Were or Weren’t Transgender

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Back in the stone age a boy in Brooklyn could buy a spaldeen (a Spalding rubber ball) for a quarter.  If that was too expensive, he could buy the lesser quality pensie pinkie for three nickels.  And with such a valuable artifact you could play handball, Chinese handball, hit-the penny, stoopball, punchball, slapball or sewer cover baseball for weeks.  Of course, if you used it for stickball, it would only last a matter of days before it split in half but the point is you really got your money’s worth out of this simple toy.

While looking for some toys for the kids Camera Girl informed me that a spaldeen now costs $7.88.  Of course, now it’s called a Spalding High Bounce Ball.  So that’s more than a 3,000% increase in about sixty years.  That sounds absurd.  And yet when I think of the return on investment compared to a gaming system that kids use today, I tend to think that this humble toy from the neolithic is infinitely better.

When I think of the hours we spent outside playing and fighting and running around and meeting new kids at the playground and thinking up new rules to make the games work better in the far from perfect environment of the street or the sidewalk or the public-school playground I know for a fact that we had much, much more stimulation, exercise and just plain fun than kids today.  There were relatively few fat kids back then and real obesity was unheard of.  How could you get fat when we were always running?  Baseball, softball, basketball, football, even street hockey were played in their proper season.  And tag, freeze tag, hide and go seek, ringalevio and a thousand variations that we made up filled the afternoon hours after school.  And we were always walking to go everywhere in our environment.  We could walk to Manhattan Beach (which is in Brooklyn) or see the fishing boats in Sheepshead Bay or walk down Ocean Parkway to Avenue U or Kings Highway to see a movie.  We walked for miles and we rode our bikes everywhere.

But what can the kids do today.  If you live in the suburbs there may not even be any sidewalks and riding a bicycle on country roads is sometimes very hazardous and so the kids have to be brought to organized sports like soccer or maybe baseball but organized sports don’t take up much time and to be honest, organized sports isn’t as much fun.

I guess what is needed is a common space like a big school yard that can be available to all the kids in a town with only enough adult supervision to keep really bad things like drugs and actual gang activity out but allowing the kids to develop their own hierarchy and split up into whatever groups they see fit.  A baseball diamond, a football field, some basketball hoops, a handball court or two and a little pavement would produce an environment that would allow kids to invent some games that could keep them playing and fighting for hours.

Maybe that would give them so much human interaction that they wouldn’t have the time to stare at TikTok, grow obese and worry whether they were or weren’t transgender.

Update:

War Pig commented:

Playing tackle football with 20 kids on a side. Playing baseball with 8 outfielders. Riding bikes to the park. Staying out from breakfast to street lights coming on with a break for lunch and supper. Skinned knees and Bactine. Playing in warm rains. Mud puddles. Drinking water from a garden hose or pumping it out of the well. Soaking watermelons in a net in the well to chill them, then eating them and having seed spitting contests. Hypnotizing chickens on the farm. Fishing in the creek and bringing home the “keepers” for supper. Gigging frogs for fried frog legs. Hot dog roasts over an open fire and toasting marshmallows on a stick. Climbing trees. Picking wild berries.

Me and my brother working on our paternal grandparents’ farm. We worked like clydesdales and ate like them, too. Stayed skinny, even on mamaw’s high-fat, high-calorie farm cooking.

Kids are missing out on a lot now. Fresh air, minor injuries, the odd bee sting, running and laughing just for the heck of it.

Damn, we had it good.

Master Diver replied:

And yet we lived!
(With the occasional application of Mercurochrome or Merthiolate!)

XXX Commented:

God those were the days.One other thing making ramps 5 feet tall and jumping like Evel Knievel, We built one once in Quantico Va. 5 feet tall and put it on the edge of a 6 foot drop off and got the guy every one hated to be the first, liked to have killed him but we had a laugh and moved on. I sometimes wonder if he ever got up, oh well one less momma’s boy.

TomD commented:

We had the woods with the abandoned German POW camp in it, the trees, a rock quarry where the Germans were worked. A bunch of us would be walking up Roswell Rd north of Atlanta carrying our .22’s to sit at the top of the quarry and shoot snakes. 5 or 6 kids with rifles on Roswell Rd now would bring SWAT and CNN.

I once lifted a stick of dynamite from a county work truck and worked on ways to set pieces of it off using the real M80’s.

Dodge ball and the other games. You’re right, no fat kids then. I can’t remember anyone being fat, young or old. Constantly on the move. Crayfish in the creek. Fistfights where no one was really hurt other than feelings.

