.jpeg)
It only struck me recently, that up until about the 1940s, a reason people never smiled in portraits is they had really bad or missing teeth. We have a lot to be thankful for today, as we near the end of the Modern Age: technologies have made it not only easier to chew, more desirable to smile in a photograph but to consume at the expense of creating meaning.
Thanks to modern medicine, broken, torn and worn hips, knees, and shoulders, not to mention severed fingers and limbs are fixable and electricity has freed women from work in the home to follow careers unimaginable to either men or women a hundred years ago. I asked my grandmother (back in the 1980s) what the greatest technological innovation of her time was.
Thanks to modern medicine, broken, torn and worn hips, knees, and shoulders, not to mention severed fingers and limbs are fixable and electricity has freed women from work in the home to follow careers unimaginable to either men or women a hundred years ago. I asked my grandmother (back in the 1980s) what the greatest technological innovation of her time was.
I was teenager at the time, and I lived by and for the phone. I was sure she’d say telecommunications, but she answered refrigeration. Medications, including vaccines, could be stored, and for the homemaker, the pivotal role in the lives of children and men, shopping for meat, milk, cheese and vegetables was no longer a daily chore.
Back in those days, fridges lasted forever. So did toasters. She had a toaster that must’ve been about 40 years old: the kind that opened on two sides and you had to manually flip the toast. I remember when the plugs changed and that was the only repair or maintenance she ever did on that appliance.
Come to think of it, I grew up with the same fridge for 20 years. Even our old black and white TV from the 1960s, replaced for the 1976 Toronto Olympics with a brand new colour TV, went on working for another 20 years as the rumpus room telly, where we watched Bill Collins midday movies, which were in black and white anyway. Those were the days when absent a remote control, you’d get up to use the bathroom or make toast during the commercials.
Back in those days, fridges lasted forever. So did toasters. She had a toaster that must’ve been about 40 years old: the kind that opened on two sides and you had to manually flip the toast. I remember when the plugs changed and that was the only repair or maintenance she ever did on that appliance.
Come to think of it, I grew up with the same fridge for 20 years. Even our old black and white TV from the 1960s, replaced for the 1976 Toronto Olympics with a brand new colour TV, went on working for another 20 years as the rumpus room telly, where we watched Bill Collins midday movies, which were in black and white anyway. Those were the days when absent a remote control, you’d get up to use the bathroom or make toast during the commercials.
Or just talk.
Lately, I’ve noticed all these innovations have had a perverse effect on societal decline. People don’t meet up as much, like my grandmother did when she went shopping, and we don’t talk as much, like we did during the ad breaks. But more than all of this, the effect of technology has us wasting resources and worse, getting sicker.
Built in obsolescence keeps us buying the newest phone or TV or even hair dryer. And pharmaceutical companies, concerned more about profit than health, build the costs of product failures into their bottom line. Vioxx killed more than 50,000 people before it was recalled and now Ozempic is facing a class action for causing chronic gastroparesis. But we’re not learning from our mistakes, our reliance on birth control which is only getting more dangerous.
My generation of girls didn’t worry about our weight, and if we did, we just cut out Twisties and donuts for a couple of days. We dressed in puffy-sleeved taffeta for balls or tight drop-waisted skirts with frills to the knees for parties. Our boobs supported by cotton bras were well-hidden and we danced all night in flat shoes (or walked home from the club if we missed the tram or spent all our money on drinks). Songs were about love and loss, human struggle in the face of adversity (U2 used to be political). Books were something we read to fall asleep at night and we looked forward to monthly magazines for fashion and the engrossing letters section, read aloud to each other between fits of laughter as we learned to navigate relationships, rather than one-night-stands.
Clothes were a uniform, worn until they fell apart. The concept of waste wasn’t about some country in Africa ending up with all my outcasts but the food I left on my plate that some African would really appreciate, so eat up! I joined PND (People for Nuclear Disarmament) as my contribution to saving the world, opposed to anything nuclear in a country with the world’s largest uranium reserves.
