Topic: Retro Rules!
It's a this and that sort of day today. Yesterday was wonderful, except for the part that made my running shoes so wet they are STILL drying out. Dave and I got caught in a downpour, and when i say downpour I mean the kind of rain where you can't see across the street because the rain is so freaking heavy. You need scuba equipment to walk outside...etc. Earlier in the day black clouds rolled overhead, spitting forks of lightning as they rumbled across the sky. The air temperature was 22, contrast this with the snow last week. Hate the weather? Wait ten days. Sadly, in ten days we are supposed to be getting snow again.
I also did a bit more purging of the back porch. it's a nice big three season room that is so stuffed with junk that we can barely get in. When the boxes are purged I'd like to put in a bigger table so i have a place in the sun to do drawings and paintings and beading and stuff and I'm not taking up half the dining room table. In one of these boxes I found the bills and stuff from ten years ago. After ten years I shred and toss everything the isn't revenue canada related. This took little time...it's just time consuming feeding everything into the shredder. Then I opened the next box, expecting it to be stuff that's five to ten years old. WRONG! this crap was from 1989 to 1992. YIKES! including all the papers and doctor reports and lawyer crap from the car accident. Looking back on that, I seemed to be In large scale denial over how badly that accident messed me up. When I think back now it was at least a year that my head was scrambled and fried, and it was at least five years before my neck and shoulder returned to ninety percent of their previous function. I doubt they will ever return to what they were before. I apparently have scar tissue in my cervical spine, they can operate to remove it but there are inherent risks when operating so near to the spinal column, such as becoming a quadriplegic. I'll suffer with a few neck aches and shoulder twinges! I also found the original receipts for my sewing machines. the serger was 500 and the other was 700, I got a discount for buying two at once. and there were five packs of needles and some extra feet thrown in for free.
So it was scary to find crap that old. I asked the boys and they said it was okay to toss old report cards. I'm saving the ones from high school, but none from kindergarten. Why bother? Those reports said nothing...and they took five pages to say it! The smallest one was from grade six, when the abolished the "anecdote" report card for real letter and numerical grades. Dan got the worst of it, every traveling salesman with some radical new way of teaching kids who came to the local school board dazzled the trustees, who would then discard the previous traveling salesman's radical idea. There was the disastrous "whole language method" the even worse "Child centered exploration" and the horrifying "gender is nurture not nature non gender specific sharing and caring environment" where I got in trouble for giving my boys "boy toys" to play with instead of girl toys! That was when a bunch of radical feminists ran the school board. They tried to turn boys into girls, with the disastrous results one might expect. The one suggested that I was bordering on abusive because i didn't send my kids to day care when they turned eighteen months! she foresaw an utopian future when kids were automatically enrolled in school at 18 months and they were there from 8 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon. Holy heck in a handbasket! She replaced big brother with big sister!
Happily, all that was abolished by the time Dan was in grade three. Most of these experiment failed miserably. Some parents were vocal objectors to these radical unproven ideas. I know I objected! When it was becoming obvious that the kids weren't learning anything, and boys are boys and it has nothing to do with nurture and everything to do with nature...it all quietly went away.
So I have another box to go through, and this one i know is newer stuff. I don't like throwing things away too soon, but i don't want to hang on to them forever. I understand that seven years is sufficient.
One interesting thing I found in one box was a newspaper from 1967. It's quite fascinating! There are ads for stores that on streets that no longer exist --stores or streets! There's an opinions column --it was in the summer of 67 that Kitchener's downtown "vision" was unveiled to the public, foreseeing a downtown in the year 2001 that had King Street enclosed in glass with stores and restaurants and movie theaters serving a projected city population of over one million. To quote
"On the advice of the experts this columnist has always been solidly for downtown Kitchener's renewal program. Thus it comes a a bit of a jolt when yet another expert takes a contrary view. ...assistant professor at WLU has called into question the whole Kitchener concept. And from what you (sic) (does he mean from what I hear and he's far too informal?) hear he's not the only academician who takes that view.
All of which leaves the layman more than a little disturbed because the city share of 15 million... (wow. and that's in 1967 dollars, when thirty dollars bought a family of four the weekly groceries)(skip a call for a public forum) ...it would be a pity to embark on such a big and costly program while the doubters haven't been given their due. After all, if the renewal program is valid, it can stand re-appraisal. If it isn't valid, nows the time we should know it."
