Recently I’ve fallen into a series of videos that aren’t in any way intended for me or my age group. They are in fact intended for women in their twenties and thirties and pertain to things like: “Basic skin care if you’re the sort of person who has tried all sorts of complicated regimes and failed at them, either because they’re too complicated or because you’re ADD AF” (That’s not what they call them, but that’s what they amount to.) And also the same for household care.
I vaguely remember grandma doing some some of the things they advise. VERY vaguely as we moved out of her house when my parents built a house of their own when I was six and after that my access to things like her bedtime routines were faulty. My mom, so far as I know, had the same skin care trajectory I have. Which now I think about it, incredibly closely resembles my writing-improvement strategy and a lot of others: Buy the materials needed for a complex skin regime. Completely fail to use them. (Sometimes even once.) Eventually move them to a remote cabinet. Toss them (if you remember to) when you move. It’s an ADD thing.
The thing is that just wiping with rose water or cleaning with cold cream (or both) then applying a moisturizer is doable, particularly since I realized I respond well (who knew?) to tallow-intensive moisturizers. (I’ve heard of people using olive oil or lanolin, too. But I am mildly sensitive to wool, and the olive oil is in the kitchen, which in terms of beauty ritual is in another universe.) is doable. I won’t say I do it every night (AH!) but three out of four ain’t bad.
There’s also channels on how to wash your hair (which led to my husband asking me why I was watching videos of people showering, particularly as they only showed the had.) And channels that advise things like pouring a pot of boiling water into the kitchen sink once a week or so to take care of accumulated gunk in your pipes. All the more useful, I suspect in this age of low-flush everything. Which is not what older pipes were designed for. And channels for how to do hairstyles with long hair that mimic shorter hair, for when you need that. Etc. (Look, I don’t wear long hair by choice. I wear long hair because “I cut my hair when I remember to book to have it cut” works out to about once every five or six years. I once grew my hair long enough to sit on, because I didn’t remember to have it cut. Which is one of those “Tell me you’re ADD without telling me you’re ADD.” moments.)
I know there are also channels on how to cook from scratch. (I don’t need it, though arguably I could start one) and other channels for very basic skills of the sort everyone used to know.
The thing is when I stumble onto these, I find that my own generation wasn’t taught most of them. Which btw the video makers assume we were taught. They say things like “Our parents” — or even “our grandparents” — “failed to pass on these skills which used to be widely known.”
I’m here to tell you that though I’m sixty three, which by any reckoning is “grandmother age” — though we are not, biologically, grandparents — I was never taught any of this. In fact, some of these things I’d lay hands on the fire neither mom nor dad were taught.
As proof that there’s a great under-fund of knowledge that has been substantially lost, I offer not only these you tube channels, which spring up like mushrooms after a rain, all with three bazillion subscribers, but also the fact Jordan Peterson made his name out of proclaiming what used to be bog standard common knowledge, but which hits us as revolutionary because no one has taught us any of it. Other sites, like FlyLady specialize in other portions of that lost knowledge.
BTW all these channels, at least the ones on beauty or household care, posit some great shadowy conspiracy that prevented knowledge from being passed on. The drug companies. Or the cosmetic companies, or whatever.
Bah. Judging from how basic the knowledge and how widespread the loss, no. It wasn’t that. For one because no great shadowy conspiracy has the kind of reach where you get to every household, every place, and issue orders.
What happened was different.
I can almost grasp it when I read the early 20th century sf (yes, resuming soon. Look, my body is STILL trying to find new and exciting ways to die, but I’ve ALMOST defeated this last attempt. ALMOST.)
What happened was the crowning flowering of the industrial and scientific revolution, complete with the smug certainty that we were better than all that came before us, and these habits (a lot of them not clearly explained by those who had them) were now dead letter, superseded by a new law that made everything simpler, shinier and more scientific.
Look, I am perhaps more aware of what happened at the dawn of the 20th century in terms of every day living than the rest of you, because Portugal was further behind the “progress” of the scientific/technological age. And a late adopter of the industrial revolution. (Though I understand some of you from some recondite regions of the rest of the world might have similar experiences.)
So, born in the early sixties, I grew up with things like cooking on wood stoves, and the guzzunder (chamber pot) under the bed, because though we had a modern (ah) bathroom, it was outside and about twenty feet from the kitchen door, and difficult to drag a child (or yourself) to in the dark of night in winter. In Portugal the change was more accelerated than most places, because it was late, and it hit, for me personally, at six when we moved to my parents’ newly built house which is hellishly inconvenient in modern American terms (it lacks central HVAC for one) but was and is solidly “modern” by any other standard. And had two bathrooms and two showers for four people, which was frankly considered an excess of luxury. (And right next to the bedrooms too. How lazy could you be?)
BUT if you’ve made that transition you understand how a lot of things that had been passed on ceased to be passed on. For instance, though my older cousin probably still remembers how to light a Franklin stove, (who can forget the time she got impatient with it and doused wood and starter with lighter fluid, causing a fireball that took out her eyebrows and the front of her hair and led to a passing nickname of “Lightly Toasted Natalia?”) I have no clue, since at six (or honestly, even at sixty, but that’s something else) no one sane should trust me with flammable materials and flame. (Not saying I don’t use them. Just saying no one sane would trust me with them.))
I’m also glad to say I have no clue of the care and maintenance of a guzzunder, though if anyone ever forces me to use of maintain one, I can assure you it will involve dipping it in bleach several times a day. (Which is the chemical equivalent of killing it with fire, or nuking it from orbit.)
On top of that, there were EXPECTATIONS which now can’t help but strike us as deranged. Let me just say that the Jetsons weren’t that far off the life people expected their children to have. Everything was going to be automated, everything was going to be easy. No one needed to know how to do things, because in technological terms, all of us would be liberated from the the drudgery of every day life. We not only would study war no more, we would study cookery no more. It would all be done for us by some sort of mechanism and — waves hands in pseudo-magical passes — SCIENCE. People really, truly, honestly though no one would have to work, and we’d all be fed by “taking some pills.” Sigh. (Now ask me how I laugh at the post-work economy and other nonsense.)
This made sense because in one generation we got vacuums, televisions, electrical or gas stoves, carpet cleaners, floor polishers (as opposed to mom putting extra old socks on me and telling me to dance on the dry wax. No, really.) REFRIGERATORS and other things that liberated a large number of people from daily drudgery. (Oh, yeah, commercial soaps and detergents and for the lucky few washers and washing machines.) WHY wouldn’t the rest be within easy reach and for the next generation?
And a lot of things people in my grandparents generation believed had been upended. The germ theory of disease overtook ancient practices. (Like swathing everything in red, as a remedy against small pox.) The new, scientifically educated progeny laughed at ancient superstition. Sooner or later older people would shut up.
