Note: A prologue from my upcoming autobiography, Life’s Too Short to Smoke Cheap Cigars (Or to Drink Cheap Whiskey.)
Parsimony.
Parsimony
My parents were children of the Great Depression. Dad was born in 1923, Mom in 1928, so they spent a big chunk of their youths going through that bad time.
My paternal grandfather was a Ford mechanic, and in those days, folks needed to keep those Tin Lizzies and Model As running, so while he didn’t exactly get rich, he always kept food on his family’s table and a roof over their heads. My maternal grandfather was a farmer and part-time carpenter, and as my Mom was fond of pointing out years later, as a farm family, they may not have always had much money, but they always had plenty to eat.
At this later stage in my life, I can readily understand how growing up during the Roosevelt Depression indelibly marked the children of that generation; “make it work, make do, or do without” was their motto, and many of them – my folks included – never outgrew that early inculcation.
But boy howdy, when I was a young kid, there were times when I found that ingrained parsimony frustrating.
This One Time…
When I was emancipated from high school, I bailed. Not that my childhood home wasn’t a pleasant place – it was – and not that my parents weren’t wonderful, kind people who made my childhood a joy – they were. But I was eighteen, possessor of a high school diploma, a job selling guns and fishing tackle at the Woolco in Cedar Falls and seized with the desire for independence. So, I took a cheap apartment in Cedar Falls, on the wrong side of the river, in the cheap neighborhood known as North Cedar. For the top half of an old house, I paid the princely sum of $125 a month and one-third of the utilities.
One morning, on a day off, the car radio informed me of a bad hailstorm that had moved through Allamakee County the day before. Having nothing to do, I made the drive home to see if the Old Man needed any help cleaning up.
I arrived to find the Old Man on the roof of the house, tossing down broken branches from the big hackberry tree that grew next to the house. “Roof OK?” I called up to him.
“Roof is fine,” he replied, as parsimonious with words as he was with funds. “Look at the car.”
Dad’s old blue Chevy station wagon was a mess. While the house had been sheltered by the big hackberry, the car was in the open, and had taken the brunt of the hail. The roof was pounded full of dents, the windshield was broken and caved in, and the hood had been pounded down to the point where it was actually bent over the engine.
As I stood looking at the car, the Old Man came up behind me. “The insurance guy was here yesterday. Car’s totaled.”
“So, you’ll have to junk it and get another car, then,” I said.
“Nope. Come on, you can help me.” He led me into the big shed and workshop. “Went to town yesterday and bought this.” “This” was a new windshield.
Turned out (I shouldn’t have been surprised) that the Old Man knew how to replace a car windshield. We did so, then removed the hood from the car, laid it upside down on the grass, and used a sledgehammer and a maul to pound it more or less back into shape. When reinstalled, it worked – it opened, closed, and latched, more or less as intended.
When the insurance company check for the supposedly totaled Chevy arrived, the Old Man banked it and drove the car for another three years. It looked funny but worked fine, and that was all he cared about.
Exceptions
An honest-to-gosh nickel.
In those days I was fond of saying of the Old Man that if he got hold of a nickel, it was a prisoner. Occasionally I would even remark that he could squeeze a nickel so hard that the Indian would end up riding the buffalo.
Mind you he was parsimonious but not cheap. Us kids never lacked for anything we needed, even if the Old Man himself used the same fishing pole for fifty years. When Mom was working, she always had a newer, more reliable car, but the Old Man bragged for years about the car he bought in 1968 for twenty-five dollars and drove for ten years until the rust holes in the floorboards grew so large as to be truly alarming. But while the Old Man spent as little as he could on his own vehicles, he never stinted on maintaining them; he did almost all the work himself (I remember the first thing he did with that $25 car was to rip out the engine and replace rings, bearings and oil pump) and took good and scrupulous care of them; as a result, his cars tended to last a long time.
Far from his Depression-era youth, the Old Man’s frugal ways and ironclad work ethic actually resulted in his being fairly well-off in his later years, although his ways didn’t change much as far as his own person. The last photo I have of the Old Man, a couple of months before he died, was at my grandson’s birthday; Dad was 94 and he was wearing a horrible old brown nylon quilted vest. He had bought that vest at some point in the late Fifties. It had seen better days. At one point the collar was somehow torn off; the Old Man sewed it back on with monofilament fishing line, sealed the seam with epoxy cement and continued wearing the vest. When a family member gave him a new vest as a gift, as we all tried to do, he would wear it once or twice, complain that it itched or didn’t fit right, give it away and go back to his favorite.
When he died, my siblings and I were unable to find the vest. We’re all of the opinion that he somehow managed to take it with him.
But for Mom, nothing was too much. On one trip into town, Mom picked up a perfume bottle, sniffed it, remarked that she liked it – but then looked at the eighty-dollar price tag and put it back. Later that day, after they’d been home a while, she went into the bedroom to find the perfume bottle on her nightstand. She never did figure out when the Old Man snuck back to the cosmetics counter and bought it.
So, frugal, yes; parsimonious, yes; cheap, sure, but only with himself. The Old Man understood and appreciated the value of generosity, but the circle of people who saw that side of him was very small.
It was some time before I realized how much of those attitudes he passed on.
The Old Man and the actual by-gosh vest.
And Then This Happened:
During the first months of my independent life, the Old Man’s teachings really sunk in, as I was the poorest young guy since an ancestor of mine named Cynwrig walked barefoot a hundred miles, through knee-deep snow, uphill, all the way to Stonehenge to study astronomy.
