Geezer Test

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Those viscous rumors really stick around, don't they, Foot?

They slip by most people...

[Crimson Ghost]

Those viscous rumors really stick around, don't they, Foot?
They slip by most people...

We got a couple of comedians here.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

As a wee tad of about five, I remember Meeker, Colorado as not having direct dial in 1961-63: you lifted the receiver, the operator would say, "Number please," and you'd give her all seven digits and she'd connect you. I don't know what you did to dial out of town, but that was the local procedure. Meeker was not a big town, and our street didn't get asphalt until right about the middle of our stay.

Leaping to another comment, having grown up in the sixties myself, my experience says Tim Leary was a dope. Too, I'd have trouble awarding the "foul decade" prize to any decade I've inhabited -- too much good on the other end of the seesaw from too much bad. The Seventies did have some spectacular stupidities. Perhaps the dumbest of these was disco: dumb music doesn't make it.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

As a wee tad of about five, I remember Meeker, Colorado as not having direct dial in 1961-63: ~~snip~~, having grown up in the sixties myself, ~~snip~~

You didn't grow up in the 60s.

[capnhowdy]

Speaking of "fallout shelters", it's quite true they were not intended to guard against blast or fire, and that's why they were callled "fallout shelters" rather than "bomb shelters".

Most people around here called them bomb shelters, and a few folks called them storm shelters.
I knew lots of folks who had dug a huge hole and pushed an old car in & covered it up to use as a 'bum' shelter. As a child they were very scary places. But cool.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by capnhowdy

Most people around here called them bomb shelters, and a few folks called them storm shelters.

Some folks did build real "bomb shelters"....I was referring to the then-ubiquitous Federally-stocked fallout shelter sites, denoted by a sign like this one:.



Here's the crackers/candy/water/dosimeter/geiger type equipment I referred to:



http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/shelsupp.html

[wolf]

I also take the position that fallout shelters are not bomb shelters.

I vaguely recall there being a CD sign on the front of my hospital when I started working there, but it's since been removed. I also remember a number of buildings on my college campus having that designation, and there were also actual bomb shelters on the property.

[wolf]

Are you implying that UG never grew up?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by wolf

Are you implying that UG never grew up?

No, unfortunatly he did, but not in the 60s.
He said he was 5 in 61~63, so at the end of the 60s around 13, clearly not old enough to make the decisions that people facing the war had to make. He was probably mimicing the the adults he wanted to so dearly please.
When he did grow up in the 70s/80s, he busied himself with learning languages so that he could find authors that agreed with his left over childhood notions and never had to make real choices.
Sad really.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

No, unfortunat[e]ly he did, but not in the 60s.

I date back to the Eisenhower Administration -- not that I really remember.

He was probably mimic[k]ing the the adults he wanted to so dearly please.

The adults I wanted to please didn't have an input here. Sometimes they looked quite askance at things I said. But they weren't going to tell me I was being some kind of evil monster for being anticommunist, after all.

When he did grow up in the 70s/80s, he busied himself with learning languages so that he could find authors that agreed with his left over childhood notions and never had to make real choices.
Sad really.

So you think you understand the motives behind my endeavors. If that's what you've come up with, you're only kidding yourself. Kidding yourself is a great way not to think in an enlightened way, which is regrettable in a man of your parts, Bruce. Right now, you're being a wanker, looking for any excuse however specious to reject proliberty, prohuman thought, just to see if you can make me feel bad. Not gonna happen; too much enlightenment and prodemocracy, proliberty thinking on this end. If there's not enough on your end, isn't it time to pull up your socks? You really seem to disapprove when I inveigh against totalitarianism and declare it should be made extinct -- which tells me you want it around. If you didn't, you'd sound more like me, and I have a very good way to sound. I make democracy's slackers quite uncomfortable by pointing out the horrors with which they declare themselves in sympathy -- I can see behind a lot of what people write, looking at their reasoning process. If you can't tell when you're slinging the BS, Bruce, I certainly can.

[edit] And I got 17. Tended to miss the music/popculture ones.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

which is regrettable in a man of your parts, Bruce.

Something you boys want to share with the board?



[eta] I'm sorry. I can't help it. I'm British. I am genetically programmed to pick up on unintended smut.

[capnhowdy]

It all looks so morbid.
I've heard them called fallout shelters, but rarely in the southeast.
Most of the older folks I knew would tell you that a nuclear attack would be 'the end of the world'. I believed it. I was very sure it would put your eye out.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Besides.....the crackers tasted like shit.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Besides.....the crackers tasted like shit.

Indeed. The candy kepy pretty well though. According to an article at that site the crackers were eventually recalled. How long they were speced to last, I don't know.

As for "morbid"...well...in those days the risk of nuclear war was quite real. In fact--although we didn't know it at the time--one Soviet sub sent to break the Cuban blockade was armed with nuclear torpedos. And they had tacical nukes that would have been used in the event of an invasion. It would only have taken one small miscaclulation on either side to light the big fuse.

T'was a very, very near thing. I'd hate to think we might have failed to prepare for what might have happened because it was "morbid". There was indeed a high level of fatalism in those days--one that is probably diffcult for somebody growing up post-Cold-War to imagine.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That would have been bad, by the time the Cuban thing happened we'd already hit the supplies in the dorm basement fallout shelter.