Light On Dark Water

End of an Era

I mentioned, in talking about Pat Metheny's "It's For You" last week, that the phrase would soon lose its telephone-related significance. For many it already has, but I suppose the majority of people now living would at least recognize it, even if it hasn't been part of their lives for a while. 

I suppose it hasn't been part of mine, either, for a while, because my wife has used her mobile phone almost exclusively for a long time, and although I was several years behind her I was going that way, too. For a year or two now we have rarely gotten a call on our home phone that wasn't a sales or fund-raising pitch, or a political robo-call. A few months ago it stopped working, and weeks passed before we even bothered to do anything about it. Attempting to report it–via the web, of course–we were taken through a series of trouble-shooting steps only to be told in the end that there was something wrong with our equipment, and that it couldn't be fixed. Of course it could have been, if we had pressed the issue. But what would be the point? We had hardly missed it, only checking–again, via the web–every day or two to see if we had any voicemail messages.

So, after several hours in the AT&T store, and on the phone with AT&T customer support, we transferred our home number to my mobile phone, and cancelled the home phone. (I kept that number because for over twenty years it's been the number known to family, friends,  and businesses, and very few people other than my wife ever called my mobile number.) Lots and lots of people are doing this, of course. I'm not sure any of my children have ever had a "land line" phone of their own.

I'm tempted to draw some kind of conclusion about social fragmentation from this. But really, aren't we all a little tired of saying and hearing things like that? What really strikes me more is a mild nostalgia, and a sense that the world in which I grew up is passing away. Fourteen years into the twenty-first century, we are leaving the culture of the twentieth behind in more and more ways. I'm always inclined to think things in general are getting worse, and always having a conversation with myself about whether that's really true. But it does seem to me that many of the hopes of the twentieth have faded, especially the hope that followed the Second World War, at least in this country; it seems a meaner world, all in all, notwithstanding the fact that we then had the threat of global nuclear war hanging over our heads–that was the big picture, but the nearer picture held promise.

The family telephone seems quaint and old-fashioned now. This morning at breakfast my wife and I were discussing the old rhyme that children not quite into adolescence used to tease each other with, when a boy or girl was suspected of liking a girl or boy. Using our names, it would go:

Mac and Karen, settin' in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes love, then comes marriage
Then comes Karen with a bay-bee carriage

That seems pretty quaint and old-fashioned, too.

Maclin Horton
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99 responses to “End of an Era”

  1. Robert Gotcher

    I’ve surprised myself at how wistful I have become about the culture of my childhood. 3 channels, plus “Education Television.” Mosly black and white. Andy Griffith. Phones that really ring and are plugged into the wall. 45s. You know the drill.
    I’ve been also wistful and nostalgic about the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. To me there is an energy that was palpable under JPII that I didn’t sense under Benedict or now Francis. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe at 55 I’m just moving into my “later years.”
    Before I know I’m going to spend hours in my rocking chair looking at old photo albums of guys with perms and leisure suits and I’m going to start MISSING those days. I’m must joking. I can’t imagine ever missing the 70s under any circumstance.

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  2. Robert Gotcher

    I’m just joking.

    Reply
  3. Mac

    I’m not making this up: I have heard people refer to the ’70s as “a more innocent time.”
    I don’t think you’re mistaken about the sense of energy in JPII’s pontificate. He was an energetic man for the earlier years of it. And there was an excitement about the recovery from Vatican II progressivism. As with most things, it didn’t turn out was well as we hoped. But then it hasn’t finished turning out.

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  4. Louise

    “For a year or two now we have rarely gotten a call on our home phone that wasn’t a sales or fund-raising pitch, or a political robo-call.”
    Honestly, robo-calls were one of the most bewildering things for me when we moved here!

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  5. Louise

    “I’m tempted to draw some kind of conclusion about social fragmentation from this. But really, aren’t we all a little tired of saying and hearing things like that?”
    Yeah, pretty much.
    Wow! 3 channels, Robert! Luxury! (Enter: the Four Yorkshire Men)

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  6. Louise

    “I’m not making this up: I have heard people refer to the ’70s as “a more innocent time.””
    Wow! That’s rather astonishing. Although they were a very innocent time for me, since I was only a child and came from a loving family and was therefore buffered against the awful aspects of that decade.

