Salt in the wound, jerks. (Coincidentally I was reading a bunch of stuff about the rise of automobile infrastructure in San Antonio, here if anyone is curious. Many photos.)
Paris is establishing a pretty big car-free zone in the inner arrondissements. US trajectory is not inevitable, I think.
A big problem IMO is that political perceptions are formed when people are young-- people who grew up driving everywhere have a harder time adjusting to new possibilities than people who see viable transit as kids and teenagers.
COVID's not going to help. DC ridership is projected to stay quite low until 2024. Conversely, vehicle miles/GDP in the US is in long-term decline. Absolute vehicle miles are pretty flat.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA
We're supposed to get increased train service to Harrisburg (which is where you can catch the main Eastern seaboard routes). Would be nice. Still no train to Cleveland.
2.2: I think change is likely because so many younger people have grown up knowing driving as little but a tedious necessity.
Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists
Oh, god, this is so depressingly ignorant and stupid.
Most horse riders did not, and do not, grow all their own fodder on their own land. Where do they buy oats, hay and so on? FROM A DEALER. When the horse casts a shoe or strains a tendon, does the typical horse rider simply turn to and fix the problem himself? No, he consults someone for help. Whom does he consult? A blacksmith, or a vet. THESE ARE SPECIALISTS.
Horse-dependent cities, like London, could only function because of an immense network of supply and support industries. There were, IIRC, 300,000 horses in London in 1900. Forty bargeloads of fodder had to come into the city every day. Tonnes of manure were shipped out every day, much of it to the fields where the fodder was grown. Horses needed immense amounts of stabling - walk round London and look at the old mews and stable yards everywhere. Horses were part of an industrial economy, they were not some sort of free-range granola bullshit self-sufficient Eurotrash Whole Earth anprim fantasy.
The beach house analogy is shit, also it's an analogy.
When the car was invented, it was to provide a few of the very rich with a completely unprecedented privilege: that of traveling much faster than everyone else.
No! The first cars were barely faster than carriages, let alone steam trains!
The carriages of the rich didn't go any faster than the carts of the peasants
Yes they did! Conspicuous consumption from the 1600s onward was reflected in buying incredibly expensive and glamorous fast carriages like phaetons and landaus! Travelling post was very expensive and a symbol of wealth! Fast passage by ship or canal boat was always more expensive! Carts were slower than walking!
For the first time in history, people would become dependent for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy
STEAM TRAINS.
It's infuriating because his conclusions aren't actually that bad (obvious, yes, unoriginal, yes, but mostly correct). But the arguments for them are so lazy, so amateurish, so idle that it almost persuades you to be pro-car, for fear of winding up on the same side as morons like that.
I read a couple of chapters of this, there were laments about the unsustainablity of large cities before cars also. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/236986/pdf
Seattle buried the seashore highway, Boston's reclaimed some land that was highway; there's a wiki page of other projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_removal
Not to take away from the OP's legitimate lament about how much better cities could be with each drop of political will to look at costs of driving and parking everywhere, agreed that things could be much much better at modest cost in $ and convenience in the US, but even with that disaster, there's a definite trajectory to improvement. Hope it's fast enough.
ajay, you make a reasonable and thought-provoking criticism of that part, which as usual you merge seamlessly into a highly aggressive and dismissive rant.
This is a pattern of yours I'm sick of, because it makes me worry if I continue the discussion I will get the same treatment, so I shut up. Can you tone it the fuck down? This isn't a collegiate debate where everyone is flexing their rhetorical muscles to tear each other apart.
Salt in the wound, jerks.
Oh crap! I missed that the first time around.
It is highly inappropriate for you to use phrases like "tone it the fuck down".
It is highly inappropriate for you to use phrases like "tone it the fuck down".
My grandfather apparently persisted with horses for much longer than common in his area, which was easier for him because he had a farm. I have a cousin who still raises some kind of working horse, something Belgian maybe? A different cousin used to breed quarter horses.
I still remember being thrown from our pony when I was five or so. He didn't want to carry me and my brother at the same time even though he would carry an adult that was far heavier than both of us combined.
I don't know any of her other works, but for her anti-car programs, I love Anne Hidalgo so much.
My crotchety old Parisienne aunt thinks the bicycles are a menace, but my cousin and her husband have been buying bikes in the countryside, fixing them up and selling them in Paris. They make their two boys wear all white with a white apron and work the bike store. It is exceedingly calculated and no doubt, very charming.
I am also unconvinced that Parisians (!) were apparently much more relaxed and less shouty and argumentative before they had cars.
I myself am now crotchety, because I am already angry that the same phenomenon keeps happening, where The Man fights as hard as possible against the progress and then as soon as it is complete, immediately brags about it everywhere and it isn't like there is any substantive progress on switching away from cars here in Sac but if there were, there would also be the bragging and I am already mad at it.
I like bikes because they make the people who annoy me spit with rage.
completely at a loss as to the, well, tone in which i am intended to read 10. or 11 for that matter! support minivet's observation, ajay. of course you're free to continue as you are!
intended tone for this comment = calm, relaxed, friendly even!
