Why did they uninvent...

...home economics? OK, so it’s not exactly uninvented, but it has fallen out of popularity. Maybe it needed some modernization but it should not have disappeared from the mainstream of education. I’m not sure why it has nearly disappeared, but I assume it is because it was always considered a girl thing. Guy stuff like changing faucet washers and buying lawn mowers was not included in any significant degree. Then, with the feminist movement and more women validating their self worth in the work place instead of in the home, it lost status. I assert that it is, and probably always has been, more than just learning how to bake a delicious and attractive cake or artfully display Christmas decorations. For example, in Hand Jr. High School, Columbia, SC in 1958, it was a conduit for girls’ sex education. I know this because my seat in social studies class was next to a hole in a new wall to accommodate a radiator that predated the remodel that made two small classrooms from one bigger one. I heard all the stuff they taught the girls about the birds and the bees in the home ec class on the other side of the wall. I got a D in Social Studies. But, there I go diverging into sex again. Lets get back on track.

While we’ve forgotten home economics, we have gone ape over global economics. This is the great disaster of everybody on the planet trading with or hiring everybody else, especially on the opposite side of the planet. You can read more about why this only works on a micro scale. This global economy thing is showing itself to be unstable and able to turn some former winners into losers because there is little regulation of global markets and finance. As we all end up unemployed or underemployed, or at least way underpaid from this monster genie being let out of the lamp, we need to do some rethinking. As individuals there is little we can do to stuff the genie back in the lamp or teach him some manners. However, we can reduce the power he has over us if we get smarter on home economics, the economics of our household and the households of our friends and family. This doesn’t necessarily mean baking tastier cakes. The 21st century home ec should be more like what its name says. It might cover stuff like getting the most nutritious greens and beans to feed our loved ones with the meager twenty bucks in our pocket. We need to reinvent home economics for the 21st century and teach it in school. We need to cover diverse things like:
• What to eat and drink because it’s good for us and what not to eat and drink because it will kill us or bankrupt us.
• What we need and don’t need in a house and how to finance the house we need.
• How to shop for and buy stuff to outfit and care for the house and yard that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, break down prematurely, poke our eyes out, or drive us nuts with superfluous features.
• How to make stuff we need instead of buying it.
• How to get the best deal on a credit card and how we should never carry over a balance month to month.
• How to find a mate to share the shelter and expenses, how to bring joy to the mate and keep him/her forever, and (above all) how to have a good time with the mate without making more babies than you can feed.
• How to get an employer and keep him/her happy no matter what our skills are.
• How to create or at least participate constructively in neighborhood and community associations.
• (Last but absolutely not least) Become media literate.

I need to elaborate on this media literacy thing. Defining it properly would take up more than I want to put in this post but you can Google it. Start with the Wikipedia description. Basically it pertains to learning not to be so freakin’ gullible to all the media conduits that the genie uses to turn us into zombie slaves. The “poster child” of media illiteracy is probably the sticker you see on so many products and ads in magazines and catalogs, “As Seen on TV”. Do you know what that means? It means the majority of cabbage brains out there believe the stupid television is actually credible, that it furnishes valid and reliable information. God help us.

Maybe there is some hope. We seem to be figuring out finally that nearly all politicians and people in the finance industry (a.k.a. Wall Street) are lying sorry sacks of slug slime. The problem is (although the Tea Party might disagree) we can’t just get rid of these characters and expect things to gravitate to harmonious prosperity. We do need to select leaders for ourselves. We have to educate ourselves in how to detect their lies, unmask their lies, and hold them painfully accountable for their lies. That’s where media literacy comes in. It’s all about recognizing and rejecting lies that come to us in an overwhelming barrage of mostly electronic media. Let’s reinvent home economics for the 21st century with a good chunk of media literacy education.

Why did they uninvent the...

...energy absorbing car bumper. We had ‘em in the late 70’s and early 80’s by federal regulation until a sweet old president with dementia decided to excuse the car manufacturers from this requirement. I had great ones on my ’80 Civic. They were mounted on shock absorbers and covered with scratch resistant black rubber. The current car bumpers should be called the senile Republican bumper in honor of the president who allowed the manufacturers to make painted plastic bumpers that cost $500 to $1000 or more for repair or replacement after one’s wife has a 1 mph contact with a concrete post in a parking garage.