Which brings us back to the aforementioned apartment.
After I’d been in the place for a few weeks, there appeared in my life a girl, who interested me enough to invite her over for dinner, which I proposed to cook myself. With some apprehension, she accepted, and arrived at the appointed time to find the apartment full of cooking smells.
“It smells good,” she said after I’d taken her coat.
“Good, because it’s ready.” I motioned towards one of the two chairs at the tiny kitchen table. “Sit down, I’ll dish it up.”
She looked at her plate with some apprehension. “What is this?”
“Rabbit,” I said. “Just got ‘er last night. Fried potatoes, asparagus.”
“Didn’t you work yesterday? When did you have time to go hunting?”
“I didn’t. Got ‘er in the back yard with my wrist rocket and a steel ball bearing. The asparagus, now I picked that this morning in the ditch out towards the county access.”
“What about the potatoes?”
A sudden mental image flashed through my mind, of my neighbor suddenly discovering some empty spots in his vegetable garden. “Oh, uh, well, I had those around.”
In fact, at that time, due largely to my slightly-over-minimum-wage job, feeding myself frequently required various nocturnal subterfuges, but that’s probably a story for another time. Suffice it to say that the dinner was a success, enough so that we ended up having breakfast together, as well.
At the time I was driving an old pickup I had bought from a farmer south of town, having wheedled him down to a hundred and fifty bucks for the old beast. Rust was a problem on vehicles in those years, especially in Iowa, where the road departments battled snow and ice on the roads with rock salt and plenty of it.
The pickup’s tailgate was badly rusted. I toured local salvage yards – both of them – only to discover that a replacement tailgate that was not equally rusted would cost as much as the truck itself had. The pack of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells I called my friends noted that my solution was… novel. That solution led to me receiving a number of questions along these lines:
“Why do you have both Reagan/Bush and Mondale/Ferraro stickers on your truck?”
“Because my tailgate is rusted out, a roll of duck-tape costs a buck, but they’re giving away bumper stickers for nothing!”
As time went on, I remembered more and more of the Old Man’s teaching. I was in my thirties before I owned a truck that cost more than five hundred bucks. In my Army years, when Uncle Sam had me careering around the country, I always did “do it yourself” moves, as everything I owned in the world fit in the back of my pickup with my dog on the front seat beside me. Since the Army paid for DITY moves a pretty good percentage of what a commercial move would have cost, I ended up pocketing some pretty good checks in so doing.
These Days…
I’ve worked very hard throughout my life to achieve a certain level of financial comfort and now, in the run-up to my sixtieth birthday, Mrs. Animal and I are… comfortable. Once the Colorado house is sold and the Alaska house duly paid off, we’ll be even more comfortable. But that doesn’t mean we don’t watch the flow of cash.
A good part of achieving that status, of course, was due to the lessons of the Old Man. Don’t be wasteful; save up and pay cash, you don’t always need the latest and greatest, take care of your possessions and make them last. We routinely get over a quarter-million miles out of vehicles. We enjoy traveling and the occasional restaurant meal, but we plan for these things, pay in advance and are not profligate. And, yes, we treasure the ability to show generosity towards our family and people we care about.
It’s a good lesson, even if we didn’t have to live through a Great Depression to learn it.
Great lessons.
Thanks, Animal. Watching CO real estate, I should think it shouldn’t take that house too long to sell!
Boy howdy, I sure hope so. I want to have all this here over with.
Gone are the days when the insurance company will let you keep the car and pay out, at least in the UK. A lot of guys get bit when they realise they can’t get their P&J back to recover all the expensive tuner parts they put in. You really have to read the fine print before signing a policy.
I can’t imagine how miserable it’s going to be living in a world where a man can’t even repair or even really own his own car any more. I take pride in doing most, if not all, of my own work.
We’re pretty much there. I have to bring my truck in just to change fucking headlights. One side is easy enough. The other requires moving parts of the engine out of the fucking way, which requires specialized machinery and tools.
Sad times. I’d drive fixable cars to the end of never if I could get away with it, but of course we’re slaves to manipulated incentives, and I doubt that will ever be a hill worth dying on.
I’m not wholly convinced that car fuckery is the point, but it is the result.
I feel like companies have found it better to allow engineers to design cars to be cheaper to design and build than ease of fixing them. They’ve figured out if they don’t have to make that “Doohicky” smaller in order to be able to reach what’s underneath it, or to move it to somewhere accessible, it’s much cheaper to design and build.
That said, except for the radiator that failed at 100k miles (almost exactly), and general maintenance (bulbs, tires, brakes, etc), nothing has failed on the truck (now at 160k – which would be closer to 180k except I only drove 5k miles last year, instead of 25k). It still drives like a dream for a huge 4×4, so it’s really hard to complain.
Yep, when I was a kid, getting more than 100K out of a car was an exception, without having to do major things to keep it going.d
Now days , my Cobalt has 100K and still drives basically like new. A new clutch is in my future, (because zoom-zoom) but the only age marks are peeling clearcoat.
What the hell truck do you have?
I just had a light changed on my Frontier at the oil change place, cost me 23 bucks. But I worked on my own cars for so long that I got no problem letting someone else do that shit. I always hated working on my daily driver.
Not exactly the same leftovers form communism in people who lived through it… as a small but telling thing I remember in the 90s people always asked the store people if the bread was fresh because in communism bread was never fresh but always a day or two old
Let me guess, it was baked in central bakeries and never delivered on-time.
