next fifteen years, provided I keep brushing and don’t coat my teeth in treacle.

In an apparent attempt to prolong the misery of getting orally assaulted — I can still feel the damn drill! — here’s a sickeningly sweet little film teaching small children how to keep their teeth healthy. Told By A Tooth from 1939.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

No wonder my grandfather had dentures for as long as I knew him. (Actually, that’s probably because he was a careless alcoholic.)

The dental advice in this film sounds quite reasonable, and the child narrator is a pleasant change from the serious adults who usually provide voiceovers for educational films.

And now I’m going to go take more ibuprofen and huddle miserably in my room…

Why not commemorate this historic occasion …

image from NASA

… with this?

image from the Stanford School of Medicine

What do you do when you have a real craving for sushi, but all that’s in your wallet is a coupon for a two-piece Popeyes Bonafide spicy fried chicken dinner?

Get creative.

This and many other meals (quiche! lo mein! tortellini!) can be seen at Fancy Fast Food, proving that presentation really is everything.

It reminds me a lot of this Penn & Teller clip — with less profanity, and admitting up-front what’s in the food.