Add to that that both my parents, and probably a bunch of your grandparents, were what Heinlein called “the lost children of WWII” and never mind that Portugal was neutral. He had a definite point to that. There was a break in knowledge between the prior generation and the ones raised during/just after WWII.
Part of that was the break in culture, as I’ve explained. The other part was that the rebuilding work after WWII really seems to have been an all-hands-on-deck endeavor. I know we have the strange idea that after WWII all women went back to not working and being home makers, but that’s fostered by the mass media which gave us the Imaginary Fifties. I know that a lot of my family (women as well as men) worked through that, as did almost everyone I know of. (Excepting the very wealthy. And sometimes they had other forms of jobs.) Now people didn’t dump kids in daycare, by and large. They had either elder relatives who took over, or exchanged care in vast informal groups OR tried to work from home (both mom and grandma worked from home, a tradition I fell solidly into.) But it really was an all hands on deck endeavor.
Was it more so than the time before the World Wars? Well, I don’t know. While I gather that even before the world wars a lot more women worked than is commonly credited, most of them seem to have worked from home. (Most men too) which made transmitting “of course” knowledge to the young easier. Because they were around and doing it/helping with it. I also believe — and I grant you I’ve not made a scientific study of it — that it was more likely you’d grow up to do what your mom and dad did. Or at least there was more of that expectation.
At any rate, there seems to have been an unusual number of children raising themselves; being raised by methods promoted by “scientific upbringing” experts drunk on Freud and Rousseau, and other attempts at creating the perfect generation by generally borking it.
The result is where we are. There’s been a lot of knowledge lost. And AFTER my generation, a lot more, mostly because the schools too drank the Marxist/Freudian/Rouseeaunian and the “This one simple trick” koolaid, giving us things like the “Whole language method” of NOT teaching people to read. (Which takes effort, since exposed to written word a lot of kids learn without being taught.)
The good news is that there is obviously a thirst among the young — chilluns, anyone younger than 40 is young to me — for this knowledge, this basic “how to get along in daily life” Baedecker.
The bad news is that a lot of it is news even to old people like me. And the truth is maybe some of it can and should be discarded, but it’s hard to tell what, since we each have maybe one piece and no knowledge of the whole of the thing.
Normally, I feel, for humanity to go through one of these breaks, it takes a major natural cataclysm or a Chinese Emperor with weird ideas. But we seem to have managed well enough with industrial/technological upheaval AND two world wars.
So, what to do? Well, as I said, all of us have a little knowledge. Some of which we acquired as adults. (Like me and cooking from scratch.) And youtube, for all its faults, it’s a free for all teaching tool. Though there are others, yes.
I don’t know what your specialty is. A lot of people are teaching cooking from scratch, so I feel that’s not needed. BUT perhaps an how to construct stories, though there are also a lot of people doing it (BUT it is my specialty) could help. Though honestly, a series of videos teaching PEOPLE TO READ if you can make it short and snappy and fun videos, and assign homework of sorts, could be useful for children and adults. And the same for basic math, etc. But also, I don’t know…. I learned cross stitch at a professional level from crazy people (shush you.) I’m struggling with seeing well enough to do it, and being frustrated because of that. BUT that’s something else. I know kids who’ve learned crochet from youtube. And knitting.
I honestly am trying to get over my body’s increasingly clever attempts at offing itself long enough to plan a series of youtube videos starting at the most elementary “How to write a blah” for values of blah. If I work very hard at the health thing and stay with it, maybe early next year?
So, what is your lost knowledge of the ancients? No, it doesn’t need to be anything arcane or reaching to the nineteenth century. It could be stuff like “How to draw a circle.” (I know three methods) or “how to hang a picture straight” (Bro, I’m begging you. Everything I do tilts fight. Also, stop laughing.) or “How to flea comb a cat.” or “how to tell if your rescued puppy is healthy” or a million other things. First steps. Basic things. And preferably those you’re a genuine expert in. (Don’t get me started on “how to save” or “how to invest” which could very much benefit from basics by someone who isn’t SELLING a system. Dan and I finally managed to learn some of this in our fifties, but getting to minimal knowledge HURT.)
Think how basic Peterson’s — or Mike Rowe’s — knowledge to share was. And how revolutionary to the young people.
Then let’s build under, build over, build around.
Knowledge of the ancients might be mostly lost, but we live in an age of miracles, where passing on and acquiring knowledge is the easiest it’s ever been.
And it’s time to rebuild.
According To Hoyt 
I wonder how many young guys (and gals) know how to whittle?
I know that it’s been too many years since I last whittled.
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I used to be half decent. I lost my great uncle’s gentleman’s pen knife (two small blades, silver bolsters and mother of pearl handles) whittling out doors, must have laid it down in a rush to get to a class never could find it. Given all the knife restrictions most kids have never handled a pen knife let alone whiottled or played mumbly peg. Whittling I could probably do. I also learned to tat (which makes fine lace) from my grandmother. I still have some of her 50’s tatting shuttles as one ivory one that was her grandmother’s. Do I remember how to do that? Um no, in fact heck no.
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I tutor high school kids, and I always have my pocket knife, well, in my pocket. I pull it out when I need it (usually something mundae like cutting open a bag of chips), and some of them will literally gasp. It’s a stinking 3.5″ Gerber lockback, it’s not Achilles’ swrof.
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Or even his sword. I wonder what a swrof looks like?
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I learned to make a whistle out of a small branch in Girl Scouts, to make shavings, whittle, safely. I still learned new knife safety during Wood Chip BSA safety, as an adult. (When someone hands off a knife, the receiver is supposed to say “thank you” acknowledging the safe receipt of the knife, or other sharp cutting implement; ax, etc.)
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Yeah the world has changed. It was common late 60’s for most 3rd to 4th grade boys to have a pocket knife, boy scout model if they had made it to Cub Scouts. Today my elder daughter teaches eighth grade. In general, even she is not permitted a knife, I had to hunt up a blade-free multitool clone for her to have for fixing stuff that breaks.
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The Reader asks if making a pile of random shavings counts?
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Yep.
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It doesn’t seem like something people really do anymore. I used to hand-carve Harry Potter style wands and sell them on Etsy (not very long ago, actually). They were by no means the finest examples of carving/whittling you could find, but they had an artfully rustic type of charm, and the people who bought them really liked them. I also worked up a certificate of authenticity and a customized, frameable document for each one, talking about how the wood and the imaginary core worked together to give the wand a unique sort of personality. People liked those, too. Might be fun and relaxing to take it up again (minus the Etsy shop, probably), but I don’t know if the burgeoning arthritis would like it… My now-adult kids don’t do any whittling, but I did teach them how to safely handle knives and make good cuts, so there’s that at least.