Well so it is today for the cheap stuff but it is fresh. Probably inefficient delivery but I heard opinions it was on purpose for some commie reason or other
Some of the bread at my grocery stores is baked on site (from dough prepared centrally) I even have the option of buying from places that make their own dough and bake fresh.
I don’t think any of them put out communist-aged bread though.
well those places want to sell bread. when there is not enough of it you don’t want to encourage buying. Also it is good to get the plebs used to bad quality. Not to mention to many carbs make one fat and commie Romania had a low obesity rate unlike the US
well those places want to sell bread
Use this ONE WEIRD TRICK to make everything better! Commies HATE it!
Sawdust is low in carbs and high in fiber!
Oh, so you got the Parm bread too?
I had parsimony pie once, I think.
My grandma would make a thing she called “Poor Man’s Rich Pie” which was a little custard baked in a pie crust. She would make it as a treat for herself, using remnants of ingredients she had when she made lemon meringue pie, which was the best I have ever tasted.
I didn’t know she ever did this until one day in high school or college I visited her, hoping to learn some of her recipes, and she made the lemon pie, and let me in on the secret.
When our kids were all still at home, Mrs. Animal used to take two-three days worth of leftovers, bang them into a pie crust with some seasonings, and bake the whole thing. Her skills at combining ingredients used to result in some pretty tasty stuff. Mrs. A called it ‘leftover pie,’ but the kids called it a “Whatchagot pie.”
Goulash, casserole, shepherds pie, meat pie, a la king – you make it work to not waste any food. My kids have finally gotten the point that will not make anything new if there are leftovers in the fridge to be had.
My grandparents all were born in the early 1900s, and so lived through the Depression aged in their 20s and 30s. My maternal grandmother’s family was one of the founding families of our little town, and were quite well off, but lost nearly everything in the stock market crash and Depression. My grandmother made sure that we all learned proper etiquette, and always carried herself with great dignity. Both of my grandfathers were auto mechanics — my maternal grandpa working for others, and my paternal grandfather owning his own shop. Both of them made it through the Depression by having the skills to fix things others couldn’t — cars, mining machinery, farm implements, etc. My paternal grandmother was a teacher, also a skill in great demand at the time. They passed down values that were parsimonious, but not cheap–one thing I learned was to pay for quality rather than buy the cheapest, because cheap often breaks and costs more in the end.
I believe a synonym for this is “false economy”.
The blindness to this is something that keeps frustrating me when members of my family rave at how they “found something for cheap”. and wonder “why would you spend so much on ___ it only costs $_ at [low-quality source].” And a decade later I still have my ‘expensive’ stuff and they’ve spent more than I did replacing theirs over and over again.
This is a lesson it took me far too long to learn.
As they say in the gun community, particularly concerning optics:
But once, cry once.
I thought it was
But once, cut once.
Phrasing?!
Yeah.
Goddammit.
Buy once, cry once.
I have the opposite issue – I tend to buy higher quality than I really need.
e.g., I should have saved some money and gotten the DeWalt drill combo instead of the Makita.
I do that as well. I tend to look for “Pro” quality when I’m buying something. I rarely need it, but like knowing that whatever it is I’m buying will do the job and last. My audio desk is testament to that.
The downside is things like having an ancient Makita 9.6v drill that still more or less works, but weighs 5 X as much as the modern 18v version, and you feel bad about buying something new when the old one still more or less works…
(anyone want an old cordless drill?)
Have I mentioned the Hitachi compound miter saw I’ve used, like, 3 times?
What? I can’t hear you over the sound of my zillion pound chainsaw fit for service at the lumber mill.
My Stihl 038 with the 36″ bar perks up.
My Alaska mill is still only half done.
Glad it’s not just me.
I probably don’t need my Honda snowblower with the tank treads. But It’s awfully nice that I’ve never had a problem clearing the dirveway either.
My younger brother (who is a sales trade on Wall Street – i.e., makes gobs of money) inherited our parent’s reflexive parsimony.
He was just given a snowblower by his friend who upgraded and my brother describes it as life-changing.
“Why did I not buy one of these decades ago?”
To his credit, he _knows_ he’s reflexively tight-fisted.
There is also a bit of method to his madness, as he also knows that 1) his job could go away tomorrow – one bad quarter might be enough and 2) he’s unlikely to ever get a similar job, as the job market is shrinking every year.
So he saves his money knowing that his next career will pay a fraction of what he makes now.
Took me far too long to learn, too. The real revelation came in discovering pricey men’s wingtips shoes stay in excellent condition for a really long time.
We always go for quality around the house before cheap. If we need to wait a few more weeks to save up, we will do that, otherwise we will borrow what we need until we can get our own.
I would like to, but there is just too big of a gap between cheap crap and nice when it comes to furniture (at least here locally.)
Ikea has this. Glass doors, 6′ high… and a $200 shipping charge. I can’t find anything equivalent to this on amazon or any of the big box stores without stepping up to $500+ units.
And besides, all my monies go to ammo these days.
Nice linkin, Lou.
Mebbe this?
I rented a house that had them bolted to one of the walls. They work well.
Finding out how insanely expensive good furniture is was an eye-opener.
I used to browse through the Pompanoosuc Mills showroom with a wistful expression on my face, when I first got my own place.
To someone facilitating his wife’s addiction to Stickley, those prices don’t look bad at all.
You will note that Stickley doesn’t even post prices for their stuff, which is always a very bad sign.
Ah, yes, you’ve linked to them before – very much my taste but, as you say, the lack of prices is a tell.
That’s some nice stuff there. Really like the look of the “Mendon” collection.