They make their two boys wear all white with a white apron and work the bike store. It is exceedingly calculated and no doubt, very charming.
The theater of the charming local shop reminds me of this from Lenny Bruce about his childhood
During the winter, the Denglers ran a roadside stand selling canned goods and eggs to the workers on their way to and from a nearby defense plant.
The canned goods would actually be sold out in the first day, and we only had enough chickens to supply eggs for about the first two or three cars. So we bought eggs wholesale from as far away as Texas and Mason-jar canned goods from an outfit in Georgia
br />My job was to immerse the jars in hot water, wash off their labels and put ours on. I would also open the egg crates -- which were packed by the gross -- and repackage the eggs in our cartons, by the dozen. With my philanthropic sense of humor, I would add a little mud and straw and chicken droppings to give them an authentic pastoral touch.
People were always coming back and telling us: "How fresh the eggs are!" Sales increased rapidly . . .
Yes, ajay is free to continue as is, and/or to consider me a snowflake or whatever, and I can manage my own problems by not engaging. Just putting that out in the open though.
Yes, the legendarily chilled Parisian mob.
i work with a charming person who is good friends with the lady that wrote that deranged nyt "parisian bikes are a deadly menace!!!" article. i politely ignored it when she sent it to me. the more relaxed vibe in paris as cars were brought to heel was pronounced at least before 2 years ago. maybe big bike has become a menace more recently, i do not know
8: We are all acquainted with ajay's rhetorical style, but for my part, I believe that "a reasonable and thought-provoking criticism" generally entitles a commenter to engage in "a highly aggressive and dismissive rant."
I would save this criticism for a time when ajay is not, in fact, being reasonable or thought-provoking. And lo! We get there in 10-11.
And so begins the meta-thread. ... Sorry in advance. I do share ajay's distaste for reaching conclusions and then working backward to invent justifications -- even when I find the conclusions congenial.
(As with dq in 18.2, I am aiming for calm, relaxed and friendly. But I probably need to give up on conveying the proper tone with words, and just start using emojis.)
Paris is establishing a pretty big car-free zone in the inner arrondissements. US trajectory is not inevitable, I think.
I agree, as witnessed by what much of western Europe did after the 70's (at least in their urban cores, nothing like comprehensively elsewhere), but there's path dependence: we spent another generation building like cars are the only thing, so now it's that much more infrastructure to rework, and few people remember the alternative.
18: one probably shouldn't complain about other people taking an unnecessarily aggressive and dismissive tone, and in the same breath accuse them of acting like a college debater and tell them to tone it the fuck down!
it's that much more infrastructure to rework
Right. Even for Sacramento, it is easy to see how the earliest city and the inner ring suburbs convert back. But the outer rings? I just don't see it. (Yet. Until someone does it and shows me.)
12: I lived in a house that was built in ten early 1900's in what is now a trolley-car suburb. There were some smaller houses next to it that had been developed by the previous owner. She was promised 2 larger ones but it wasn't specified, and there was an apartment building nearby. The guy who built it did not really believe in the inevitability of the automobile, so we had a large carriage house, and there were stalls for horses. I think you could fit a few cars in it.
26: the issue there is also just the sheer low density of it. Even if you decide that an exurb is going to become less car dependent, and you're going to build a tram system (for example), you need so much more investment per resident. Hard to see how a less car-dependent city doesn't just end up surrounded by a Ballard Ring.
I think about the practicalities of owning a car in London quite a lot.
I'm pretty sure I could stop having a car tomorrow without huge inconvenience. I make (literally) two journeys a week that would be inconvenient to do on bike or public transport, but they'd be inconvenient, not impossible, and my street has a Zipcar space that usually has a Zipcar in it, so I could use that.
I do drive to Scotland or Wales/Cornwall a couple of times a year, which I couldn't really do any other way, but, again, I could replace that with a hire car, if I had to. Right now, I don't, because I drive a 10 year old second hand car, long since paid for, with low vehicle tax and no London ULEZ charge, and which costs me less to insure per year, and to maintain for a year, than it would cost me to hire a car a couple of weeks a year and use a Zipcar a couple of hours a week. However, when that car wears out, I'm not sure I'll replace it. The cost/benefit calculation would flip the other way, and it'd be cheaper to just hire a car when I need one, and stick to using a bike and walking the rest of the time.
I currently drive about 3000-4000 miles a year and I think I cycled and walked fairly close to that amount last year. Certainly if we discounted the couple of long multi-hundred mile annual trips, I definitely walked and cycled as much as I drove.
Locally, many suburbs are deliberately car-dependent as a way to enforce economic and racial segregation as well as keep property taxes low. It works because road building is subsidized.
26, 28: Yeah, the exurbs are essentially unsalvageable. They're built on 50+ years of perfecting auto-oriented development, so that every last bit of usefulness by other means has been wrung out. Sure, maybe there used to be a trolley stop that fostered an urbanesque core at one time, but that's been swamped by road and land-use patterns that simply can't be retrofitted by any plausible population.