Tom’s World – 09SEP2024 – Museum Aircraft – 1

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Tired of statues and would like to jump to another topic: museum aircraft

Most, but not all, of these shots were taken at the US Naval Air Museum, on board NAS Pensacola. I’ve been to the Smithsonian, Wright Patterson and scores of lesser museums but this museum is right at the top, world wide. The Blue Angels are based out of Pensacola, so you’ll see a lot of that. The Naval Museum concentrates on Naval stuff as you may suspect but there’s other noteworthy stuff there too, like a Messerschmitt Me 262 one of the very, very few still in existence. The ME 262 was the first ever jet to be used in combat.

 

This Navy NC-4 was the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic. Unlike Lindberg, it wasn’t solo and it wasn’t non stop. But it was in 1919 when most aircraft had max ranges in the hundred mile range or so. This by the way, the actual aircraft, not just the aircraft type. Talk about a beautiful restoration.

Corsair: The museum tends to be crowded with stuff just everywhere competing for visual attention. I shot this picture and was looking at it wondering what could be done with it and somehow ended up here.

An F18 outside one of the museum buildings.

00683: A B25 Mitchell bomber. This was principally an Army aircraft but the B25 won fame in early 1942 when the famous raid on Tokyo was launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet.

A little humorsep

My Last Presidential Debate

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I wasn’t going to watch the debate because tomorrow is going to be an early trip and a long day so I can’t stay up late but then I said, “Ah, the hell with it.  I’ll watch the sideshow.”

Well, she wasn’t Biden.  She could string together sentences.  And of course, the questions from ABC were almost all slanted against Trump and for Harris.  But basically, it was a free for all with both of them hammering away at each other.  Parts of it were somewhat entertaining but I wouldn’t call it very decisive.

I like the fact that Trump basically stuck to using a very large part of his time hammering her on the border and the economy.  Those are the bread-and-butter topics that people really care about and I liked his closing statement where he made the main point; that all the things that Harris says she’s going to do could have been done at any time in the last three years.  But they weren’t done.

So, does this debate help Trump or Harris more?  I guess it marginally helps Harris because she didn’t stand there like an idiot in the way her boss did a couple of months ago.  She’ll get a bounce because she’s proven she’s not brain dead and because the press will claim she was brilliant.  But really this election is a referendum on the economy and the Border.

Neither of those issues work in Kamala Harris’s favor and talking about them isn’t good for her case.  Now it’s entirely possible that America will vote for Harris.  And it is possible that even if they vote for Trump that the powers that be will print off a million ballots in Philadelphia and Detroit.  So maybe this whole exercise was pointless anyway.  But it did give us a chance to see Trump and Harris side by side.  I’ll have to say I do enjoy his show.  He is unique.  He’s crazy as a loon but he’s a hell of a lot more fun than anything else going on in this country.  He’s got energy and he’s got flair.

Well, that’s my take.  Was it worth it?  Nah.  I should’ve written about something fun.  Basically, I can’t wait for this election to be over.  It’s like some kind of boring speech you have to sit through while waiting for a game to start.  What happens after November will be a new world.  All the make-believe will be over and we can start thinking about the here and now.  Maybe my focus will be on hoarding things that won’t be available in the future.  Or maybe it’s time to start working on my do-it-yourself skills for when I won’t be able to afford the costs of craftsmen and the like.  Or maybe I’ll concentrate on fiction writing and leave the punditry to Tucker Carlson and his buddies.

But whatever else I’ll be doing; I think I’ve watched my last presidential debate.  I mean, what’s the point?  If these same people are put back in the White House after four years of this then I’m in the wrong country.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 10SEP2024 – California

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war pig

Dad was s big name at North American Aviation, then Rockwell/Rocketdyne. He actually touched things that went in orbit in the space program. I have a ring the factory made for important people at Rocketdyne. It was made from a crazy, missile nose cone titanium alloy. Like tungsten carbide, it took diamonds to cut it. It had been tempered in the hellfire of reentry and was light yet incredibly string. We lived in places like Simi Valley, Canoga Park and then up in the Thousand Oaks area. Mom shopped at the then amazing Topanga Plaza. We went ice skating indoors. We’d go up Mt Baldy in the morning to play in the snow, then in the late afternoon, we swam and surfed at the public beaches. It was the days of Wolfman Jack, Dragnet and Adam-12. It was also the days of the Watts riots, but as my heritage is divided between Caucasian and Native American, neither side had an issue with me. Mexican, Black and White kids got on amazingly well in school. Drugs were just beginning to be a problem. Living was large and life was good. We were solidly ahead of the Russkies in the space race. American technocracy led the world. We were winning battles in Vietnam (only to be betrayed by politicians later). Overall, it was a magical time.

Darth Vader is Dead!

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The iconic actor James Earl Jones has passed away.

I think it was the summer of 1972 (but I could be wrong) I went to see Shakespeare in the Park with a girl I was going to high school summer school with and it was Jones playing King Lear. The park was full of unwashed hippies and life was good. There was a convenient summer thunderstorm during the storm scene. He was a fantastic King Lear.