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  7. Louise

    “I don’t think you’re mistaken about the sense of energy in JPII’s pontificate. He was an energetic man for the earlier years of it.”
    I had never really thought about that until now. I think that’s right. And of course, this was before the big scandals.
    Since that time, the Church in Australia has dwindled terribly in terms of numbers, which doesn’t mean we can’t make a come-back, but does mean less energy.

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  8. Louise

    And I should point out that the energy in the Church in this part of Texas, at least, has much more energy than the Church in Australia as far as I can sense it. Not sure what it’s like where you are, Mac.

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  9. Mac

    There is a place that has telephones and does not have robo-calls?! Do you mean to say that you didn’t get any unsolicited sales and begging calls at all?

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  10. Mac

    I’d say the Church here is in pretty decent shape. Of course I don’t have anything to compare it to, and of course there are always many, many things that fall way short of perfect. But it seems basically healthy to me. I don’t think it’s shrinking appreciably in numbers, though I could be mistaken about that. My local parish is thriving, as far as numbers are concerned, but it’s in a growing area.

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  11. Janet

    Well, I was on retreat with several women from what I think is your local parish and they were great–very engaged with their faith.
    We had a very hotly contested Republican primary here, and then, just when we thought it was safe to answer the phone again, there was a run-off. While I was on vacation, I got about 3 calls a day from one campaign or the other. I had to answer the phone because my daughter was going to have a baby at any moment, and I was the babysitter. I swore I was getting rid of my land line and getting cellphones, but then things happened with my mother and I didn’t have time. My main problem is that I hear so much better on the land line.
    AMDG

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  12. Janet

    I do really miss good solid phones that don’t slide across the top of the desk when you answer them, and the kind of receiver that you can hold between your ear and shoulder if need be.
    AMDG

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  13. Robert Gotcher

    I got a robocall from one of our bishops the other day encouraging me to go to an Archdiocesan event in October. It is funny, because I know the bishop personally and had recently sent a letter to the Archbishop about a matter, so when I picked up the phone and hear, “Hi, this is Bishop so-and-so” I thought maybe the Archbishop had asked him to call me. Then I realized it was a robocall. I couldn’t help but think of the odd juxtaposition of “Successor of the Apostles” and “Robocall.”

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  14. Art Deco

    This morning at breakfast my wife and I were discussing the old rhyme that children not quite into adolescence used to tease each other with,
    From Alabama (or Florida?) ca. 1960 to Upstate New York a dozen years later (with a younger crew). Odd. Haven’t heard it in forty years or more.

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  15. Mac

    We got onto the subject because we were talking about children’s songs, then about jump-rope rhymes, which I think this one also served as. Do little girls still jump rope?
    Odd juxtaposition indeed, Robert. Our bishop used to send around a cassette tape of a little talk about contributing to Catholic Charities every year. It was played in place of the homily. It was very odd to have the priest place this little cheap tape player on the lectern, turn it on, and go sit down.
    I do see people (female people) holding cell phones between shoulder and ear. The days when I could do that with a normal phone are long gone, so it makes my neck hurt to see them.
    I have a hand-me-down iPhone 3 with an Otter-brand cover. It’s a soft plastic of some kind, and I hear people complain about them because it feels slightly oily to the touch. But it tends to grip whatever surface you set it down on, and I really like it for that reason–it doesn’t slide around at all.

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  16. Grumpy

    My stepmother likes to call me on the landline, because it’s cheaper to call a landline from England than to call a mobile. That’s the only real reason I don’t get rid of it. I’m also told that if you call the police they know where you are immediately, from a landline. That’s not a real reason for me, because the landline is in a fixed spot by the back door, and if I had a burglar, that’s most likely where he’d be standing. I wouldn’t want us to be on the identical spot.
    So I went in the AT&T store the other day to get one of these landline phones that isn’t fixed by a wire to a spot. Or any landline phone that doesn’t have a tangled up cord that means you are fixed to a spot about two feet away from where the cord is plugged in the wall.
    Because I figured that, if I had a fancy landline phone I could wander around the house using, I might occasionally use it, instead of my mobile. And it is cheaper to call England on the landline.
    The guy in AT&T store very reluctantly showed me their one cordless model. He then told me in no uncertain terms to get rid of the landline because I am wasting my money. I came up with the calling the police excuse, and he said that’s not true – the police can track the mobile because it has a gps on it. Then I told him about my stepmother preferring to call the landline. He seemed unbelieving. He wanted it to go. I ended up just leaving the store without either cancelling it or buying a cordless.
    People call the mobile because one can always get someone on their mobile, whereas to get them on their landline, they have to be standing near it in time to catch it. That’s the 20th century.
    In other news, my Iphone, which was stolen in Spain in early June, leading me to go back to England and abandon the camino, has been being used by someone somewhere. How do I know? Their photos are downloading via Cloud onto my phone is how I know. That’s the 21st century.