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I used to work with a Star Wars fan, maybe ten fifteen years younger than me, which would make him older end of Millennial I think, who whittled Star Wars figures.
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The number one way you can tell if a scout has gotten their Totin’ Chip (pocketknife permission) is the sudden prevalence of sharpened sticks around camp.
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We put that to use. A lot of fringed fire starter sticks were made.
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I lost my Totin’ Chip card, but still have my Paul Bunyan (Axe skills) patch. Hey! I know how to fell a tree without causing serious bodily injury! That’s something.
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It sure is. Falling trees are dangerous.
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So is falling out of trees. 😛
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I’ve found multiple instances of death due to falling trees in my genealogical research, back in the 1800s.
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Does scrimshaw count as whittling?
I’d say it counts. There is some impressive scrimshaw work out there. People almost never do it any more, but back when whaling was going full steam (no pun intended) and whalebone was an abundant material, people made some impressive decorated-yet-practical items, like this pie crimper.
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I never had that kind of eye hand coordination.
Now, sewing a fine seam, three layers deep, so as to properly align mucus membrane margins for a good cosmetic result? yep, been there, done that multiple times, occasionally when severely sleep deprived.
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“The greatest advance in women’s liberation was the washing machine.”
Because it turned laundry from constant daily drudgery into an occasional inconvenience. Load washer, wait an hour, unload washer. Throw in dryer or hang up to dry. Oh, and ‘permanent press’ fabrics that didn’t need to be ironed every time they were washed.
There were a lot of other advances that had greater impact on daily life (Refrigerators! Flush toilets!) but nothing that relieved more women of more toil.
Of course, you should always understand the task the clanker is doing for you well enough to do it yourself in a clankerless emergency.
———————————
Skills will get you through life without clankers better than clankers can get you through life with no skills.
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Washing machines saved toil by doing things that people used to do. The work was still done, but it was automated. Home refrigerators saved toil by making things people used to do completely unnecessary. Collecting food on a daily or nearly daily basis went away. The basic task was still done, but it became far less often. I “go to the market” every two weeks or so. This is impossible without reliable home refrigeration.
Techniques for using up sour milk before it soured too badly became mostly unnecessary.
Maintaining ice went away completely. I occasionally use the line that ice went overnight from a precious commodity to a nuisance that had to be gotten rid of by defrosting, but the process of acquiring and maintaining ice simply disappeared.
Early refrigeration manuals often considered refrigerators to be a cooking appliance, because they took over from other cooking appliances, such as crank-operated ice cream makers. Instead of using a salt-filled basin to freeze ice cream, you just put it in your freezer. Crank-operated ice cream makers mostly disappeared until their resurgence as a nostalgia item (which, I suspect, were welcome partly because they kept the kids busy). The concept of keeping pastry cold when working it already existed before the refrigerator, but it meant techniques that were no longer necessary. Make it at night? Make it in the basement? I really don’t know.
I suspect—but cannot know because much of it has been forgotten and what is remembered is remembered without the reason—that home refrigerator/freezers relieved at least as much toil as washing machines.
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When I was growing up, they seemed fairly common…. but the cranking was done by an electric motor.
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Almost bought an ice cream maker ball. Difference from cranking was the ball got tossed around until the ice cream was made.
Sister did end of the year science project for middle school with the same theory, only she used freezer gallon bags.
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I kept a pair of eight year old boys out of my hair for an hour or so by pouring a pint of whipping cream in a shaker jar, and having them make butter.
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Now it can be done in a few minutes with a food processor.
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Two eight year old boys and a food processor equals a trip to the ER.
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As Discworld’s Death would say, it’d be a learning experience!
😋
On a more serious note, some processors have attachments with no sharp edges specifically for mixing jobs. However, no matter how safe it might be, a food processor’s efficiency would defeat the real purpose of your exercise…
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My sister and brother-in-law used to make ice cream using liquid nitrogen.
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I remember when defrosting the refrigerator used to be a bi-weekly thing. Use up all the spoilable food, unplug the refrigerator, lay dishtowels on all the racks to collect the melting ice buildup. Not a practice I need anymore.
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Freezers not as frequently, but multiple times a year. Now my small chest freezer, not self defrosting, I should at least once a year. I don’t usually bother more than every two to 3 years.
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In my recollection, this was a high summer task. I always enjoyed when mom started it, because it meant a huge pile of snow-like ice in the yard. “Huge” was probably relative to my own size at the time. And I expect my mom didn’t enjoy it as much as I did.
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The freezer that came with the house (14 cubic foot, might have been GE, circa 2003) froze up regularly. The self-defrosting one that replaced it was unsatisfactory for various reasons (I will not buy Whirlpool again), but the third one works beautifully. (2016 Frigidaire FTW.)
The DIY defrost cycle for a freezer is painful. Helps to have a couple of really big coolers.
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I prefer manual defrost for chest freezers at least:
For long term storage, not having the automatic defrost thaw cycle prevents freezer burn. And if I’m not getting in there as often, frost buildup from warm air is much slower.
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My mom used to go to the store every day. I still remember. Massive time sink. Meat, fish, milk, all had to be bought every day. Oh, and was three different stores.
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At grandma’s house in the 1920s fresh beef was only available in the immediate aftermath of one of the local farmers slaughtering a cow and selling the cuts door to door until he was sold out.
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Also 1920s, my great uncles and uncles were still able to catch fish in the local creeks with their bare hands, similar to the method bears still use in streams.
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Old recipe book sounded like a double boiler with ice instead of hot water for keeping pastry cold enough.
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Yeah this.
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Our Hostess Said:
I have ONE piece of purely anecdotal data. My paternal grandmother was 33 in 1934. She had a 7-year-old boy a 5 year old girl a 3 year old boy and was 7-8 months pregnant with a second daughter when her husband passed in 1934. In Hartford CT they had an Irish housmaid before he passed (sort of middle to upper middle class). The housemaid continued on but they moved to New London CT to reduce costs and got a new Housmaid/nanny while my grandmother got a Job with HELCO (Hartford Electric Company, one of two CT electric Companies), the nanny was a lovely African American lady (rare in CT in the 30’s) who I met when she came to my Grandmothers 65 Birthday party. Pretty much, they had the nanny/housekeeper well into WWII when the older daughter and my dad (who was the 3 year old in 1934 but solidly a teen by WWII with his sister ) and could take care of the younger daughter. Grandma was a sales person selling electric appliances (stoves, washers, vacuums etc) and made a decent lower middle class living and could afford to have a housmaid/nanny (as if she had a choice grandparents of both sides were in upstate NY). My dad’s tales of he and his older brother were astounding, making my 1960’s free range childhood look controlling and constrained. You really needed a Nanny/Housemaid for the single parent to work, the amount of work to keep a house running was high. From my dad, it sounded like having household help was not uncommon, especially as you moved up the social ladder. I think WWII broke that, there was so much need for labor of ANY sort that you couldn’t compete with all the war effort labor. Especially in CT that made all sorts of war materiel like subs, aircraft parts, tires. shoes, and large amounts of small arms munitions.