You can get good deals on their showroom pieces:
https://www.pompy.com/instock
my buddy got an excellent desk that way.
Next time I am in the Boston or Burlington areas, I’ll try to hit one of their showrooms.
Before our first kid, my wife and I bought a fine leather living room suite. The dogs destroyed it. Now the dogs are not allowed on the furniture but 4 young kids are heathens. So now we buy cheap sofas and recliners with the expectation of replacing every few years. I almost never buy extended warranties but make an exception for the sofa because I know what’s coming. The warranty on the last set bought an entire new set plus some.
We’ll go back to quality furniture once the kids are older.
That.
^^ This. We know what we want for our living room but we are still 2-3 years out from getting it. Our kids plop down so damn hard on to our current couches that there is no way we are buying nice stuff until they leave.
My mother did not let us children on the furniture.
Even to this day!
She lets her grandchildren on the furniture, though you can watch her cringe when they draw their feet up.
I have to admit, my GF was not raised to keep her feet off the furniture, and it makes me cringe a bit sometimes.
I remember my sister talking one time about her two young kids playing and running around upstairs and her being in the finished basement looking at the ceiling light bulbs and cringing. 🙂
She lets her grandchildren on the furniture
My MIL is the same. She kept a room in her house with white carpet and nice furniture that my wife wasn’t allowed in growing up. It was only used ~once every couple years for entertaining non-family guests.
This room is now filled with tub after tub of toys for her grandchildren where they are encouraged to run wild. There is a kidset table and chairs for them to eat mac and cheese and drink juice over the pristine white carpet. We just watch in amazement at the 180 turn after becoming a grandmother.
We weren’t allowed in the ‘front room’, so we couldn’t mess up the furniture.
But the amish built couch and chair that the folks had up there was still going strong when I was 30 and had passed through the family room, and then to my grand-parents and onward to my uncle.
My Mom still has the dining room set that they bought when I was 4. Rock maple. I’ve fell over drunk in those chairs during my college years and seen my Dad do it before me. Tthey have never even had to be repaired in 50 years.
Yeah, if the dogs were allowed on the furniture, we wouldn’t have nice furniture.
It amazes me that nearly everyone allows their dogs on the furniture.
Furniture is a tough one. Luckily we are scavengers and live in and near well-to-do area to scoop up their ‘junk’ they don’t want anymore and put out on bulk trash days. Picked up a solid china hutch (needed minor feet repair), a big solid coffee table (the wooden track for one of the drawers needed to be replaced), wooden bed frame (just was missing hardware), etc all because these people just toss it out.
We just have to beat all the North Vegas folks that trek their way into the hills to get it before we do on bulk trash day.
I have no shame when it comes to that. Hell my kids picked up a full sized air-hockey table that only needed its corner railings fixed up.
the saying here is I am too poor to buy cheap
The Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness..
That’s one of my favorite passages of all the discworld novels.
I read it at thought, “yup, took me some time to learn that lesson”. The only way to get ahead it to think in terms of life cycle costs, not purchase price.
Then I read socialist shitheads claiming this is a passage on “injustice”. I never got that impression when I read it the first time or on subsequent readings.
The only part of it that I took as “injustice” was Vimes realizing that one way that the rich people stayed rich was that they could use the same boots/coats/etc. for generations, while his cheap boots only lasted a couple of years (with the extra year from the cardboard soles). Same as when Vimes talks about the life cycle of selling clothes to the pawn shops, but never buying clothes there (because only poor people did that), but instead buying clothes from the secondhand clothing store (which were always suspiciously close to the pawn shops).
Vimes discovered that rich people spend less money than poor people by marrying into wealth.
I discovered on my own (back when I was working poor) that buying quality up front could save in the long term. This put me at odds with my in-laws who could never understand the concept.
So, modern writers who talk about this injustice never say “We should all learn from this. The poor need to learn how to spend like the rich”.
Nope, the conclusion is always, always “Eat the rich!”
There is a small secondhand clothing chain in Austin that I loved. Tommy Bahama shirts for $30? Hell to the yeah. Plus at the time when I was managing the bad we had lots of “business meetings” at strip clubs. Strippers love customers that wear silk slacks.
You and the band were strippers?
*Ballad of Chasey Lane plays*
But a lap dance is so much better when the stripper is crying.
I grew up white trash, single-mom-working-3-jobs-and-going-to-night-school, boxed-mac-n-cheese-3-nights-a-week poor.
I still wash and reuse zip lock bags.
I finally gave up on saving twist ties. During the last house move I threw away the gallon bag of them I had saved.
I am becoming less skin-flinty as I grow older.
I still get anxious when the freezer gets low.
I can confirm that I have experienced all your points, though we still save twist ties and the rubber bands that come on veggies from the market. I am down to two whole chicken in the freezer…I need more chicken in the freezer.
Teens have learned how to break down a chicken. It ain’t pretty, but they at least have two legs, two wings, two breasts and maybe a thigh and a half. Also taught to them utilize that carcass and get some stock or broth going.
Although we don’t have plans to eat any of our chickens (it’s hard to eat chickens when you want eggs – at least when you aren’t interested in continuously growing out chicks), I badly need to learn the proper way to kill and process them.
Break neck, hang upside down on a clothes line, slit artery. Or chop off neck, hang upside down on a clothes line, which ever method you choose. From there its just plucking and general cleaning. I miss and don’t miss those days on my uncle’s farm.
I don’t miss those days, but I’m glad I know how.
Lay a stick across the chicken’s neck, step on ends of stick and pick chicken up.
