…that would have caused my old Dad’s brow to furrow with amazement:
1.) Bottled water.
“WTF?” Selling ordinary water? In bottles? And charging how much?” That’s not to say he was unfamiliar with the concept — he’d been to France, and after getting the runs from drinking Parisian tap water, he did what the Frogs did and drank Perrier.
But the idea of a society which did have clean and potable water out of the tap (e.g. the U.S. and the U.K.), but still sold bottled water would have been as alien to him as people not being able to drive a stick shift. So:
2.) All auto, all the time.
Back when I were a yoot and my old man was still alive (early 1970s), you couldn’t take your driving test in a car with automatic transmission. Which meant you had to know how to take off on an incline without rolling backwards, as well as being able to row through the gears when parallel parking (another required activity). Once again, he was perfectly comfortable driving his various Mercedes (all auto), he just wouldn’t now be able to understand why almost nobody in the current generation can’t perform so simple an activity. Of course, that’s not all the modern yoot can’t handle:
3.) No manners, no discipline and no beatings.
The lack of manners in today’s society and the indiscipline not just in kids but in everyone would have driven him crazy. Tardiness, ingratitude, disrespect not just for one’s elders but for everyone… all this makes me want to reach for the sjambok. My dad would have been worse. And all this is because children’s (okay, boys’) backsides have somehow become sacred objects that one may no longer use as a disciplinary receptacle for the above whip. As I always say, it’s not the punishment per se but the fear of punishment that keeps youthful psychopaths on the straight and narrow. And all this has disappeared from homes, the schools and the court system because OMG the chiiiiildren! And the children have responded in true Lord Of The Flies fashion, and we are shocked and saddened by all of it because we are morons and can’t understand the root causes of the above.
What a load of bollocks. All of it.
Bottled water. LOL, yeah right.
Never bought one in my life.
Though, because municipal water is what it is, we have (2) Brita filtered water pitchers in the fridge at all time.
My first car had a stick, the car I took the driving test in had a stick, and I’ve driven a stick most of my life.
The fact is, you are just a better driver all the way around if you drive a stick and the reason why is simple.
With a stick, if you aren’t in tune with your ride, it simply will not go.
Driving a stick involves ALL of your senses, cept taste, so you are inherently part of the driving process, rather than being mostly a passenger in an automatic.
I smacked our son on the ass exactly one time, when he was about 5, because he threw a cap gun at the TV.
After that, gentle reminders of what was and what could be was all that was necessary and even that became null and void by the time he was about 8 and on.
Yeah, the fear of dad is a thing if administered properly.
Here in our Tiny Town™ in NW Wyoming we drink (and make coffee, and bathe) with tap water for about 9 months out of the year. But once the heat of summer settles in our local treatment plant does a slightly variable job of handling whatever is in the run-off from the mountains. Now I’ll admit that the local rivers and streams that bring our water to us look like poorly-made chocolate milk starting in late spring, but it’s the flavor of the water that makes it a little weird to drink for several days out of the year.
Every once in a while it tastes like they failed to clean the school of dead fish out from the intake screen. We’ve actually had town meetings to talk about this, and they’ve assured us that even if it smells “a little fishy” that it’s still perfectly safe and potable, and that they drink it themselves and use taste feedback to adjust the treatment levels to get it back to normally-tasting chlorinated water.
So for those days when it smells too strongly we stock bottled spring water from the nearest Wally World in 48-packs (the cheapest per bottle) and use it for drinking, coffee, and cooking, while still using the tap water for everything else. Heck, we live in a desert and having a couple of weeks worth of water stored isn’t a bad idea anyway. Our irrigation water is “raw” water (i.e., right out of the river with zero treatment) and is definitely not potable (we’ve got emergency filters if we ever need to use it, though). We’ve thought about a well, and our local driller (“Our goal is a wet hole”) just laughed and told us the bench on which we live is bone-dry, and he could drill for 400 feet and come up dry.
Once the run-off slows down and the rivers clear up the occasional smell goes away (heck, most of the time it’s fine even in summer). But there’s good reason for keeping a couple of flats of bottled water around and rotating through them on a regular basis.
Bottled for me means Beer or Wine. But I understand that for some keeping an emergency reserve of water is prudent.
I learned to drive in the army in 65 on a Willy’s jeep that was older than me, been on stick since then exept for rental in the US.
My parents did not use spanking, they relegated that duty on my Granny, even now I have a burning sensationt on my butt ocasionaly.