Why do we need a better mousetrap...literally?

We’ve had fine mousetraps all my life. Aside from a pesky little habit of sometimes snapping your finger when you set them, they did the job, executing the little rodent painlessly in about a millisecond. But now we have the sticky mouse paper inspired, no doubt, by fly paper. With the sticky paper, the poor little sentient beings (What does sentient mean anyway?) get stuck, trapped in terror for hours until you find them. Then, what do you do? They’re still alive, looking up at you with pleading little beady eyes, hoping you’ll at least drive them across town to your insurance adjuster’s house and set them free. You can’t peel the paper off so you’d have to cut around their little feet leaving them little paper slippers for the rest of their mousy life. But no, you’re too busy so you have to drown them in the toilet while they struggle in agony as if they were being water-boarded by Dick Cheney, or worse yet, you just toss them in the garbage can to agonize for hours while ants eat their eyes out. Yep the original was much better.

Why did they uninvent the...

...ordinary toothpaste cap. The ordinary toothpaste tube nozzle and cap were perfected at least as far back as when I was a small child and Dodos and Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers filled the forests. You just unscrewed the cap, squeezed out the paste and screwed the cap back on. But, they couldn’t leave it alone. They had to devise nozzles that dispensed different colors of paste through little sub nozzles. You’re supposed to believe these different colors are actual different ingredients (like epoxy glue) that can’t be mixed until they’re about to enter your gaping maw. They also had to add a flip up cap that won’t stay closed and copiously ejaculated toothpaste into your travel bag on air flights until toothpaste on flights was finally made illegal. The flip up caps usually break off before the last of the toothpaste is used up too. Bring back the ordinary toothpaste tube and screw-on cap.

Why did they uninvent the...

...car that uses a one size fits all round sealed beam headlight?

There are adults alive today who don’t remember this. There used to be a one size fits all standard headlight for all cars and trucks; Chevrolets, Fords, Plymouths, Mack trucks, even the imports like Volkswagen Beetles, Triumph sports cars, and Opal Cadets. They cost about one dollar and constituted the whole thing from illuminating filament to integral lens of thick non-yellowing, scratch proof, pebble-resisting glass. There were some improvements as the years passed. They started to make them with permanent quartz halogen bulbs inside for greater efficiency but they were still round, under five bucks and above all, one size fit everything. If one burned out or took a rock, replacements were still available at any gas station even in Nowheresville. Then it started to happen, first innocently enough. The car manufacturers’ stylists figured we needed some new shapes; rectangular and small rectangular.

Then things started to get out of hand. They figured we’d like two lights per side on some vehicles and they added extra small and small round to the increasing numbers of sizes. Suddenly somewhere around the early 80’s each car manufacturer started designing custom component illumination systems with separate bulbs, reflectors, and protective (ha ha) clear plastic covers that scratched and yellowed. And, they leaked too, fogging up and corroding the reflector. What a great ADVANCE! When my wife hit a deer and cracked a custom protective lens on our ’85 Subaru, they wanted $180 for the replacement. Of course I got some junk yard parts plus some screws, rivets, and epoxy glue to make a mount for a one size fits all replacement. I had to do it again when I bought and “restored” a wrecked Civic for a few months transportation in Washington State a couple of years ago. So what if my cars were asymmetrical. I’ve heard of “illumination systems” on higher end models of today’s cars that cost over $800. As consumers, have we gone nuts to accept this? We’re scared to death of federal standards requiring greater fuel efficiency because they might make the cars cost more. Of course we’re happy to pounce on the newest all fluff and no stuff squinty-eyed illumination system proffered by free enterprise innovation.

Why did they uninvent the...

This post inaugurates a series on laments about great things of the past that were uninvented. True to form I shall probably drift off topic onto some other twists like “Why didn’t they invent it right?” and “Why did they have to make a better mousetrap when the original was perfect?”

Have you noticed that your fitted sheets never fit? That’s because the bed industry has gone bonkers making mattresses and box springs thicker and thicker. If you get a new set today (They nearly always come in a set.) the combined box spring and mattress thickness almost require you to have nine-foot ceilings. Why do you even need the box spring at all? You could put bowling balls under the mattress and you wouldn’t feel them. Heaven help you if you have to get up and go to the bathroom at night. You’ll need a stepladder. You’re liable to fall off the ladder since you’ll be suffering from hypoxia at the extreme altitude. I know why beds all have that pile of sham pillows now. You need to throw them down around the base of the ladder in case you fall climbing down. Why did they uninvent the sensible thickness mattress?