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  17. Mac

    I am typing this on my phone, therefore it will be brief. But I just happen to have a perfectly good cordless phone setup that I no longer need as of last Thursday, and would be happy to send you. It has two handsets but at the moment we are unable to locate one of them.

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  18. Grumpy

    One handset is enough for me – it is all I would have bought in the AT&T store if the guy had not been determined to prevent me. I’ll send you my address on facebook.

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  19. Mac

    Ok. It’s pretty funny that we can’t find that handset–losing the phone is another thing that couldn’t happen in the old days. There’s a feature where you press a button on the base and it makes the handsets beep, for just this reason, but apparently the missing handset has long since lost its charge.
    You can’t always get me on my mobile, because I frequently don’t answer it. If I don’t recognize the number, or in some cases if I do but don’t want to bother with it at the moment, I don’t answer and let them leave a message if they really wanted to talk to me. Another difference from the old days. No more answering the phone only to find out it was a telemarketer instead of the call you were expecting.
    There was a story in the new the other day about your same situation–stolen iPad, pictures appearing on the original user’s iCloud acct. Those people were identified and caught. Claimed they bought the iPad at a swap meet.

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  20. jkt

    You whole have that phone wiped.
    AMDG

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  21. jkt

    I hate auto-correct.
    AMDG

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  22. Mac

    You meant to be telling Grumpy she could have the stolen phone wiped out, right?

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  23. Janet

    Yes. I think it changed “should” to “whole.” Makes perfect sense, right?
    AMDG

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  24. Grumpy

    What happened was, the next day my cards wouldn’t work in the ATM and I was so scared they had emptied my accounts I went back to GB. Then I called AT&T and they ‘disconnected’ the Iphone. But it now turns out they literally disconnected the PHONE. They didn’t disconnect the device. When I found the alien photos last weekend I went into the Apple store and they changed my password. They didn’t say anything about wiping the phone. Would it be AT&T who would do that or Apple? Naturally AT&T are saying, now, this is an Apple issue, and Apple….
    It was pretty stupid of me, but when I was in the Apple store they told me to delete the alien photos and I did. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it as I did it, but I did.

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  25. Mac

    I don’t know whether it would be Apple or AT&T who could/would wipe the phone. Hmm…looks like you can do it:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2701
    Why should you not have deleted the photos?

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  26. Fr. Matt Venuti

    Being born in 1980 I might possibly be of the last generation where a landline was normal. It’s a shame my kids won’t ever hear “get off the computer, I need to use the phone!” either. I haven’t had a landline since 2001…

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  27. Mac

    My kids probably heard more of “get off the phone, I need to use the computer.” It drives me a little crazy when I hear somebody refer to their network router as a modem. The computer is pretty much a relic, too.

