Pluggers by Rick McKee for October 27, 2011

Yup, still got a few of mine. Though I never owned one, my favorate car was the ’59 Dodge 2 door Royal. That baby looked like it was doing 90 while just standing still.

I remember going through my mom’s 1954 World Book Encyclopedia as a kid. At the age of 8 I could find Belgian Congo, Ceylon, and both Yemens on a map.

Yup – exactly – and my married son wants my old set of encyclopedias for his own apartment :-)

THE ONLY THING THOSE ENCYCLOPEDIAS ARE GOOD FOR ARE TO BE USED AS A BOOSTER WHEN THE GRAND KIDS COME TO THE DINNER TABLE.

mebbe Steve Jobs thought the internet is a fad too, his bio is in a book, not an iPad he developed!

My favorite car is the 1966 Thunderbird Coupe…

My Honey-Bear and I were watching an old 1930’s movie “The Thin Man.” The hero asked a friend if he could use the phone on his friend’s office desk, and we both blurted out, “Why don’t he just use his cell phone?” and broke out laughing…

My father was an electrical engineer; in the early 60’s he had an idea about inventing an oven that cooked food with microwaves…my mother said that was the dumbest idea she’d ever heard.

Back in the 70’s my father commented on a Dick Tracy cartoon (Detective Tracy had a wristwatch that doubled as a telephone.) Dad said that there would have to be “radio towers absolutely everywhere” for such a phone to actually work, and said the technology was unfeasible.

I wonder if my grandparents thought stringing a telephone line on poles all over America to connect every home with every other home was an impossible goal.

You may be a Plugger if you remember “party lines.”

Have a blessed day.

I STILL USE A SET AT SCHOOL! ’52 Studebaker is what I learned to drive………..

..and the neat thing was, you didn’t have to learn how to operate a book and they didn’t keep changing it all the dang time and there wasn’t always somebody telling you that you need to get a new machine for umpteen dollars to read it. Oh, and it never crashed unless the missus threw it at you.

I had a ‘55 Dodge in college. It had a big engine and could squat and go. The problem was I didn’t have the money to properly maintain it. It was all gunked up inside and only gave me 6 miles/gallon…

Back in the 80’s, about five miles from me grandmum’s (Vermont) was a fellow who restored Model T era fords. In New England in those days, every other farm had a Model T rusting out in the back barn, so there was no shortage of rusty Model T’s.

The man had a little factory set up in a barn, with old hulks lined up at one end, and the finished products all parked neat in two rows at the other end. It was weird to see a “car dealer” sellling completely restored Model T’s, with a parking lot that always had at least eight to twelve ready to sell models on display.

Those were the days…

party lines. we shared our party line (1950’s) with 3 other families. each party had their own assigned ring ; two short rings, one long ring , and different variations thereof.if you picked up your phone to dial out, you weren’t always able to do so, because one of the three other parties were speaking…..so you had the option to hang up and try later, hoping they wouldn’t be on long, or pretend to hang up and sneakily listen in ……..I suppose that , indeed, makes me old

Love old cars. I learned to drive in a ’59 DeSoto, even parallel parking. What a boat that was.

I saw a both funny and scary thing a few months ago… it was a Duracell brand USB flash drive that included the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on it… clearance priced for like $8. Considering the hundreds of dollars one of those sets had, that’s disturbing. :-s

Old Encyclopedias, How about old Almanacs. and two old magazines that are still worth reading: Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. Some of the information may be outdated, but still worth it.

It will never be gone. We can always get Congress, or even enough sofa-dwellers from these discussions to produce enough wind to generate enough for the essentials.

Those aren’t Pluggers. Those are Luddites!

So, um, if Pluggers don’t use the Internet, who’s discussing these strips on here? Hipsters?

Pluggers still tell stories because they think encyclopedias are passing fads.

My aunt used to pick up on her party line and say, “Martha! Fred! Bill! I really need to make this call, can you all hang up for about five minutes?” Yes, as kids we used to covertly eavesdrop on our neighbors’ calls…

Have a blessed day.

My youngest brother had our family’s 1963 set of World Book Encyclopedias and the yearly update books for 1964 through the mid 1970’s until a few years ago.

I have all MAD Magazine’s from the beginning,1952 through 1998 on a 7-CD set.