The head stays on the ground and you should have a firm grip on now headless chicken.
@ muzzled woodchipper,
How to Videos here:
https://www.planetwhizbang.com/poultry-processing
Thanks!
What happens to the 0.5 thigh missing from your equation? I suspect fowl play.
Sometimes they get a little chicken when they are breaking it down.
I bet it’s poultry in motion.
It’s a gizzard-damn work of art!
Sorry to break the pun thread but I love gizzards. XX teethed on gizzards.
That sounds like a fairly uncommon practice; rare as hen’s teeth.
I once went to a churrascaria in the middle of nowhere Brazil. It was a run-down joint, but it smelled good.
They had 2 options. You could order the full menu, which as you’d imagine included every cut of meat, or you could order the budget menu, which consisted of the lesser cuts of meat. Being that the cost differential was only $2 US, I would have been happy to order the full menu, but FIL (though he wasn’t yet at the time) insisted on the cheap menu, because he was a cheap bastard.
That menu consisted of horribly tough pieces of meat, capybara, chicken hearts, and gizzards.
Though the gizzards weren’t the worst thing (the capybara was, and it’s probably the worst meat I’ve ever eaten), they were far worse than any id ever eaten here. And they were plentiful. Massive spits with a couple dozen in each.
Yuck!
You guys are plucked when Swiss finds these puns.
Grilled chicken hearts are a standard at the cook-outs my Brazilian friends do – those things are delicious.
Maybe in a vacuum.
But when the people at the next table over are eating picanha and linguiça, you just know you’re eating the bad stuff.
True, true.
Huh. I would have thought it would be good like most other herbivorous rodents.
Mine on any given day would be:
Phone
Wallet (sometimes anyways)
Keys
Vape
Other vape
I hate carrying shit around.
Speaking of parsimony, my Dad grew up on the farm, raised by depression era parents, so he grew up eating the parts that didn’t go to market.
Beef neck bones and souse, chicken livers and gizzards, and all the marrow and knuckles would get ate off the chicken bones.
He’d go out of his way to get that stuff when I was a kid… Some of that I learned to really like and some of it just makes my skin crawl.
Look at this. Missing half a thigh, and he’s still crowing with success.
Their first two birds looked like a buzzard picked at its bones, but they soon were clucking away with ease after that.
*narrows gaze*
OT from the morning links thread, regarding the Minneapolis paid social media influencers:
To be fair, government media/press offices have existed for a long time. The difference here is that they seem to be explicitly paying people not officially employed by the government to post, essentially, propaganda, and to make it look like it is *not* coming from the government’s press office.
In what way is this different than “Russian” paid social media posts “interfering” in internal US affairs?
Yes.
It’s looks to me exactly like State Sponsored media.
Is it weird that I imagine you sitting in the shop-attached-to-the-barn typing this?
Oddly enough that is exactly where I am. Working from home, and it doubles as my office.
Awesome.
I have now achieved continuity.
I read everybody’s comments in their voice if they’ve been on zoom a couple of times.
Yep.
I imagine your voice speaking, while your eyes are on your screen reading something horrible that you’re trying not to say, but know we all want to hear it (no matter how much we may protest).
Lol
LOL
Usually on Zoom I’m playing Jewel Quest while listening. It’s why I miss people coming and going.
What I like about communicating in writing is that I can ponder what I want to say or even if I want to say it. In person/Zoom, though, I just blurt stuff out without thinking about it.
I will admit, Brett chugging that blue lava lamp made me speechless.
It was like a slow motion train wreck. It was horrible, and you knew the results would be disastrous, but you just can’t look away.
Can confirm – He was regretting it the next day.
We all know that FDR lengthened the GD by a goodly amount of time via the Raw Deal.
Just how badly would our current government fuck things up?
We may be about to find out.
And based on how badly government has broken our legs, and insisted on replacing family businesses and good jobs with a couple of pittance checks, I’m sure a bang-up job it’ll be.
Rust was a problem on vehicles in those years, especially in Iowa, where the road departments battled snow and ice on the roads with rock salt and plenty of it.
That used to not be a problem until just a couple of years ago. The state DOT didn’t use salt for a number of (good) reasons until the whining from the snowflakes, Califucktards, and other transplants led to using salt in ever increasing amounts. Significant snowfall or ice events only happen once in a while (major storm every 15-20 years, snow of more than a trace 4 years in ten). There’s no reason to maintain a fleet or resources to clear the roads immediately. If you can’t get around (steep hillsides or unsuitable vehicle), stay home for a day or two.
The rock salt isn’t nearly as bad as the brine many places use now.
We occasionally end up with white roads when VDOT puts down too much salt.
I’m one extra generation separated from the depression. All my grandparents got here on the boat in the 20’s and 30’s. They passed on their frugality to mom and dad, who passed it on to me. I still have a hard time spending money on myself, but no problem spending on Mrs. TOK and the kids. I thought it was just me who did that.
Move along, nothing to see here. Just your run-of-the-mill speech suppression.
Fuck these people.
https://justthenews.com/nation/free-speech/principal-sues-school-district-after-suspension-following-free-speech-talk
That one will be interesting to follow especially if he called out that actions on the 6th, but spoke more to the ‘response’ by a not-so-subtly-in-the-same-bed reaction by the FedGov and the giant tech companies.
Don’t California my Tennessee!
Question for the glib hive mind- what’s y’all recommendations on side by side/UTVs? Wife has narrowed it down to a Kawasaki Mule, maybe second choice as a Kubota. Mule seems decent from what I can find online. 4×4 SE for moving plants/small material around the yard including a hill in the back.