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  28. Grumpy

    Mac, you said that in the story you read about, the thieves were identified and caught. I was making the inference that they were identified from the photos? It was because I thought the people in the photos might be identifiable to the police that I deleted them with a bad conscience.
    The disappearance of computers had a lot to do with my problems in Spain this year. Now, my stepmother and other family members but especially my saintly stepmother, could tell you that I have a financial disaster every single time I go to Spain. Every camino brings it own troubles. Like the time my nephew’s headmaster cashed all the postdated checks I had given for his school year at once, not one month a time, as instructed by my brother in law. When that happened, I was in Logrogno, on the 2012 camino. And usually we sort it out by email – I was in long conversations with Notre Dame Federal Credit Union, from the computer in the albergue in Logrono.
    When I first started going on the camino in 2005, it wasn’t the ancient days of innocence. It wasn’t 1970. The students I took with me were all texting each other, finding out about their family stuff with little messages. And very very occasionally (this was in France) one of the more expensive pilgrim albergues had a computer. By 2009 all the albergues had computers. You put in a euro and chatted away for half an hour. Plus there were computer cafes in the big cities like Bergos or Leon. I must have posted here from those computers in days gone by. There was one roadside café with a computer, about 75 km about Santiago which I posted from, in 2011, and then again in 2012, saying, I’m nearly there. In 2012 it was a nearly dead computer. In 2014, this year, it was gone. Nearly all the albergue computers and the computer cafes were gone – except one in Santiago which everyone uses for printing their boarding pass.
    So on my first excursion into Spain this summer, when my Iphone was stolen and then the next day my cards didn’t work, I couldn’t contact AT&T or Notre Dame Federal Union, or my saintly stepmother.
    I went back after Stratford Caldecott’s funeral at the end of July for a quick one week run into Santiago. I left my phone behind this time, since it wrecked my holiday in June. But, wait for it, my cards still didn’t work in the atms. So I just lived on the very little money I had on me when I arrived in Spain. And the same thing, I couldn’t tell anyone or call for help, because now the only way to do that is on your Iphone, which every single pilgrim seems to have.
    Its making an unprecedented change to most people’s caminos. Because it was a huge ingredient of it, that one didn’t know what was around the corner or where one would sleep that night. In a sense, it was at least a very big element of what it was about. But now, everyone is constantly phoning ahead to see where they can bed down. That’s a big shame. They don’t know it, but they are spoiling their own experience of the camino.
    I’m not one who would prefer to go back to the 1970s, but this thing with the Iphones and the camino is certainly a change for the worse.

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  29. Louise

    “Do you mean to say that you didn’t get any unsolicited sales and begging calls at all?”
    Yes, but not by robots. 🙂

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  30. Mac

    The nice thing about the robots is that there’s no sense of guilt or irritation when you hang up on them.

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  31. Mac

    That certainly does sound like a change for the worse re the Camino. You’re saying that the computers went away because once everybody had a smartphone the computers weren’t needed?
    One thing I notice in general about phones with cameras, plus Facebook, is the encouragement of the habit of being distracted from some interesting experience because you’re capturing it on video and posting it to Facebook. I’ve fallen into that more than once–although, on the other hand:
    http://www.xkcd.com/1314/
    Yes, I think the thieves were identified from their photos, although I didn’t read the story that closely. Or at least the possessors of the device–they claimed they weren’t the ones who stole it, which is plausible, because what kind of idiot would take a picture of himself with a device he stole and put it where the person he stole it from could see it? I know that was probably just normal operation of the device, to copy stuff to the cloud, but still, if you’re going to steal something like that, seems like you’d know you need to cover your tracks, and how to do it.
    “Every camino brings it own troubles.” Kinda makes sense. When my wife and I used to teach NFP, it seemed like whenever we were about to have a class some weird obstacle would pop up.

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  32. Grumpy

    Yes. Once everyone was carrying their own phone no one needed a computer. Even people who are doing a cheap frugal computrr carry some kind of device. I walked with a group of youn hungarians who were doing it as frugally as they could, staying in the municipal albergues and buying their own food, and they were skyping home to their parents on their own computers. That would be much cheaper than putting euros into a slow old computer with creaky keyboard to program coordination.
    The photos on my phone were a woman who looked annoyed to be snapped (1) and a young boy (6)

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  33. Rob G

    “the kind of receiver that you can hold between your ear and shoulder if need be.”
    They make a retro handset that plugs into your cell or “device.” They run about $10.00. At first I thought they were just a novelty item, but according to the reviews on Amazon they seem to work pretty well.

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  34. Janet

    “Every camino brings it own troubles.” Kinda makes sense. When my wife and I used to teach NFP, it seemed like whenever we were about to have a class some weird obstacle would pop up.
    My daughter heard a talk this summer given by a man who taught theology in a secularized Catholic university. The people were there to fulfill a requirement and were not engaged at all. One day the class was invaded by ants and then wasps (I think it was wasps, might have been roaches.) It was the only only classroom to have this problem. They finally had to move and the same thing happened. There were some other really strange things that happened to him personally and then someone broke into his office and vandalized it and they believed the intruder and had come to harm him.
    The one day, a woman who had been very confrontational in the class said something like, “You people see all these ants, and these wasps, and all this stuff has happened? There must be somebody doesn’t want us to hear what that man is saying.” And before the class was over most of the class had become serious Christians.
    AMDG