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Paternal grandmother worked from home. She raised Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys for the local market. She had “household help” (long story on why the quotes) for her oldest two. An unmarried childless aunt who got foisted off on her. Later, the two oldest were the household help, for the next youngest two. For reasons, she didn’t need extra help for the last two.
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We had household help maybe twice a week back in the fifties. My dad was an engineer with the auto companies in Detroit, and my mother never worked. I remember Dad having weekly or maybe monthly poker games with his buddies, but not much else from the fifties. I was pretty young then. Yeah, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
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Dad was a lead draftsman for a construction steel company in Detroit from 1954-1960. I’m pretty sure Mom was a secretary during WW II, but like most of the ladies in our neighborhood (St. Claire Shores), was busy raising kids. I was 8 when we moved away (during a fairly steep recession), and finances were such that Mom started working again. She worked part-time until Dad died in 1970, at which point she found full-time work. She kept that up long enough to get Social Security, though Stepdad’s disability retirement helped a lot.
1950s St. Claire Shores was pretty kid friendly. Summers, somebody would have a Slip-n-Slide or (on very rare occasions) a pool, the 25 cent matinees were in easy cycling distance, and The Mom Patrol kept things from getting too much out of hand.
Dad was an assistant Scoutmaster in Michigan, and camp outings included an Operation Deep Freeze one long winter weekend. Lots of scouts there, nowhere near as active in the well-off Burb we moved to in ’60. (Lots of dads were VPs and such; kids didn’t much care for chubby, Odd me. Took a year or three to find compatible friends.)
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Something that’s been knocking about in the backbrain is “For any problem there exists (orwill exist) a solution that is simple, political, and wrong.” Think, for example, the histories of Communism, the War on Poverty, and Climate change for practical examples.
A lot of young people were educated to believe most problems in life had simple solutions. That’s not how real life works. Real problems generally require attention to detail (inputs and outcomes among others) and proper maintenance to ensure the solution keeps working. Balancing a budget. Keeping a house clean and orderly. And so on.
The thing is, as good as ChewToob is for dissemination of knowledge, there also exists whole mountain ranges of garbage that one must sift through if one does not first know what one is looking for at times. Propagating quality skills and knowledge takes time. Posting a fifteen second video complaining or poorly explaining takes comparatively nil.
For ways to stay above the garbage layer I’m not the one to ask. Such attention driven things are far beyond a grumpy hermit introvert. I prefer books to people most days.
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Clearly we need freelance internet librarians who can direct us to the useful bits on Da Tubes. I’d actually pay for that service.
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Under a set of (probably highly unlikely conditions), such would be a good use for AI. Of course, a) training it (good vs twaddle) would need a lot of trainer time, b) the biases of said trainer would have to be clear*, and there must be myriad things I haven’t thought of.
(*) Back in the ’70s, an offbeat country station had an equally offbeat news guy. One nugget of wisdom, paraphrased. “Your news sources are going to be biased. That’s human. If they tell you what their biases are, you can filter accordingly. The worst source is one that claims to be objective.” — Travus T. Hipp
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Indeed. I used to train AIs, so I know in detail what it takes to try to extract useful information from them, countering even unintentional bias. The LLMs we have now have just been trained on the free-range internet, and so are utterly bogus for many, many uses. They have other issues as well. A friend and fellow data scientist, Hollymathnerd, calls LLMs golden retrievers, fast, compulsively eager to please, and stupid as hell. The news guy you quote is exactly right. It’s possible to train an open LLM (as in the data model algorithm is open source, and all the data sources are listed), but we ain’t seen that yet. I think real people internet librarians would be feasible. We just need to reimburse them for their work, and the best way to understand their biases is to see results and heed reviews of their efforts.
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Heck, Robert Heinlein foresaw that need in his 1942 serial _Beyond This Horizon_, in which he described the function of “encyclopedic synthesist.”
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Any social problem the government tries to solve, it will make worse. The more of our tax money they squander on it, the worse they’ll make it.
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The more of our tax money they squander on it- the better for them. They take a piece of every dollar, spread out among them. Since their whole job is to make laws, they are going to make more laws. If their job is to solve problems, they will find (or create, as we have seen) problems to solve.
As the old demotivator said, if you can’t be part of the solution (and there’s no steady money in doing that) there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
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“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.” 🤓
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twitter.com i status 2051647381981290697
Note: Replace blanks with “/” to get to AI video link.
Too funny to not post. AI video of a recommended ad for Pratt for L.A. major campaign. I can see reasons why Pratt would keep hands off and just let it go viral.
Source. PJ Media
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HH4Q-L6XYAQWPpg?format=jpg
(Rubio Mother’s Day Meme)
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The Reader loves it.
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Twitchy Monday Memes
https://twitchy.com/fuzzychimp/2026/05/11/monday-morning-meme-madness-n2427872
There are some good ones.
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Not going to try to post videos, those have been problematic lately.
I’d hint at this meme, but I’ll let the younger of this crowd go “huh?”. If you get it, you get it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HHf1hNxXEAE-NOj?format=jpg
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It’s fitting.
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There’s a bonus at the bottom of the page but it’s not a meme. Eileen Wang, mayor of Arcadia CA has pled guilty to being a communist Chinese spy.
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Bwahahahaha!!! And this can be done by just one guy with a few hours to burn, an LLM subscription, and mad prompting skills. What a time to be alive…
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I saw a few Pratt ads (I think they were done by him); he can be brutally funny. The Joker/French Fop/Camel was great.
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The fork goes on the lefthand side of the placemat, with the knife on the righthand side. Spoons – larger to smaller – go on the right side of the knife. Smaller forks are placed in descending order to the left of the main fork. Cups and/or cups and saucers go in the upper right corner. Swallow before you talk, and if you must talk while your mouth is full, cover your mouth with your hand. If you need to spit something out, grab a napkin or a tissue, put it to your mouth, and try to do it quietly. Then either put it on your plate or excuse yourself to go throw it away.
If you want something in the middle of the table, don’t reach across the person next to you (either side) but ask them to pass it to you. If the party passes a dish around the table, even if you do not want what’s on it, take it and pass it to the next person. Table etiquette 101 in a nutshell!
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We tried to pass this on to our son. He also, along with his classmates, took a class in the 6th grade that ended in a “dinner” party with a guest (grandpa went).