Today, renewable energy is how were going to save humanity, inspite of the nonsensical drive to eliminate the 0.03% of CO2 – literally the gas of life – produced by humans. But the lithium batteries powering vehicles that star in the parade of strategies designed to lead humans to nirvana are blowing up all over the place while the trillion-dollar industry promoting “climate science” is enriching the few from the pockets of the many.
Lithium batteries aren’t the only explosions threatening progress. Whilst infrastructure, research and critical thinking are swept to the side, the business of war is booming in the US and its aligned states, just as life expectancy is in decline after steady growth since the Industrial Age.
Processed foods, highly regulated to eliminate any incentives for farmers to produce the real thing, have created nations of fat people who’s brains are addled by sugars and chemicals, unable to think their way clear to understanding how exactly it is we got here.
Marketers, under the guise of “inclusivity” market clothing and cosmetics using overweight people, normalising chronic disease and consumption at our peril. The world has gone mad, I reckon my grandmother would think. Girls dress like hookers, boys can be girls, meanwhile we support wars by transcending the antecedents that caused the rupture, whilst buying into alternatives to oil and gas, as if there’s no price to pay for the cobalt mined by children in the Congo, or the hazardous materials leaching into the soil from expired solar panels,
But at least we great teeth.
Built in obsolescence keeps us buying the newest phone or TV or even hair dryer. And pharmaceutical companies, concerned more about profit than health, build the costs of product failures into their bottom line. Vioxx killed more than 50,000 people before it was recalled and now Ozempic is facing a class action for causing chronic gastroparesis. But we’re not learning from our mistakes, our reliance on birth control which is only getting more dangerous.
My generation of girls didn’t worry about our weight, and if we did, we just cut out Twisties and donuts for a couple of days. We dressed in puffy-sleeved taffeta for balls or tight drop-waisted skirts with frills to the knees for parties. Our boobs supported by cotton bras were well-hidden and we danced all night in flat shoes (or walked home from the club if we missed the tram or spent all our money on drinks). Songs were about love and loss, human struggle in the face of adversity (U2 used to be political). Books were something we read to fall asleep at night and we looked forward to monthly magazines for fashion and the engrossing letters section, read aloud to each other between fits of laughter as we learned to navigate relationships, rather than one-night-stands.
Clothes were a uniform, worn until they fell apart. The concept of waste wasn’t about some country in Africa ending up with all my outcasts but the food I left on my plate that some African would really appreciate, so eat up! I joined PND (People for Nuclear Disarmament) as my contribution to saving the world, opposed to anything nuclear in a country with the world’s largest uranium reserves.
Today, renewable energy is how were going to save humanity, inspite of the nonsensical drive to eliminate the 0.03% of CO2 – literally the gas of life – produced by humans. But the lithium batteries powering vehicles that star in the parade of strategies designed to lead humans to nirvana are blowing up all over the place while the trillion-dollar industry promoting “climate science” is enriching the few from the pockets of the many.
Lithium batteries aren’t the only explosions threatening progress. Whilst infrastructure, research and critical thinking are swept to the side, the business of war is booming in the US and its aligned states, just as life expectancy is in decline after steady growth since the Industrial Age.
Processed foods, highly regulated to eliminate any incentives for farmers to produce the real thing, have created nations of fat people who’s brains are addled by sugars and chemicals, unable to think their way clear to understanding how exactly it is we got here.
Marketers, under the guise of “inclusivity” market clothing and cosmetics using overweight people, normalising chronic disease and consumption at our peril. The world has gone mad, I reckon my grandmother would think. Girls dress like hookers, boys can be girls, meanwhile we support wars by transcending the antecedents that caused the rupture, whilst buying into alternatives to oil and gas, as if there’s no price to pay for the cobalt mined by children in the Congo, or the hazardous materials leaching into the soil from expired solar panels,
But at least we great teeth.