I don’t really know anything about them other than to say if you have kids, get one that doesn’t go fast. A co-worker’s daughter was paralyzed and her boyfriend killed when he lost control and slammed into a tree while joyriding in one.
No kids and don’t need to go fast. Smaller, slower UTV like what Gators used to be like.
My Ranger is fucking awesome.
If you specifically don’t want speed, don’t get a Ranger.
They’re fucking great. For me it’s the equivalent of having at least 2 extra workers.
But it will hit 55mph without a problem at all.
We use the diesel Kubotas as airplane tugs here at work. They seem to be decent enough, but I was shocked at the price we paid for them.
That’s why it’ll be a gasser. Plus the weight is more.
I can say that overall I am more spendy than I need to be especially wine and scotch and some other things.
Life is too short to eat sub-par steaks.
Or:
Shoot ugly guns
Play shitty guitars
Listen to music on a shitty sound system
Hey!
Ugly guns are some of my favorites.
I recently got some sub-par steaks, priced accordingly. I think someone… butchered the bandsaw work, because these were labelled “NY Strip” and priced at $3.99/lb. Many bone shards that required picking and washing out, but it made truly luxurious stew meat.
If I have a bad habit, I will do it well.
About the only one that costs less for better quality is home roasting coffee.
I think our roaster took a few years to amortize to the point where this was true for us.
I used to say that the deer in our freezer was the most expensive thing we ate, by the time you factor in all the hunting gear.
That’s only if you assign a value of 0 to the enjoyment from the hunting.
I got my roaster over 15 years ago. I’m contemplating getting an upgraded unit at some point, but the old one still works just fine (and provides much better coffee then I can get at most places around here).
Back when I was a kid, the most expensive thing was probably the perch and walleyes from the couple times a year my dad and I would get out on one of the boats and fish in the lake. No hunting tradition in the family (that I’m aware of), just fishing.
The eggs from my chickens.
Between feed and taj majal sized coops, they will never come close to paying for themselves.
The guineas, however, are worth their weight in gold. We had a bad tick problem. Even with the drops, each dog would come in with 5-10 ticks per day.
After just 1 season with guineas, the ticks are gone. We’ve seen 4 in the last 3 years. And although their eggs are smaller, and are only produced seasonally, they’re every bit as good as chicken eggs.
Uncle Roger roasts his in a wok.
In those days I was fond of saying of the Old Man that if he got hold of a nickel, it was a prisoner. Occasionally I would even remark that he could squeeze a nickel so hard that the Indian would end up riding the buffalo.
This made me chuckle, because it reminds me of what my dad used to say about my grandpa – “Pop throws nickels around like they were manhole covers. He squeaks when he walks.”
Like your Old Man, Grandpa was born in 1923. He was an inveterate tinkerer, never throwing anything away that he believed he could fix. He worked his way into the white collar world by his mid-30s, but he was a trained mechanic so there wasn’t much machinery that he couldn’t figure out. When he passed away last year, my uncle took most of his workshop tools home. All of them ran beautifully, and none of them was newer than 35 years old or so. He also taught himself carpentry and built a fair bit of his own furniture – Grandma’s last childbirth was a difficult one, and she was in the hospital for almost two weeks after. While she was there, he built a beautiful cradle which still gets passed around the family every time someone has a baby. Me, my sister, her and my kids, all of my cousins – all of us began out lives sleeping in that cradle he built almost 60 years ago. My parents’ liquor cabinet, he refashioned from one of those old-time TV stands, and he built their china cabinet too.
I wish I were half as smart, determined, and accomplished as Grandpa was.
I’m betting that the Gucci, Versace, Choo, and Tiffany stores don’t get very much business from Glibs.
I asked my wife for one of our anniversaries if she wanted a nice handbag and she said I would rather us get a new truck.
Not enough space for all the stuff she wants to carry?
Fun fact is I probably carry more stuff in my pockets than she does in her purse/handbag. We have a picture of a night out at a bar in which along with friends, made a game out of who ever is carrying the most items has to buy shots. I lost..by a mile. I mean, who carries a #2 pencil with them at all times?
Constipated mathematicians?
Please tell me you plunked your carry piece and extra mag on the table.
It was wallet, #2 pencil, red pen, loose change, two sets of keys, a lighter, pocket knife, two receipts from earlier in the day, and mints and challenge coin (friends were military – never leave home without it; though his are tough to beat).
Mine on any given day would be:
Phone
Wallet (sometimes anyways)
Keys
Vape
Other vape
I hate carrying shit around.
After we first got married, the Spousal Unit announced that she wanted power tools for her birthday. She even had an ordered list.
I love that woman.
Plug-in or battery operated?
Yes.
I have a couple of my dad’s old Craftsman power tools that are older than I am. My rotator cuff was going out and it got to where I couldn’t lift his circular saw.
Mr. Mojeaux went out and got me a new, lighter saw and surprised me with it.
I’ve heard of those in this song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L8zGfKDCCY
I might patronize Choo’s store if he had one, but he went back to Korea.
I dunno, I have a couple of pairs of Allen Edmonds dress shoes, and a Sinn wristwatch. But I’m an admitted shitlord. I’m not quite sure what the ladies equivalent to Allen Edmonds would be…
I think that’s different – the quality is high on the Edmonds & Sinn and they’ll last years and years.
Gucchi/Versace/Choo is more about fashion and will be “unwearable” within just a couple years.