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So, lost knowledge of the ancients about how to test the temperature of boiling sugar. I still don’t know how it’s done, and I’m not about to experiment. Several months ago I read an old (1938) cookbook that itself updated something from Thomas Jefferson’s family. For a Peach syrup or jam recipe it included the instructions:
I sort of made fun of it at the time—it seemed likely to be either a typo or a phrasing that meant something different in 1935 than now. Then, this weekend, I read Jacques Pépin’s autobiography, and he talks about how he’d learned a technique for using his index finger to test whether caramel is done, how his younger brother saw it and tried it himself and you could hear the howl throughout the house.
I’m assuming it relies on the Leidenfrost effect because he says you first dip your finger in cold water, but other than that he doesn’t describe how it’s done. Which is probably a good thing.
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I feel too lazy to check, but I’d bet the The Joy of Cooking would have a writeup on the sugar.
Re the finger test: Cold water or no, that offends my sense of survival.
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We use a candy thermometer.
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I have never heard of the finger test for candy temperature. But I do make candy. The glass plate stored in the freezer method works. Drop cooked candy on the cold plate and check for hardness. In the winter you use fresh snow and drizzle your candy on it to judge soft ball, hard ball, or crackle.
In a pinch you can use ice water if needed
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I have no useful life skills to pass on; anyone can teach a young’n to stare at a glowing screen, press some Magic Buttons, and sigh in exasperation.
I can cook, without poisoning anyone, and I sort of passed that on; my wife taught me what ‘smooth and elastic’ bread dough is, and I can pass that.
I’m good at Making Lists and Failing To Do The Things. Most folks have the second part handled.
Having children taught me why kids have TWO parents …
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MS-DOS or whatever cohorts do have some things to teach younger cohorts about computers.
The widespread consensus model of the methods and results of teaching this stuff was rather comprehensively broken.
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You know what you have to teach to kids? How to save to local devices and use file-sorting methods. Most of them have never saved anywhere other than “the cloud.”
If you can’t access it from your own devices, it’s worthless. The cloud should be for backup, not primary.
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Agreed – not a cloud user, myself, but some might like it for off-site storage/backup.
More critical: save every once in a while – don’t count on the program to do it for you, make it a regular and explicit command.
Story: Taught WordPerfect to a lab full of college freshpersons. All storage on the lab computers was to floppy disks (DEC Rainbow – school was a DEC shop) and there was dedicated computer attached to a printer – no network for these.
The way to print was to save your doc, eject the floppy, walk across the carpeted floor to the printer-computer, insert there, and print.
Some of you caught ‘carpeted floor’, right?
Static discharge would occasionally trash a floppy. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth! It was as good as a low-level format, unrecoverable.
Fortunately, the mostly-successful prep for that problem was not too bad: Rainbows had 2 floppy drives, so save the doc twice, to a floppy in each drive.
That story would be as arcane as cursive writing to today’s kids.
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Microsoft365 does unexpected things. When you think you have autosave-to-the-cloud set “on” in your current document/spreadsheet/whatever, if anything interrupts your cloud connection, the little autosave switch icon will turn itself off without announcing anything. You can still save manually locally, but the app does not default over to “autosave manually”, but rather to “what autosave?”
Short version: Never Trust A Clanker.
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I turn auto-save functions off by default. When I’m working on stuff, I’ll often make drastic revisions to a document, look it over, and then decide I don’t like the changes. Other times I’ve taken a document, and made some changes to make it more specialized for a particular function. And I still want the original, more general, document when I’m done with what I’m currently working on.
I’ve been burned by autosave multiple times while doing that.
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I do that. Open a general document, immediately save it under a new name, then work on the changes.
Tax spreadsheets, for one example.
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I treat an internet cloud like a pyrocumulus. Some days, pyrocumulonimbus.
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My take on this is based on an old public-service announcement that used to run locally (and in many other places too, evidently):
“It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
Now that was then and this is now; and all too often now the answer would be “Of course I do, their phone is GPS-bugged and they’d better not turn it off or leave it at home” — but the principle remains valid.
“It’s X o’clock. Do you know where your data is?”
Where “in the cloud” is semantically equivalent to “I think it’s out there somewhere” and to “No.”
Given the almost-insane smallness and cheapness of SD cards and (especially) hard drives (my Mac HD 20 was 20 megabytes when it came out) it’s really hard to concoct an excuse not to do local backups. Unless of course your file is “the first trillion digits of pi” (but of course then you can always run Y-Cruncher again anyway, pi isn’t going anywhere soon).
Wait, you can fit a trillion digits of pi on your 5 TB drive, $150 new at Wal-Mart. Easily. With most of it left still empty…
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Since the PSA has been getting a workout for the “things were better because parents didn’t know where their kids were” points-
Folks, the point was that responsible parents would know where their kids were. It’s ten, they’re at home and either in bed or getting there.
And parents of juvenile delinquents would get fake, lame peer pressure to control their feral spawn who were out doing crimes, without the police-cost of a legally enforced curfew. (Which some places had anyways.)
It was a literally textbook example of social control PSA, trying to deal with rising crime rates.
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Am not sure whether I am on the wrong track or not.
I have considered doing an ‘America for graduate students’ series of lectures on Rumble or something.
And, I’ve underthought the preps enough that I was today years old when I recalled that graduate courses in the humanities tend to have a weekly reading lsit.
Which basically means that my plan for structuring the thing is wrong, and that the other thing that I had not planned would also short a bunch of the work of a real course.
Anyway, my navigation of life is pretty ignorant and disorganized. I’ve also realized today that I was putting in writing, thinking, and note time on a distraction project, and no wonder my thinking on the main job is not happening.
I’m also finding some of the plotting/pantsing creative writing discussion on MGC a little thought provoking.
Mostly in terms of extending CW metaphor to a non-fiction case, and asking myself what outlining would be like, and how I would know if I have broken my characters, or whatever.
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If the picture has a wire to hang it from, use two picture hanger nails, (or small Command Hooks or drywall screws) about 1/4 of the picture width apart instead of just one. The extra friction will make the picture stay put when you level it.
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I remember when my mother got an electric washer and dryer set. I was 9 years old at the time. Before then she had a wringer washing machine and a massive clothes line to manage the laundry of a family of 8. Including diapers.
It was a very exiting time for her.
When I was in high school the subject came up and she said that the washer and dryer increased her daily chore load considerably.
Before she did laundry once a week. Took half a day but then she didn’t need to do it again for a week. People wore their “play clothes” or “work clothes” until they were actually dirty. One only had a couple sets of good clothes and you kept them nice and changed out when going from “needs nice clothes for this” to play or work. Each person had a towel they used for the week until laundry day.
Once “convenience ” arrived she did laundry every single day. Clothes got cheap so everyone had more. Everyone expected a clean towel every day, etc.
So on the whole, she felt it didn’t help her out much. Although she was a huge fan of permanent press. She was much more impressed with her chest freezer. Canning is a huge amount of work that has to be done on a very tight schedule. Preparing food for freezing is much less work.