It wasn't valid. And the contrary voices were silenced and ignored...most notably by the publishers and editors of the local paper, including the person who wrote the column. The one thing that ruined downtown more than anything was castles in the sky visions of utopian futures, ignoring trends and ignoring reality. The newest call for "visionary public transit" is just another case of enclosing the downtown in glass...,it has brilliant vision, but serves absolutely no logical or practical purpose. If they would have discarded bold visions and allowed the downtown to realistically evolve, taking cues from other North American cities the same size as Kitchener rather than from European cities with ten times the population, the core might have become what they are attempting to make it now, something that Waterloo already is: funky quirky and niche oriented...serving a specialized segment of the population who doesn't live in suburbs and would rather go naked than buy at gap. Insert hid sight and 20/20 cliché here; but all along there were thought filled objections, objections that were never given voice.
Finally, here's another quote:The enemy is aware that no matter how hard he might hit North America, there is somebody to push the button --which would hit him with a devastating counter-blow. Publicity is part of this cool game (?!?game? holy heck in a handbasket!) The US wants potential enemies to know what aces are held in any showdown. This isn't GWB now...this is referring to NORAD, and the capability to turn the entire world into radioactive ash. Not only was this desirable...it was merely a game to these people --it was COOL! they were oblivious to the destruction their game could lead to. And notice the vague "enemies" we're still dealing in vague undefined paranoia these days...replace vaguely defined enemy communists with enemy islamic terrorists and surprisingly little has changed. Before it was political dogma, now it's religious dogma.
There's a chilling picture of a vietnamese man holding his grandchild as US soldier march into his village, Tam Ky while Hanoi is bombed. Niether look happy. The article states that victory is assured if they don't waver in their purpose...if they stay the course. Again...not GWB about Iraq...this is about Vietnam. WHether or not the principles that led to each war are/were the same or not is irrelevant; both wars became an un-winnable morass that sunk the US into a pit of debt. Iraq is becoming this generation's vietnam, people are dying, there's little hope of victory, and there's little promise of return on the money spent liberating a people who don't want the US liberating them.
Wow. I'm quite opinionated today! There's a farm page article about a revolutionary hay baler...it rolls it into compact cylinders instead of square bales and soon the fields will be full of cylinders. That was accurate. The stock market quotes are as follows: Dow Jones closed the day at 852.17, down sharply by 4.45. the TSE was also down .67 to close at 158.15. There are a mere 35 mutual funds listed, and they are considered highly speculative, for the experienced investor.
Meanwhile friday night is fight night at the aud, and kids get in for 50 cents when they come with Dad --75 cents if they come alone! And on Sunday Johnny Unitas led the Colts over the Packers, 13-10. With Unitas the Colts could be considered one of football's greatest teams playing with history's greatest quarterback. And don't forget --the man on the go needs the "in" shoe from Walkwel shoes at 182 King West at 16.98 a pair. And if you need wine making equipment don't forget that everything you need is at Nelco Hardware at 45 King Street West! And just arrived! The 1968 Doge Charger! Looks like a jet on wheels with a 318 V8 engine, bucket seats, and deep carpeting! You'll look spiffy in your new Chevelier suit from Sauder's Men's Wear...two button jacket, tailored square front vest and trim fit trousers all in 100% virgin wool! Available only at Sauders at 38 King West.
In my neighborhood the plaza on union had a special ad, there was a department store, a grocery store, a place to find the finest layettes for baby, a bank, a florist, and a drug store. Tower's was having a sale on ladies winter coats for 10 to 15 dollars and check out all the happening new music in the city's most happening record department. They have the chart hits from CFTR, CHUM and CKOC AM stations. What other happening record store offers the coolest cats that?
And Goudies Grill room was the perfect place for formal afternoon tea for the good ladies of Kitchener. They offered a special selection of the finest teas, scones and tea sandwiches. Have your next social at Goudies and let us do the work! And Golden Orchid shoes were now 5% off regular prices, at these reductions they will go soon.
There's a lot more. There isn't any comics...a shame because the record ran dozens of comics throughout the sixties --from comedy to romance to action. The women's page is stained beyond legibility, all I could see was parts of a couple ads. The Ann Lander's column headline read, mom doesn't understand kid's and that was all I could see. Like that problem has changed!
And that's all for today. Tomorrow will be back to abnormal.