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  35. Janet

    That xkcd is funny, Maclin. I can see both points of view. When I’m trying to photograph something, it does help me to focus in on it and see things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
    AMDG

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  36. Craig

    I am sorry to hear that smartphones have taken over the camino. I remember that when I was there (~2005) we never knew from one day to the next where we’d be sleeping, and there was a certain camaraderie each morning as people rolled out of bed and tried to get going in order not to arrive after the albergue up the road had filled. I remember one occasion on which we did arrive late, finding nowhere to stay, and had to be billeted out to a family in the area. It was one of our more memorable evenings. As Chesterton said, the more control you have over things, the fewer adventures you have. Of course, he said it better than that.
    I confess that I am one of those who are annoyed by people who pull their cameras out all the time. I remember being in Venice and watching someone filming their walk through the streets, eyes fixed on the little screen. That’s crazy. I am even more annoyed by people who arrive at a beautiful monument — a church, maybe, or a famous statue — and then stand in front of it to have their picture taken. Get out of the way! Do you think this is about you?!
    Needless to say, few people enjoy travelling with me.

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  37. Grumpy

    It’s just that, Craig. It’s taking the adventure out of the camino for people who will never find out that that was what it should be about.
    There was a nice English family. There was a father who was rather stout. There was a mother who had terrible blisters. There was a teenage boy horrifically embarrassed by his parents. And between them they walked so slowly they were always arriving too late for an albergue. So they were constantly phoning ahead, even two days ahead, trying to find somewhere to sleep. And they were being badly advised. One day in Tricastella where the albergue was full a lady bar owner put them all in a cab to Samos to stay in a bar owned by friends of hers. But just 500 yards out of Tricastella, on the beautiful river-forest route to Samos, there was a nearly empty municipal albergue (I know because the next day I talked to a hippy guy who stayed there).

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  38. Mac

    But don’t you want to be able to prove that you actually stood in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Though photographs don’t prove much anymore.

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  39. Mac

    I see both sides of the case presented in xkcd, too, Janet. Mainly I think “other people having experiences incorrectly” is very funny. Trying to photograph something definitely makes me pay more attention to it. But it does seem sometimes that people actively doing something and more or less simultaneously documenting it are missing something.
    That story about the theology class sounds like something out of a medieval saint’s life. Remarkable, to put it mildly.

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  40. Janet

    It’s remarkable, but anyone who has ever tried to get children ready for Mass on Sunday morning is familiar with the phenomenon.
    The noticing comes when I take a picture and narrow in on some part of the whole that wouldn’t have seen. I have a devotional book from Magnificat with daily entries from the writing of Benedict XVI, and on each page there is a small detail from a larger work of art. Sometimes it might just be a flower or a branch or an more-or-less insignificant character from the background of the picture. I’ve really enjoyed these.
    I’m beginning to see it’s really dumb to judge what other people are doing by what you would be doing if you were doing the same thing. 😉
    AMDG

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  41. Grumpy

    I keep trying a clumsy circumlocution like ‘an element of what the camino could be about’ because I don’t want to say there’s a right or wrong way of experiencing the camino – not exactly. How could it be ‘right’ to experience it with emailing Indiana NDFCU on grotty old computers and ‘wrong’ to experience it with no grotty old computers because everyone has Iphones now?

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  42. Craig

    Well, maybe. But I must say that I recoil at the thought of mugging for the camera in front of a great work of art. Doing so is, it seems to me, a way of augmenting oneself by appropriation of the thing, of asserting one’s dominance over it, of sticking it into one’s bag. There is something consumerist about it. I “did” that. True, people experience things differently, but for me getting up for the camera would be spiritually unhealthy. I would be surprised if that weren’t true for others, at least to some extent.
    Having said that, I did take some pictures of myself leaning over the rail from atop the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome. The opportunity was just too good to pass up. So I’m not entirely consistent.
    That’s a strange tale you tell, Janet, about your friend’s class, but I believe it. I’ve experienced something similar on one or two occasions. (Not to mention all the problems with the kids on Sunday mornings!)

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  43. Craig

    I was also going to say that there is a risk that the smartphone-infestation on the camino does special harm to the religious pilgrimage aspect of it. There’s no smartphone for the pilgrimage through life.

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  44. Grumpy

    Im glad I didnt take it with me when I went in August!