Thinking about Whales

You’re wondering, “Why is he thinking about whales and putting up pictures of bears?” Simple answer. I’m thinking about whales because I’m reading Moby Dick. It was a free download on our iPod Touch and I’ve never read it before. I don’t have a convenient recent whale picture so I used a picture of the largest mammals that I have photographed recently, the shy gentle bears that somewhat regularly visit our backyard.

Moby made me think of two impressive whale experiences that predated my blogging habit. I felt they needed to be recorded since whales, along with everything else in the ocean, appear soon to be extinct if we don’t change our ways. Hopefully not, but possibly in the next generation or two, nobody will have any more first-hand whale experiences.

OK, first whale experience: We lived many years on Eld Inlet, the southern tip of Puget Sound. We saw lots of harbor seals there. That was novel to me as a Carolina boy where, growing up, I thought you had to go to Eskimo-land to see any seals. One day soon after we moved into the Eld Inlet place, my parents came to visit. I quickly got my father down to the gravelly beach that we semi-privately shared with four other property owners. I proudly pronounced that we could dig our own clams, grow our own oysters, and sometimes we even saw seals. As if right on queue, directly in front and close in to shore, a huge mass rose to the surface and blew a V-shaped spout. My father frowned and opined, “That ain’t no seal!” Clearly it was a gray whale, the only huge thing other than the distinctly-finned Orca that might venture so far south in the sound. We watched it spout several more times and it clearly was hanging around for a bit. Leaving my father there, I ran up to the house to fetch down my kayak and camera. My mother was hollering after for me not to get into the water with any whale. I chased it around the inlet racing toward each spout to get a close snapshot but each time it rose in a different location hundreds of feet away. There were no good pictures.

I got another chance for a close encounter a couple of years later. The neighbors reported that a grey whale had been hanging out all day feeding in the bottom muck in the cove across the inlet from us. Wife and I again mounted kayaks and crossed the inlet. This time the whale was working a much smaller area and it was easy to get close. More sensible kayakers were also there to observe from a sensible distance. With all the good sense of a guy who climbs wet ladders barefooted, I charged up right over the location of the last couple of spouts. Suddenly the whale rose beside me and exchanged breath with a huge, “Chug; suck” sound. Mist from the spout drifted over me. I have to say I did not smell the foul odor that some people report from close encounters with whale spouts. However, what I will never forget was the deep resonance of that sound. It sounded like someone had briefly vented a steam valve in a mine tunnel. It gave me a sense of the huge volume of the breathing tube and lungs in this gentle but mighty creature.

Second whale experience: This one concerns Orcas. Orca whales are cute, smart, and relatively small as whales go, though hellishly much bigger than about anything else that isn’t a whale. They’re the ones that, if unfortunate enough to get captured, end up doing tricks in sea aquariums until they get disgusted with the life and decide to drown their trainers. Most Orcas live in pods, don’t roam too far from home, and enjoy a good diet of fish, like salmon. However, some Orca pods are the real rouges of the sea. They are transients and roam far and wide to munch on big animals like seals and even other larger whales. Several years ago the town of Brinnon, WA on Hood Canal (not really a man-made canal but a fjord wide and deep enough for submarine traffic) was experiencing a seal problem. Normally popular and welcome, the seal population had grown way too big for their local habitat. They were gobbling up lots of fish, fouling the water with their excrement and causing commercial oyster beds to shut down. Well, one day we were driving along the canal near Brinnon and saw a crowd of cars pulled over to the side of the road. We pulled over to see the attraction. The rogues had come. The water was filled with tall Orca dorsal fins racing back and forth, singly and in groups. No boats were out. We didn’t see this ourselves, but some friends who live in Brinnon told us they had seen seals far from the water and still heading for higher ground. While walking down to witness the spectacle our friends passed a seal that looked at them curiously as if to say, “You guys are going the wrong way. Are you nuts? Get further inland.” When the rogues had left the seal population had been culled down to a fraction of its size.