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Girl with the Dogs a channel about a pet groomer in Niagara Canada did a video about a cat with fleas recently, tho I haven’t watched it yet to see if it addresses flea combing.
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Combing for fleas doesn’t get every single flea. Revolution topical for the win (I’d take a mixture that is free that actually works).
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When you only see your parents for a couple of hours after they are tired from working all day they can’t impart much wisdom to you. Whatever the philosophies and prejudices of your state paid teachers will probably win out unless you have exceptional parents. The very first things lost seem to be the most mundane if useful. Like cooking. I learned to cook because I always sat in the kitchen, I watched and listened because the women talked about important stuff. I learned things about the other men they never knew about each other because they all sat silently in the living room watching baseball, football, or if nothing else, even golf in desperation not to talk to each other.
Out of pity for kids, girls too, who were never taught to cook I wrote “Help! Nobody Taught Me to Cook” It’s only 50 pages long and goes for the princely sum of ninety-nine cents. It has obviously made me a fortune. I should probably do, “Help! How do I do the Laundry?” and “Help! How Can I Buy Stuff Without Being Ripped Off?”
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While not exactly “lost” something I do and try to give the basics of to my students is mental arithmetic. It turned out what I had been doing for as long as I can remember (“invented” it all by mylonesome) is how a human brain works, and it’s even got a term to describe it: successive approximation. Basically, whatever the operation, start at the big end of the calculation, and move on down, making corrections as you go. I tell students it’s the “Does this make sense?” backstop for any calculation they run through a calculator. A few seem to have appraciated it.
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Oh yeah. To this day I still often picture multiplication table when doing arithmetic without pen and paper.
Learning to count change also helped with that when I worked at a gas station in High School
And “does that make sense?” I have had many a conversation with younger co-workers about not trusting the results of a spread sheet formula without a sanity check (how does 101.0, 256.0 and 307.0 add up to 664.5?)
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Yep, with slide rules you had to know where the decimal place was supposed to be. With calculators a typo can really throw you off.
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Some of us still know how to use slide rules, it’s getting the hardware that’s the problem. (I do still have both ones I’ve ever owned; but it’s tough for others.) Set the scales right, and you can even read some problems for many-multiple input values at once (like angles of refraction vs. index of refraction in the second medium).
Actually I graduated to slide rules from a table of logarithms; I must’ve been about 12 or 14. Sort of my own version of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” — until calculators became A Thing rather suddenly. My SR-50 was a big Christmas gift, in high school… yes, I was indeed an Odd.
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I’ve got a lot of knowledge that would take a refresher to actually use again, and may be of limited use to most people. Also a lot of it is already out there in some form or another
How to navigate without a GPS (map and compass). Or even how to read a map. And use a compass (I see the Navy has caught on to reality and is again teaching non-GPS navigation to their midshipmen)
Navigate using written directions not a phone speaking them with a moving dot on the screen.
(And yes Sarah, I understand all of these navigation related items are black magic to you ;-) )
How to start a fire with flint and steel (forget two sticks, too much work and time for me), which includes how to lay a fire properly to get it going and then sustain it (and how to do it blindfolded, with a SERE instructor standing over your shoulder flicking water at your tinder)
Cook over a fire, with or without utensils
Use a jack and change a tire
Some things (adjust a carburetor, changing spark plugs etc.) are truly obsolete unless you have the money to indulge in 20th century cars.
I used to teach a lot of this stuff to younger boys in Scouts, but having a daughter moved me away from that organization at about the time it started moving away from me.
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A few years back, a scout who went on the Wilderness Survival overnight said that another scout had started a fire—with two rocks. In granite territory—no flint. TWO ROCKS. The camp staff was so impressed that they made him a special award.
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It is of great concern that so many young folks today have no idea how to start a fire, even with matches and paper let alone under field conditions.
There is tiny ferro rod and tinder chunk in the corkscrew of my Swiss knife as I type this. (product is sold a “Fire Ant” )
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Used to do all that in Girl Scouts too. That has been not required in *GSA for a long time. Not that some troops don’t teach it, but not required. Even before girls were allowed as part of BSA, the girl scout troops who did cover the principles, were often closely associated with a BSA troop or pack.
(*) I learned it in GSA in ’60s. I didn’t have girls, but sisters did. One of which was involved in GSA in ’90s. Another acquaintance, ’00s, worked with GSA troop, who learned the basics, backpacked too.
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Daughter’s GSA troop didn’t do any activities like that. Mostly the indoor arts and crafts related stuff (and sell cookies) We did send her to a summer camp a few years where she learned canoeing etc. This was in the early 00s
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I did map and compass navigation before I was 10. I have taught it as an adult, including in the Army.
One of my tricks weas to draw map contour lines on a hand to make them more understandable for more challenging students.
“Sir, give me your right hand.” (draws hilltop (knuckle), saddle (two knuckles), draw (between two fingers), ridge finger) and depression (cupped palm) on suitable parts. (almost always lightbulb ignites over head)
Of course it was a permanent marker.
Of course the right had is used to salute.
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Growing up in Michigan I was taught state geography using my left hand for the UP and my right hand for the Lower Peninsula.
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Google “HOW TO REPLACE SPARK PLUGS ON HYUNDAI ELANTRA 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016“
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Sometimes the old knowledge just doesn’t work anymore: https://x.com/Hombrelmparable/status/2052478577866584386
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I might have laughed a bit on the end of this one. (See Monday Meme’s link above.)
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Yes, I laughed. “In Memoriam.”
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This entry brought back memories of my childhood back in the 60s-early 70s, and I think in the US the disconnect from past wisdom really took hold post-WW II when the cult of the Expert came into full flower (the past is just superstition and Science! has all the answers). After all, it was the Experts that supposedly fixed the depression & won the war. And they got us to the Moon!! So people like my parents would never have dreamt of questioning what they were told by the Experts.
Anyone here old enough to remember Dr Benjamin Spock? His book about child care (1946!) was such a big thing that the TV comedians were making jokes about it and him in the 60s. New post-war parents didn’t ask for advice from their parents about raising their kids, they read Experts like Dr Spock. And I think that things were changing so fast the older generations felt intimidated by the rate of material and social change. And then too, they had their own problems. After a generation of Social Security, the Lost generation found out that it wasn’t enough to survive on (anyone remember the old stories about seniors having to buy pet food to eat themselves?) So the Experts could buy off the older generations by tweaking (‘saving’) SS in exchange for them butting out.
badgerwx (long time lurker)
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High school Graduation Checklist – live skills edition:
Basic mending, at the replace button, mend simple seam level of skill (and thread needle and tie knot, of course.)
Map navigation, and following directions.
Mental math basics (even I can keep a running grocery total in my head.)