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  45. Grumpy

    The hardest part of being without it was simply not knowing the time

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  46. Grumpy

    When I went in 2011 I walked with a boy who is with the OPs in DC now. I had a little nokia which was my alarm clock. When i asked yhe Dominican boy why he didnt have a phone he said, ‘its an electronic tether’

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  47. Mac

    Watches and clocks of all sorts have been replaced by phones. As you say about your Nokia, it doesn’t take an expensive smart phone to serve that purpose.
    It is an electronic tether. Certain People Who Shall Remain Unidentified get annoyed if I fail to answer my phone simply because I had put it down somewhere out of earshot.

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  48. Janet

    I have an old track phone that I use as an alarm. It’s a great alarm. It has no number, because I transferred the number to my new phone, but it still gets voicemail–very odd.
    I do think you can make the judgement that frequent use electronics on the camino are detrimental to the experience for anyone because when you are sucked into the internet, you aren’t where you are.
    It might be a good penitential exercise to have a smartphone on the camino and not look at it. What I wonder is how all though people recharge their phones. Are there a billion wall sockets at the albergues?
    AMDG

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  49. Grumpy

    People beg steal and borrow each others chargers

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  50. Mac

    But where do they plug them in? I guess these albergues have electricity and enough outlets for all the guests to plug in overnight?
    True, Janet, and it is possible to say that in some cases it’s objectively a bad practice to be messing around on the internet or whatever with your phone. At Mass, for instance. Unless you’re looking up the readings or something.

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  51. Grumpy

    Americans and Koreans (and so on) beg or borrow chargers which will go into European plugs. The albergues have electricity. I’m not sure what the answer to the question is, except for that people manage because they have to – that’s part of an element of what the camino is sometimes taken to be about 🙂

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  52. Janet

    I’m just thinking that it would have to be a LOT of outlets.
    AMDG

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  53. Grumpy

    I feel like when I was visited by this extremely French French theologian. This Dominican never succeeded in learning to drive. So with my driver’s license two years under my belt at that time, I posed as the driving expert. Then we came to a fourway stop. He asked me how zhat worked. I said the person who arrived at the stop goes first. He said, how do you know who arrived at the stop first?
    Naturally I was flummoxed, because, you know, one just knows.
    In the same way, I just don’t know how to answer. There certainly are not dozens of outlets, but it’s never a problem. I don’t know why. People arrive at the albergue and do all different kinds of things. Some sleep. Some shower. Some wash their clothes. Some cook. Some go to buy food, if there’s anywhere to buy food near by. Some people work on their blisters and boils, sticking needles into them. Some people work on other people’s blisters and boils. So you never have everyone wanting to charge up their phone at the same time. Some might do it in a bar, if there is a bar and they go to it. Some might do it in the albergue.

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  54. Grumpy

    It was very different going in August for the last 200 KM of the French camino – there was such a pressure on bunks that no one who arrived more than half an hour after an albergue opened got a bed. But in general, in addition to doing different things, people arrive at different times – from 12 pm or 2 pm opening down to 6 at night.

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  55. Janet

    I thought, when I saw Macaroni and Cheese potato chips in the store the other day, that I had seen the most bizarre flavor of chips ever, until today when I saw Cappuccino potato chips. This definitively proves my theory that there are no depths to which a society jaded by sex will not sink in search of gratification.
    Sorry for having to hijack this thread, but I had to put this someplace and if I posted it on Facebook my children would be scandalized.
    AMDG

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  56. Grumpy

    Could be the most extrme thread hijacking ever

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  57. Grumpy

    One cannot explain spontaneous order
    Paleocons dont grasp it because they are rationalsts

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  58. Grumpy

    My feeble effort to be more random than Janet

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  59. jkt

    Well, I thought we had probably exhausted the possibilities of electrical outlets.
    AMDG

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  60. jkt

    And it does have an admittedly oblique relationship to the old-fashioned nature of sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g.
    AMDG