Caveats apply – e.g., my brother got a pair of Gucchi loafers as a gift a bunch of years back and says they’re the best shoes he’s ever owned.
(I also have some good shoes & just got myself a Laco as a birthday present).
It horrified me to learn that most women’s shoes are designed to wear out in under fifty uses.
That is sadly not surprising.
Relevant
When I was spending a few days working in Shanghai, I went out for a walk one evening and ran across a street vendor selling various things. I gave some thought to buying Mrs. Animal what the guy assured me was a “genuine Versace handbag,” but I figured on the off chance it was a fake, I’d be out twenty bucks, so I passed.
Mrs. Animal likes stuff from Bass Pro Shops better than from Gucci, Versace, Choo or Tiffany anyway.
Nazis everywhere.
As covered by RedState’s Nick Arama, Alyssa Milano accused organizers of the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference — aka CPAC — of designing a staged salute to Naziism.
On Saturday, the actress made the assertion via Instagram:
“This is the stage at CPAC. THEY’RE NOT EVEN TRYING TO HIDE IT ANYMORE.”
Accompanying the claim: a photo of the center-pointed stage featuring rear left and right flanks.
They worship Odin? I hate that the Nazi’s used so much Norse iconography. It leads to misunderstanding with people who just want to celebrate their Scandinavian heritage and doesn’t mean what the Nazi’s wanted it to mean.
I guess the same could be the same for the swastika.
I am very selective on my Nordic tattoos because of that.
I considered getting a Sic Semper Tyranis tattoo. Then I did a little digging… why do we let white nationalists get all the cool stuff?
Semper Fidelis Tyrannosaurus!
Lulz
That would be a sweet tattoo.
Or a “Hench4Life” tat.
With a silhouette of a guy in a butterfly costume pointing a gun at a dinosaur’s head
That would be sweet.
You mean,
“Why does the media paint all the cool stuff as being associated with white nationalists?”
Well, yes. It doesn’t help that actual Nazi iconography is pretty cool either.
why do we let white nationalists get all the cool stuff
White privilege?
Seriously, the VA flag is a white nationalist thing now?
Milano made a five record deal in Japan, which is littered with swastikas, therefore Milano is a Nazi. See how easy that is, sugar tits?
https://youtu.be/QAc0BvDcaIY
Her promotion of gun violence ending with her dreaming about a noose. Clearly she is a racist as well as a Nazi.
Fading starlet seeks attention and continuing relevance, News at 11.
Milano’s left tit has more brain cells than her head.
[insert brain sucker joke]
They originally tried to arrange the stage in the shape of the OK hand signal.
Mom and dad were born in 1935. He sends me photos of the clan back in the late 30s looking like refugees from a Ma and Pa Kettle film.
Dad and his brother were the first in the family to go to college thanks to the GI bill.
’37er. I was the first in my family to go to college, also on the GI Bill, no cousins/no nephews/nieces went to college. My son is one of few family members in his generation with a degree (he’s 58).
My mother had a sewing machine, even in high school I had a few homemade shirts, ’til I could start buying my own. Today most people see me and want to help me out. It’s impossible, at least for me, to break out of the personal thing but I am generous with my kids and grandchildren. The truth is old people need very little because we already have everything we need.
I’m busy giving stuff away now.
Saw the following headline at Slate.
What New York Could Do if It Took a Quarter of Its Roads Away From Cars
Didn’t even bother to click.
Fuck those socialist parasites.
If they take away the highways, what will our billboards fall in love with?
It’ll make everyone healthier, ’cause they’ll start biking instead!
The girlfriend had a friend on the book of face that was talking about an ingenious plan to power your home by riding a stationary cycle for only an hour a day. I provided a Olympic Cyclist vs. Toast video (that was originally shared by someone else here) to point out the absurdity of the plan.
Finally, something predicted in Soylent Green comes true!
You know I just watched a vid on the Soviets’ sports culture. Makes me think of the bike lane horse crap.
Vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-XYNvB_NVE
(As an aside, I absolutely read Pie’s comments in this guys voice)
With the new demand for porters, unemployment will be a thing of the past!
Ban every government-sector worker from driving into work (sorry, UCS).
New York should ban all private vehicles from the city.
Don’t give them ideas
The Taxi and Limousine Drivers Union Endorses Rat on a Train for mayor!
Are those government taxis and limousines?
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2021/03/federal-appeals-court-revives-claim-against-oregon-state-bar-stemming-from-published-statement-on-white-nationalism.html
That the bar quickly provided a refund is both sufficient that they knew they were in the wrong and is insufficient punishment for doing so.
Wow, couldn’t statements by a State Bar on topics like “what constitutes 1A protected speech” be considered as exhorting or pressuring members of the Bar to not take up cases where people’s 1A rights are infringed?
Fuck you, pay them and kneel before Zod.
Great stuff Animal. Not good with money myself but never spend much on myself. Drove around some of the most beat down cars imaginable. Was driving around a 98 4 door tracker that my wife found me at an estate sale. Thing was someones summer car and hadnt been driven in a year when i bought it—mice had taken over the A/C ducts and had built nests. Loved that thing but had to give in to pressure from the kids-they refused to be picked up or dropped off in it as they got a little older.
Thanks for the stories man.
Bureaucrats getting nice little paid time off bonus in new stimulus package:
Democrats are like pigs in shit right now. They got to create a crisis, make it exponentially worse by claiming new and exceptional powers, and then run on passing a massive relief package that gives them even more power and opportunity for graft. They won’t stand up to the teacher’s unions, but they’ll give nice bailouts to their kind.