The anatomy of appliances and how to care for them without going on-line (and how to make checklists of same to keep near the appliances.)
Change a tire.
Eat like a civilized human (use fork and knife, which fork and knife if there are two of each, chew with mouth closed, proper napkin deployment.)
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I have trouble with the grocery total. Squirrel! OTOH, the grocery list is largely a standard, so it’s easy to be in horseshoe range of correct..
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In 1933 my mother had a crash course in 1933 era household electrical appliances. She had moved into town for the school year since she had no access to a decent high school at her very remote country home. She got rotating assignments with town families for room & board with the proviso she help the lady of the house with the usual chores. Her first Saturday morning the lady of the house waved her hand at a kitchen stacked with dirty dishes, pots and pans, and simply said “Wash them all!” The lady had erroneously assumed mom knew what an electric toaster was and what precautions to take. Mom washed the toaster in the kitchen sink. Fortunately it was not plugged into a hot outlet, which accounts for my coming to be born.
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Even my dad knew how to change a tire, but not how to check his car and trailer license plates and registration before going on a road trip.
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Hilarious essay Sarah!
I have very few useful skills except for things I’ve made up myself, and their utility is clearly suspect. As I’ve said before, “To say I was raised by wolves is an insult to the parenting skills of wolves.” I think I was near thirty when I saw the original Lethal Weapon. There was a scene where Danny Glover’s character is teaching his teenage son how to shave. I was gobsmacked. You mean there’s techniques to this? I just got handed a can of shaving cream and a razor with instructions to try not to kill myself. Brushing your teeth? My parents handed me a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. Or there was my depression-era raised grandmother who instructed us to use one square of toilet paper, or, at worst, two. At least she didn’t insist on us using corn husks. :)
My family was not musically or artistically inclined, so I learned nothing about music or art. In school, music class consisted of, “Sing!” and art class consisted of, “Draw!” Fortunately my parents were readers, so I had that going for me.
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(While reading, mutters darkly in “summer camp” and “Infantry”.)
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My lost knowledge of the ancients … being able to sew from a pattern, and even wing it when creating patterns for doll clothes. You have no idea how astounded people are, when they ask about my 19th century costumes (which I wear to author events) and I tell them that I made them – the hats and the handbags, too.
Being able to sew, even from just a simple pattern, used to be an expected housewifely skill – to make your own clothing, and that for your children. But then imported crap became cheap, and fabric and notions became expensive. People still do home sewing, but more for special things. It’s become a hobby, rather than an essential skill. And hobbies always cost more…
My daughter was astounded, during her time in the Marines – at how many of her fellows were unable to figure out how to sew on a button, or hem the bottom of a pair of trousers.
Let’s see … I can also make soap from oils and lye solution. And cook from scratch, including making pickles and preserves. Make beer and wine from scratch, also.
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Cooking from scratch takes time but yields tastier. Pies, biscuits, stews, casseroles, pasta bakes…
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Cooking a T-bone from scratch takes less time than getting it served to you at most any restaurant.
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You can also cook it to the proper consistency. Fewer and fewer cooks these days seem to actually know what medium rare actually means anymore.
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With JoAnn going under, $SPOUSE isn’t doing much sewing. (OTOH, when the rumors started, she loaded up on flannel for nightgowns.) Rumor has it that WalMart has some fabric, but neither of us is eager to check them out. Modulo quilting squares, Hobby Lobby was a bust.
I miss New York Fabrics, Hancock, and JoAnn. Most of my sewing was basic, though I did (and mildly screwed up) a wizard’s gown adapted from a nightshirt. Got the stripes mislocated, but Good Enough for the party.
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I was the family button-sewer – mine stay on.
Anyone remember Frostline kits? We made down jackets, mountain coats, sleeping bags, a tent, etc. I found knit ribbing to be tricky, but straight seams were easy. Hard stuff my wife taught me. She had made a bunch of things for herself in high school; made some for kids, RenFaire costumes, did repairs. Also knit me 2 sweaters and a pair of socks; knit baby blankets, hats, gloves.
My son knits scarves.
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Back when I backpacked (Carter/Reagan), one of my trail buddies had a Frostline tent. Don’t know if he did it or had someone sew it for him. Could have been either.
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I still have the Frostline down jacket I made for myself about 50 years ago. I have -ahem – outgrown it, laterally. I used to have bright yellow Frostline rain poncho which can be easily converted to cover both myself and a huge backpack, or it can be pitched as an emergency shelter. It’s still around here — somewhere.
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My parents believed that ‘specialization is for insects’, so therefore I can mend and sew clothes (from a pattern, but also I was starting to branch out into draping before I got too busy/it grew too expensive to continue), preserve food (dehydrating, canning, freeze drying, freezing, root cellaring, etc.), garden, clean a house (surprisingly one of the Dark Arts, apparently), budget for a household, and cook from scratch. I also do calligraphy, write, play/teach piano, and do martial arts (Traditional Karate-do). I can start a fire from match or stone and flint, and read a map.
My brothers and sisters also have their own skillsets, including but not limited to woodworking, welding, machining, forging, civil/mechanical/electrical engineering, and sharpshooting, as well as the aforementioned gardening, preserving, and scratch cooking.
My friends joke that our family has a Very Particular Skillset, very well-suited to restarting civilization after a Zombie Apocalypse.
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IIRC Adam and Eve were the first documented sewers of fine clothing…
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When I moved out of my parents’ house in 1970 I had Mom give me a crash course in darning socks, sewing on buttons and hemming pants.
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It can make for good advice, though!
My kids listen to me about fire, ever since I explained to them that yes, you can set your hand on fire with rubbing alcohol, but it doesn’t start to hurt for at least a few seconds so you need the water right there, or the burns can be really bad.
They may have also missed the distinction between a dry ice burn to remove a wart, and a burn-burn on my hand…..
(We also make time and place to play with fire. Because pretty and fun and dangerous if you don’t set it up right.)
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That was one of the advantages of having wood-burning fire-places, growing up.
“Yes, you can play with matches, but it has to stay in the fire place.”
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I don’t know if the drafting tutorials I’m putting on YouTube count towards any of this knowledge preservation, but I’m trying to make them as comprehensive as I can…
At some point something is going to come up as “this would have been helpful to mention three lessons ago, but I forgot until I ran into it just now”
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Aye, manual drafting isn’t quite a lost art, but there are times when it’s faster and easier to do it by hand rather than fire up the CAD program.
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It is ever.
I started with Revit, rather than use CAD, and as nice as Revit is, I couldn’t make it do complex curves.
So when I wanted a three-lobed triangular dome, hand-drafting it was.
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There’s a related category, interesting information that is very narrow in application, but was ‘accidentally’ not passed on.