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  61. Grumpy

    I can remember people chanting Macs rhyme and Im a little younger

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  62. jkt

    I seem to remember my kids chanting it and they are much, much younger.
    AMDG

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  63. Mac

    I’ve been out this evening and am just now catching up. I believe the two of you would have to split the award for furthest-afield thread wandering. I don’t consider it hijacking, btw, I’m all for it. Unless someone jumps in to beat people over the head with some personal mania.
    Anyway, getting from antique telephone nostalgia and declinism to Cappucino potato chips and paleocon rationalism is a pretty good feat. And yet there is actually a connection.
    I would have said paleocons are exactly the best friends spontaneous order has. Libertarians expect too much of it, and neocons aren’t really interested, and liberals can’t abide it any more, though some radicals on the left are of similar mind as the libertarians. But paleos would at least leave a space.
    Someone posted a picture of those Cappucino chips on Facebook the other day with a caption along the lines of “we are truly doomed.” It seems more just loony to me, like putting maple syrup on a taco.
    I hate four-way stops. “one just knows”–well, one is supposed to, but that’s exactly my problem. It’s fine if I’m at a full stop while the other guy is a car-length away, or vice-versa. But most of the time it’s closer than that, and I’m so busy trying to see exactly when he stops that I’m not sure exactly when I stopped. And if it’s four people arriving near the same time…. Maybe it has a connection to my inability to do two things at once.

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  64. Janet

    If you get to the stop sign at approximately the same time, the person on the right has the right of way. If four people get there at the same time, well I usually figure there’s one person who will insist on going first and then the person on his left goes next.
    AMDG

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  65. Mac

    Yeah, “approximately”. Who gets to define that? 🙂
    I hate ’em.
    Did I mention here the friend of a friend who mounted a bullhorn under the hood of his car so he could address fellow drivers in need of correction? He hated four-way stops, too, and would bellow at people to “JUST GO AHEAD, DAMMIT”. I think his hatred was different from mine, and probably directed at people like me who hesitate.
    Another reason I hate them is that sometimes the mental conditioning that responds mechanically to stop signs fails to note that this is not a normal stop sign, and, seeing that no one else is going, causes me to start to go out of turn.

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  66. Janet

    Back to my theory that food is the new sex ;-), another indication of this is that the government, which has now pretty much decided that nothing having to do with sex can be called illegal, is now regulating what we eat. It’s interesting to see the favorite slogan of feminists wrt abortion, “This is my body, I can do with it as I please,” falling before the insistence that we are not allowed to choose what we put in our mouths.
    AMDG

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  67. Mac

    I saw one rationale for this coming 25 years ago, when the anti-smoking crusade was really cranking up. In response to people saying “It’s none of your business, it’s my health and I’ll smoke if I want to,” the crusaders replied “No, it’s everybody’s business because you burden all of society with health care costs resulting from your irresponsible behavior.”
    The more nationalized health care gets, the more appealing that argument gets. But naturally it’s not applied to any sexual behavior.

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  68. Janet

    Well, I guess it is in a way because if we pay for everyone’s contraception, we will save all the healthcare costs connected with pregnancy and 75 years or so of healthcare for some person we don’t want.
    AMDG

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  69. Mac

    Right. And even bigger savings will come when abortion is paid for. Also, abortionists will be contributing more to the GDP.

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  70. Paul

    my children would be scandalized
    I’m pretty scandalized myself that there should be such a thing as Cappuccino potato chips.

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  71. Rob G

    “The more nationalized health care gets, the more appealing that argument gets. But naturally it’s not applied to any sexual behavior.”
    Sexual liberty, being the engine of modernity, will always, always get a pass.

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  72. Mac

    And trump other liberties, which is the lesson currently being taught by the cultural left and enforced by the Obama administration and its judicial allies.
    Actually I’m unable to imagine what Cappuccino potato chips would taste like.

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  73. Louise

    Are 4 way stop signs relatively new?
    They can be fairly exasperating.

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  74. Janet

    No, they were already around when I started driving in 1966.
    AMDG

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  75. Janet

    The first 48 years are the hardest. 😉
    AMDG

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  76. Louise

    Hehehe

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  77. Paul

    Roundabouts slightly increase the frequency of collisions, but vastly reduce how lethal they are. They’ve been ubiquitous in the UK for forty years. In the past twenty they’ve been adopting them in a big way in France and Italy and Belgium. I’m curious now about Australia.