I hate my employer.
We hate your employer, too.
Does the number $1400 hold some kind of mythical significance to them or something?
Who knows…they want private companies to only pay $15/hour but are kicking out $35/hour for those that cannot maintain the asinine amount of leave we get.
7, 2 and 100 are sacred numbers
7 Resurrection; Spiritual completeness
2 Union; Division; Witnessing
100 Children of the promise; Election
Draw from that what you may about recent events.
pay federal employees up to $1,400 a week for 15 weeks as paid time off if they have any kids who are not enrolled in full-time, in-classroom instruction as their school
Make that a severance package, and I’ll support it.
Bail feds out with $5600/month because of restrictions imposed by government, while the rest of us flail in their sea of incompetence.
How are these fuckers not dangling from lampposts nationwide?
Well, when I put in for the required permit for decorating lampposts, it was denied.
Unauthorized religious holiday celebration in public.
What I also don’t get is…even us expected employees, who were never allowed to telework in the before times, are on near 100% telework status now with no end in sight. So my guess is one of the government unions is going to benefit from this and its going to be a very narrow subset of persons that are going to be getting this.
Parasites
A little bit funky
Nice. I wish I could play like that.
One of my younger friends on Facebook is a writer. She posted an article on “ableism” and monsters. She was distressed by how many “writers” that she knew called the article woke horseshit.
Enjoy:
https://mythcreants.com/blog/ridding-your-monsters-of-ableism/?fbclid=IwAR3R0EF3d6Ki_asBqH_VakZNNJknEtnG0cYrVKOSARHN_h8K3H4D2XQj37k
One of the things that makes the concept of “insanity” so inaccurate is that it lumps all types of mental divergence together. Because it was never based on the specifics of real mental illnesses, “insanity” has not kept pace with our developing medical understanding of the mind. Instead, it remains a toxic stereotype about people with divergent minds being dangerous, out of control, irrational, and disconnected from reality.
That’s insane.
Except when they call conservatives dangerous, out of control, irrational, and disconnected from reality. That’s super ok.
*rummages around the site*
On the last podcast, Fay brought up the problematic trope of the killing of disabled people, especially if they’re disabled during the story. This made me think. If you’re writing historical or historically inspired fiction where this is something that did happen ([Malcolm provided several examples of cultures where this took place]) how could one address this? Does inverting the trope just draw attention to it and/or misrepresent the culture you’re inspired by?
– Malcolm Heredia-Langner
Sparta hardest hit.
Animal, if your dad was still around I’d have a place for him in my boat. Sounds like we could have been brothers, though I’d be the baby in the family.
Enjoyed another of your tales, you’re going to do well in Alaska. The local coffee shop boys will be waiting for you every morning. I am too cheap to
hang out with those guys, besides I like my own company better.
I know the astrology column was yesterday, but are we quite sure Mercury Gatorade is over? Our payroll processing website is down, and Excel started acting weird, disabling features I’d just used moments before.
D:
The payroll site outage isn’t a crisis…yet. As long as it’s back up by tomorrow, it’ll be like submitting payroll after a Monday holiday. Also, the timekeeping site is separate & functional, so I could do my thing in there. So far, I just can’t turn the hours and minutes into dollars and cents.
So…back to month-end financial reports.
My desktop browser logged me out of all of my websites today.
Tom Woods and Malice on the New Deal
https://twitter.com/dangerousdocs/status/1366433048519090183?s=21
It’s really good. I’m digging this series. I never would have thought these two would work so well together.
I was primarily raised by my grandparents (b. 1914 & 1917), who got a double dose of Great Depression parsimony: my mom was stricken with a horrific case of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis when she was two. The Grands were working five jobs between the two of them to keep up with the hospital bills — and the hospital’s policy was if you weren’t current on your tab, you weren’t allowed to visit the patient. Fortunately for them, Mom eventually got a transfer to a Shriner’s hospital.
When Grandpa finally retired and took his wife, daughter, and me down to Florida on his $13k/yr pension, I discovered that old habits of frugality often die hard. When we went on vacation, we stayed at budget motels, period. Days Inn or Motel 6 was fine.
One of our meal staples was called, simply, “potatoes and eggs.” Far as I can tell, it was just peeled and cubed potatoes, scooped up three or four at a time, dipped in egg wash and deep fried. Cheap Depression-era calories, as far as I can tell. I don’t keep the same habits as they did (though for twenty years, I would buy a new Corolla for Mrs. Shpip, drive her old one til it had 100k+ miles on it, then sell it and buy… another new Corolla for her, etc.).
I will, OTOH, sometimes indulge myself in a Depression-era southern snack just because.
I have never heard of peanut butter-and-mayonnaise sandwiches before. I absolutely love mayonnaise on just about everything, but the thought of it with peanut butter makes me recoil a bit. I’ll have to try it out though.
I bet you shop at Khaki Republic too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_pmwvIvi9Q
favorite bit
I’m wondering if the photo of parsimony girl is Kat Timpf before she went blonde?
Shutterstock
My Grandma lived during the Depression. She would reuse trash bags, styrofoam cups/plates & plastic utensils. We used to laugh but now I think we should’ve taken notes.
We still make jokes about my grandma rinsing paper towels out. She died with millions and live a modest life. Don’t worry though, the way my mom spends money, I’ll inherit hundreds of dollars!
Depending on where you live, reuse may be your only option for styrofoam.
You just mix it up with some gasoline and … *gets put on yet another list*
Good story, and good advice.