If someone were actually wanting to manufacture biological weapons, I absolutely do not have anywhere near the know how.
but, it was ‘misinformation’, no longer convenient to be aware of, a bunch of the old consensus and rules of thumb. That would have suggested a few potential problems with the new ‘consensus’ on covid.
Which is to say, when it comes to the latest information on disease hazards, we might as legitimately propose that the Tobacco Mosiac virus is capable of wiping out all of humanity.
The least annoying explanation for more viral clickbait, is that everyone in media got a massive hit off of the excitement and clicks last time and they are going to be jonesing for some years to come.
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Quoting my HS Biology teacher: “TMV or not TMV. That is the infection.”
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@ Sarah > “But we seem to have managed well enough with industrial/technological upheaval AND two world wars.”
No, no – it was eleven wars.
I have it on the best authority. ;)
You can lose a lot of things after 11 wars.
********
Seriously, I have several old books, and a couple of new ones, which contain a lot of the “lost” information. The Foxfire series, started back in the Sixties and still going forward, made a conscious effort to archive a lot of “how to” from our great-grandparents’ days.
foxfire dot org
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Sarah, there are magnifying glass frames and circles that can be used to magnify sewing and other crafts. Might be a good buy.
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I use magnifying glasses with lights in the frames. Mighty Sight. Get them on Amazon.
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I got one and it was horrible, so I’ve been leery, but…..
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My mother still has one, and it was effective enough that she still uses it. This being one bought at a yard sale somewhere, so provenance unknown, but there do exist examples that aren’t utter crap.
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There are also magnifier visors and headbands.
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I have reading glasses in multiple magnification factors — x2 or x3 for general use, x4 to x6 (so far) for ‘fiddly stuff’ like assembling electronics or soldering.
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A few pairs of readers like that – and headlamps!
Turn off your headlamp when checking the mount of an optic – light going in the wrong end makes weird artifacts.
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My parents were pretty hopeless financially. I learned my financial savvy on the streets, literally, listening to Clark Howard and Dave Ramsey on the car radio.
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Obvious follow-up joke: so Dan is insane? (Obvious reply: “He married me, didn’t he?”) :-P
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Upon behalf of all Dans, Dannies, and Daniels everywhere I do proclaim we are innocent of such vile slander! Sanity is our watchword. We are such pillars of utter, cold sanity that there needs to be just a little bit of chaos to spice up our lives.
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He mostly doesn’t know what I get up to when I’m cooking….
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Well, I have a PSA that (for once) is somewhat relevant.
When changing tires on a 2025 Jetta, if it looks like there are locking lugs, relax and check. What you think are locking lugs might just be plastic covers that pull off easily with the piece of wire that looks like the pin for a fire extinguisher. Also, the lug nuts (which screw into the hub) are the only thing holding the wheel on—except for a lot more friction than you might expect.
Source: The two hours it took me to change a tire on the side of the highway and a video showing someone *just pulling* the tire off after I couldn’t figure out how to open the hub.
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along the way, I have accumulated a fair amount of semi portable knowledge – a fairly complete set of Audel’s repair manuals from the 1930s, a set of the Foxfire books through 1983, a complete set of 1950s Mechanix Illustrated “How to” books, covering everything from how to build a brick grilling pit to how to make a cross bow using an old car suspension spring cut down to make the prod … and many others, some of which I have lost between a fire, three floods and five moves since 1992.
Considering how tough it would be to replace them, I’m seriously considering getting a fire rated long gun safe and installing shelving!
and yes, I have read many of them over the past 6 decades, and even worked on some of the smaller projects in them.
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Then there is knowledge which should have come from the ancients but mostly did not. In 1928 my 18 year old aunt Jeannette was standing inside at the kitchen door, opened the screen door for some fresh air, when lo and behold a bat flew in, straight into the center of her forehead, knocking her to the floor. No apparent injury outside of a bruise that appeared later. The bat did a quick U-turn and flew out of the kitchen before the door could slam shut. Her mother was a native American healer, and somehow grandma knew this event was a horrible omen and said so on the spot. 6 months later Jeannette died of something the family doctor misdiagnosed as bacterial meningitis and he then put the whole household into quarantine. Jeannette took over a week to die, very confused and agitated, and absolutely no stiff neck of any kind. Doc tried to take her temperature with an oral thermometer, which grandma warned him not to try. Jeannette bit the thermometer into pieces as soon as it touched her tongue, this was by reflex since she was barely conscious at that time. When I was in medical school decades later I figured out Jeannette had contracted rabies from a bat. It wasn’t until 1953 that the CDC declared people could contract rabies from a bat. Immunization against rabies would have been a possibility in 1928, but at that time the “experts” would have been clueless about this.
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The thing most people could use an education in? How to look at a situation, figure out what’s going to fail, and plan fixes for when the worst comes to pass.
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My dad knew next to nothing about how automobiles worked, and just about every auto problem he had was taken care of by local mechanics. In the fall of 1969 by great good luck the local high school had “adult education” programs where they allowed members of the general public to work in their facilities such as the auto or woodworking shop, along with others. This was my senior year in college and my only formal auto mechanics experience, but it was so very helpful. There was a working V8 on a stand in the shop and we could fiddle with the installed distributor, seeing and hearing about a mal-adjusted distributor made the engine act up. Simply removing and reinstalling a spark plug or a wheel lug, etc. etc. gave me the confidence to teach myself as I went along. In 1970 for $150 my brother sold me a ’64 Plymouth Valiant and a box of Craftsman tools. The Valiant died of road cancer in 1973 but I still have most of those tools, plus a whole lot more tools. My peak achievement in this regard was replacing a rusted out radiator core support in a 2001 F150 for less than $200 with just hand tools when the going mechanic rate was $1800 or more. Which reminds me I must change a burned-out right front turn signal bulb in my 2012 Elantra….
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The ancient term “diabetes mellitus” implies that some (or all) ancient medicine men had to taste the urine of diabetics to figure out that it was sweet. This led to the creation of medical and nursing students.
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It isn’t just early twentieth century techno-utopianism that’s going on here. It’s also the fact that regulation, mostly in the name of environmentalism, really has made our existing tech less useful, and we’re having to resort to old solutions that really were obsolete 60 years ago.
An example is dishwashers. In the dishwashers of old, you could leave rotting and drying food remains on a plate for a week, then pop the disgusting thing into the dishwasher and, presto! It’s shiny and clean. Now you have to prerinse all your plates; the dishwasher is just a sanitizer, if that.
Similarly, all the tips on how to get stains out of your clothes wouldn’t be necessary if they allowed decent detergents.
To give a larger example: one of the critiques of Golden Age science fiction is that it seldom dealt with fuel economy and delta V. (Actually, Heinlein often dealt with them, but bear with me). What this criticism misses is that the writers of the time believed that the space ships of the future would be nuclear powered, and that having enough fuel would not be an issue.
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