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  78. Mac

    I guess at least people are at least going more slowly when they get into them.
    I’m not sure about the rest of the country, but here in the south they are unknown. In recent years they’ve introduced things called “traffic circles” on some streets, but they’re just there to make people slow down, not to facilitate flow through the intersection. They basically just consist of a big obstacle, and serve the same purpose as speed bumps–you have to slow down and go around them rather than blasting straight through the intersection. Like this:
    http://edmontonbikes.ca/uploads/page/west-downtown-complete-streets/Vancouver-mini-traffic-circle.jpg

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  79. Robert Gotcher

    In the past ten years they’ve been building them all over the place in the Milwaukee area. Here are two by a freeway interchange in Muskego. http://tinyurl.com/lj4l5qa.
    In Oklahoma City where I grew up there was a large roundabout (the Classen Circle) on Classen Blvd, now called Classen Drive. They dismantled the circle some time after I moved away. Here is an areal of it in 1969. http://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/1969classencircle.jpg

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  80. Robert Gotcher

    For some reason typepad included the period in my url. Here it is again without the period. http://tinyurl.com/lj4l5qa

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  81. Mac

    If nothing else, they look cool from the air.

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  82. Grumpy

    Paul, there are quite a lot of so called ‘circles’ in Indiana and Michigan. They are fairly dangerous because Americans have never been taught to use them. As you know, it’s a big part of the driving test entering and exiting a roundabout correctly. Here, I’ve even encountered people getting confused and going round one in the wrong direction. People don’t know what lane to be in, at the very least.
    For me, the American practice of being allowed to ‘turn right on red’ was difficult to accept until an American told me to treat it like a roundabout.

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  83. Janet

    Am I remembering correctly that there is a big circle in downtown South Bend?
    We have one of those traffic circles that Maclin described in downtown Memphis in the place where we turned to get to the condo where we stayed. That’s the only one I know about.
    AMDG

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  84. Mac

    So if I ever get on a roundabout I’ll know to treat it like right-on-red.

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  85. Robert Gotcher

    Isn’t it right on red after stop? I don’t think you have to stop to enter a traffic circle. You do have to yield, though.

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  86. Mac

    Yes, it is. The traffic circles here didn’t have any particular instructions that I recall. They were on residential streets and were just another approach to speed bumps.

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  87. Louise

    There are a lot of roundabouts in Tasmania and Australia generally, I think. I prefer them to the four-way stop. We’ve had them for aeons and most people seem to know how to use them.
    The four-way stops with double lanes really bother me!

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  88. Mac

    Funny: earlier today one of my children was complaining about “the four-way stop stalemate.” The dislike runs in the family, I guess.

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  89. Louise

    It may be quite common!

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  90. Grumpy

    There’s lots of circles around the University. I don’t think there’s one in downtown SB

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  91. Rob G

    About a 1/2 mile from where I live we have a four-way stop with three lanes coming from each direction. When they built it 30+ years ago it was fine, as the traffic using it was pretty light. Over the years as the area has built up it’s become a nightmare, and they are finally working on getting lights installed.
    Roundabouts/circles have just started making their way into SW Pa. We’ve had a small number for a long while, but up till recently they’ve been few and far between. It seems to me that one of the places where they are putting them is where cross-traffic left turns might be difficult, but that don’t have enough traffic to warrant a light or a stop sign.

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  92. Mac

    I think a multi-lane four-way-stop would cause me to just lock up completely if all the lanes were occupied.

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  93. Janet

    I’m trying to remember if I have ever seen that. I can’t conjure one up, but it’s what you have to do if a traffic light is out and it’s awful.
    AMDG

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  94. Grumpy

    You have to stop on a round about to see whats coming. My passengers would tell you my ‘stop’ is more of a pause than a stop

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  95. Mac

    The police have a self-contradictory concept called a “rolling stop.” I was told this once on being pulled over on my motorcycle for having run a stop sign, which I had indeed done. He said I could have gotten by with a rolling stop, but apparently I had been flagrant. Perhaps your pause is something like that.

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  96. Grumpy

    well the passenger who complains or at least mocks me about my ‘pausing’ originally told me about the ‘rolling stop’ in an effort to get me to take some action in relation to Stop signs.

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  97. Anne-Marie

    I once made a rolling stop with my (American) husband’s grandfather in the car, he asked, “Is that what you call a stop up in Canada?” I said, “Where I come from, we call that un stop americain.”

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  98. Grumpy

    Touche

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  99. Mac

    AKA, apparently, the “Rhode Island roll” or “California stop,” among doubtless many other terms.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign#Compliance_requirements

    Reply

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