<p>DOS - I guess I didn’t polish the drum, since I don’t even know what that is. Clearly, I was an under-trained Xerox(R) operator ;). I suppose I knew how to clear jams, but that doesn’t seem to help me now. Or maybe I called the former Xerox operator, who had been promoted to mimeograph operator and bookkeeper. Boy, the career path opportunities…</p>
<p>jmmom: if you didn’t have to polish the drum, then you were an operator after Xerox was able to produce copiers that didn’t require drum polishing. Thank your lucky stars. I was not a Xerox operator but worked in a publishing company that used the single copier that we had heavily, and I was friends with the operator. The drum held the surface that provided the photocopy, and could be removed and/or replaced. He had to polish the drum (using a special powder) at least every couple of days to remove scratches that otherwise would show up on the copies (and if they got deep enough would require our owners to buy a new drum more frequently than they wanted to).</p>
<p>what has happened to just plain good ole family cooking. i love to cook and my kiddo is a microwave junkie anything that they want now adays is in microwave form. to bad they are missing out on wonderful flavors and experiences. thanks for this thread it has brought back a lot of good memories.</p>
<p>Adjusting a CRT. Pretty soon everything will be LCD and my adjustment tools that I have become very skilled with will just gather dust. (I’ve worked on CRTs for almost four years now, adjusting two last month–tilt and focus are the two major problems from age).</p>
<p>Every so often I remind my kids (and husband) that life didn’t always include microwave ovens.</p>
<p>They are handy but whole segments of society don’t know how to cook. That also goes for knowing anything about nutrition. People don’t know what’s in their food or what SHOULD be in their food. Don’t want to get on a rant here, but when you see day laborers going into the convenience store for a breakfast of doughnuts and Mt. Dew…really sad.</p>
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</p>
<p>But…but…that’s the breakfast of champions!</p>
<p>ah: the antique Home Ec skill set: the “balanced” meal breakfast of milk, cereal, fruit AND maybe eggs and bacon. In the archetypal “good mom” version, this would also be presented attractively AND the whole family would sit down to breakfast together!!! (My mother even read an inspirational verse to us from an earnest monthly Congregational publication)</p>
<p>Fast forward: I am lucky if I can get them to eat and over the years I have fed very odd combinations, not well presented, just to get carbohydrates and protein in.</p>
<p>Looked more like a relay race some days. And inspirational verses were missing. Occasionally deities were invoked but not in a form we’d print here…</p>
<p>mmaah–hahaha! </p>
<p>Understand completely about the morning race. Leftover pizza has protein, carbs, AND calcium! Leftover apple crisp is full of fruit! And of course, cold cereal (not the sugary kind) these days is vitamin fortified so that’s comforting.</p>
<p>A skill handed down from my mother is starting the “race” the night before. She used to lecture me on setting out the next day’s clothes, making sure things were clean and mended…sigh.</p>
<p>You’re right, mommusic. Nobody mends clothes amy more. The mall is just a stone’s throw away. Or else those pants HAVE to have holes!</p>
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<p>Not so sad after all (haha). Maybe the Mt. Dew does take it overboard though. :D</p>
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<a href=“http://living.aol.com/aolliving/main/0,23754,9001061106,00.html[/url]”>http://living.aol.com/aolliving/main/0,23754,9001061106,00.html</a></p>
<p>Listening for distant am radio stations after dark. </p>
<p>Listening to Jean Shepherd on WOR telling stories.</p>
<p>Building crystal radios with a 1N34 diode an earphone and a water pipe as a
ground.</p>
<p>Going to Cortlandt Street to buy surplus electronics before the WTC project
forced them all out of business, and then to Lafayette Radio at 100 Sixth Avenue. </p>
<p>Being able to repair discrete electronic devices with tubes and transistors,
capacitors and inductors.</p>
<p>
Every night, for years and years, alone in bed in the dark in deepest New Joizey. Amazed at how he’d always get around to wrapping up the convoluted tale just as the final strains of Strauss’s [Bahn</a> Frei Polka](<a href=“http://www.flicklives.com/Music/Bahn_frei/Bahn_Frei.mp3]Bahn”>www.flicklives.com/Music/Bahn_frei/Bahn_Frei.mp3) welled up under his monologue.</p>
<p>scidoc, thanks for reassuring me that there are others who still remember. Flick Lives.</p>
<p>Are there no longer any distant AM stations?</p>
<p>pye:</p>
<p>From Wikipedia:</p>
<p>"AM signals exhibit diurnal variation, travelling much longer distances at night. In a crowded channel environment this means that the power of regional channels which share a frequency must be reduced at night or directionally beamed in order to avoid interference, which reduces the potential nighttime audience. Some stations have frequencies unshared with other stations in the U.S.; these are called clear channel stations. Many of them can be heard across much of the country at night. (This is not to be confused with Clear Channel Communications, which currently owns many U.S. radio stations.)</p>
<p>Wiki doesn’t explain this but I believe years ago some radio stations were much more powerful, and/or not limited at night. So when weather conditions were right, if you were lucky you could hear actual broadcasts from large cities far far away. Pretty cool. </p>
<p>Now you can hear stations from other <em>countries</em> on the Internet and nothing surprises us anymore.</p>
<p>I guess that explains why I can hear WNYC just fine in the daytime, but hardly at all at night. For the brief period that they had their transmitter on the Empire State building (after 9/11) reception was great 24 hours a day. I should just live further away?!</p>
<p>Now I know you will find this funny, as my old friends still tease me about it, because it was a cheap date. We would go to the international terminal at JFK and watch the planes come in and observe visitors from all over the world
visit the United States for the first time.</p>
<p>We called home person to person asking to speak to ourselves to let our parents hear our voice and refuse the charges as a signal that we safely<br>
arrived on long trips.</p>
<p>We also used a paper clip to save a dime on pay telephones. A paper clip
was inserted where the wire enters the hand piece and grounded to the
phone and you would get a dial tone.</p>
<p>For the richer folks, the collect call was refused & the signal for the folks to turn around & call back on the parents’ dime rather than the starving student’s. My folks were always upset with me when I’d call them long distance & didn’t call collect so they could refuse–didn’t like me spending my $$.</p>
<p>Here’s something to reawaken this thread: At a church family potluck I taught several kids how to play Bingo–the real old time version with wooden markers and plain number cards and a tumbler for the wooden balls with the numbers and letters on it. Very soothing and low tech and everyone had great fun…</p>
<p>Any other “old fashioned” games out there that are in danger of becoming obsolete?</p>
<p>We played a domino game invovling getting points if the dominos on each end add up to multiples of five. This has been a multi-generation tradition in my husband’s family (he remembers playing it with his grandmother). We also played a lot of other games like Old Maid (with the cards that are animal characters with funny names like “Fitness Fanny” and “Drillin’ Phil”), the Memory Game, and many others. I hope that games like this are not lost to future generations.</p>
<p>I heard a cute story–a father tried to introduce 2 young daughters to Solitaire with a real deck of card. So one girl laid out the cards and the other put her finger on a covered card and tapped twice as a signal that her sister should flip it–in other words, she thought she had to double click to turn a card.</p>