I have owned three cars and trucks with automatic transmissions, a Ford Taurus POS, a 2009 toyota Tacoma and currently a Toyota Camry. I prefer a standard transmission to an automatic.
Bottled water -bought some when necessary because I prefer that to soda. Sometimes I will buy iced tea but I find that most of these beverages are no more than corn syrup with fake flavoring. Typically I bring a hydroflask or some sort filled with water from home that came from our well. It’s probably too high in iron content.
Manners are nearly non existent. I’d love to carry and use a sjambok to correct this situation. it has been getting worse and in desperate need of some “over” correction. The spank gets the perp’s attention so that they properly learn the error of their ways. The spank isn’t for punishment, it is to get the miscreant’s undivided and complete attention so that they’ll learn.
Bottled water has its place and I don’t mind it. If you live in NYFC or Toronto, the tap water is some of the best tasting water anywhere, but elsewhere, if it tastes hideous, I don’t begrudge anybody a better tasting bottle. And for emergency purposes, naturally, as well as for long car trips. We host a large party every year and quite frankly I’d rather not deal with washing drinking glasses, risking breakage, or wasting entire dinosaurs worth of plastic on red solo cups. It’s a convenience that’s nice to have in the right circumstances. But for normal day-to-day water consumption where the water supply is safe and doesn’t taste off? Open the spigot and have at it.
I’ve driven more manual trans vehicles than automatics and I can swing either way. My wife vastly prefers manuals. We both can drive without using the clutch for up- and down-shifting, and it practically guarantees no texting and driving in city traffic. BUT. With that said, I’m a pretty hardcore off-road driver in my Jeep. Having driven both manual and automatic on the trails, I’ll take autoboxes any and every day. The only advantage of the stick is for for driving down steep hills. Driving UP steep hills, on tricky tracks, and through water crossings, the automatic is a vastly better choice, allowing me to concentrate on my lines rather than managing gear selection. I still can (and do) shift the transmission manually when needed, but no chance of wrecking a clutch or stalling out on a hill climb. And for on-road driving? Sticks are fine if you don’t live where there’s always stupid-bad traffic. I’m in NJ, so….yeah.
For point three, I couldn’t agree more. I went to a “whacking school” in Canada in the 60s and 70s, prior to abolition. A 16″ canvas/rubber strap made of conveyor belt material (manufactured by Goodyear, in fact) was used across the hands and was the only permitted form of corporal punishment. It was brutal and terrifying to be on the receiving end, and its affect lasted days. Normally it was administered in private but occasionally before general assembly. It worked extremely well.
But the problem was that there were a few known sadists in our school system who would go far beyond reasonable correction and especially with single-digit aged brats, trips to the doctor occasionally ensued. My last encounter was at age 8 and in retrospect (a) I deserved it, and (b) it did its intended job quite well. I certainly didn’t want another helping. But a mate lost the use of his writing hand for six weeks for daring to get into a fight in the school yard. Hardly a fitting punishment. A couple of whacks gets the point across, a couple more for good measure, but no more than that.
Now, for criminals, that’s an entirely different matter. No mercy whatsoever. Flogging should always be an option either for the court or the offender, for minor criminal matters. Two dozen lashes and the matter is concluded to the satisfaction of society, and taxpayers are saved the costs of incarceration for a few months or a year or so. Going back to Canada for a minute, up until the mid-1960s, the lash was still in use for jail discipline, for incest, rape, and buggery. Typically in three doses of 12. The first administered within a week of intake into the penitentiary, the second halfway through (but could be cancelled for model behaviour), but the third, and always the most vicious, occurred the day of discharge. I recalled reading that one convict sentenced to hang was flogged on the gallows trapdoor before the drop. Bring that back, and better still, televise it on pay-per-view.
Sold my last car with a stick a decade ago, and just have A/T in the trucks.
If I need to reconnect with my inner Juan Fangio, I jump on the MV Agusta and go for a spin.
Addendum…..
As to H2O: Having grown up in the L.A. Metro area, I experienced the best and worst of tap water. The San Fernando Valley had what at best could be described as water that was half liquid, and half chlorine gas. In SE LACo, we were blessed with fine artesian wells. Living now in the high desert of NV, we receive from the water dept. a periodic notice of the arsenic content in our very mineralized water. So far, it has always been within acceptable limits, but the wife still buys a half-dozen flats of bottled water each week for cooking and will not drink anything from the tap – me, What the Hell! I use tap water to wash down all the damn pills I take – it’s probably a wash.