The "lifestyle centers" that they build now, designed to imitate walkable main streets, could conceivably be turned into actual downtowns if you replaced the parking lots with apartments & townhouses and (say) introduced good bus service to the local urban center. And the number of people you'd fit onto that 40 acre parcel would match the number who already live sprawled around it--so now you have the ghosts of 1000 McMansions on silent culs de sacs. The street system can't sustain tripling the density of those developments, and now you're talking about needing huge numbers of people in--from where!?
It's all quite hopeless absent $8/gal gasoline, and $8 gas would lead to bloody, reactionary revolution long before it resulted in more humane land use patterns.
Final comment on the horse issue: it is wrong to state that cars replaced horses for passenger transport because cars were faster.
Initially, they were not. What they were was cleaner and cheaper.
If you put a horse in a building, you need to shovel a good deal of horse manure every day, or hire someone to do it. Cars do not need this.
Cars also rapidly became cheaper for public transport, and, also importantly, took up less space, both in garages and on the road.
A hansom cab was 3.8 metres long, not including the horse in front of it (so I would guess at least 5m total lane length) 1.25m wide and 2.7m high (not counting the driver on the back, who needed, I would estimate, a good 0.7m of headroom above the cab roof, so 3.4m total height). A Ford Model T was far shorter (2.5m long), slightly wider at 1.7m, and considerably lower at 1.9m - and it didn't have a horse, so you didn't need a separate stable as well as your carriage house/garage.
3: My MIL takes Greyhound when she visits, which is moronic. It's exactly the right sort of distance where high-speed rail makes sense, but it got culture-warred (as did the Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati HSR plan) out of existence: https://hsrail.org/blog/high-speed-rail-hub-cleveland
so now you have the ghosts of 1000 McMansions on silent culs de sacs.
With drained, empty swimming pools - hence "Ballard Ring"...
18: one probably shouldn't complain about other people taking an unnecessarily aggressive and dismissive tone, and in the same breath accuse them of acting like a college debater and tell them to tone it the fuck down!
There are two ways to read 8; (a) "Your style has bugged me for ages and I'm venting about it now." (b) "you have a recognizable style, and it's fine, but I like to be able to ask you to tone it down on occasion, and I'd appreciate it if you would do so for this thread."
I initially read it as (b) which seemed completely reasonable to me, but re-reading it I can see why you might take it as (a). As an observer, I'd like to suggest that we all make an effort to read it as (b), because I think there are a lot of cases where it is easier to say, "I won't mind [X] most of the time" if you can also feel free to say something in specific cases.
Certainly if we discounted the couple of long multi-hundred mile annual trips, I definitely walked and cycled as much as I drove.
I drive and cycle less than you do, but I definitely cycle more than I drive. I own a car because, like you, it's worth it for the times when I need it, but I didn't own a car for many years and also wonder about how necessary it is.
Covid might help the McMansions. A drive that is horrible five days a week isn't bad one day a week. At least for us, one or two days a week in the office is the plan.
Hard to see how a less car-dependent city doesn't just end up surrounded by a Ballard Ring.
Is that made up of a bunch of high rises?
FWIW I found 5 and 6 amusing and literally lolled, it's just not often you see a Fisking these days.
My car use is pretty similar to what ttaM describes, except that in addition to several long car trips per year we also go (at least when there's no pandemic on) to the city an hourish away once a month or so (fancy movie, trader joe's, apple store, better whisky selection, airport, etc.). Also the non-car travel is all walking/biking and never public transit. The slightly ridiculous thing is that the grocery store is no more than 3 blocks away, and like a third of that distance is walking through the parking lot. It really wouldn't be *that* bad to grocery shop without a car, but we'd have to shop at least twice as often.
25: Wrong! Once one has established a tone, one does not get to tone-police that tone. Ever! You moron.
39: Wait, weren't you the one who was saying he had a two hour+ commute pre-COVID?
Sorry to be all "not even that" (I think heebie posted a long time ago about a coworker who overused that phrase but I can't find it now), but I feel like America's car dependence is 90 percent caused by America's political psychoses and can't be fixed until they are. Sure, we can and should try, but there won't be meaningful progress as long as Idaho has the same number of Senators as Massachusetts and more than DC.
As for the article, I won't get into the "ajay: rude or not?" meta-discussion, but I'd disagree with the OP that it's really good or a good read specifically. I thought the language of Cold-War-era leftism was almost comical (the article was originally published by a French guy in 1973), like it should have been published with a mimeograph instead of a Web site. Interesting anthropologically to see "bourgeois" used so much, I guess, but not extra persuasive or enjoyable on its own.
Personally I didn't own a car for over 10 years. I got one in late 2020 for a lot of little reasons, pretty much all of which were tied directly or indirectly to the pandemic. I hope this car lasts until either the kid is grown up or my parents no longer live in Vermont, because those facts make it very useful to have one of our own. After those change, eh, hard to say.
29: With AB & I both self-employed at careers that require site visits, often far-flung*, there's no serious possibility of being completely car-free, but 7000 miles/year for a family of 4 is so far below the USian norm that I don't feel much angst about it. The car can go a week at a time between trips.
That said, there is some temptation in these things. I'm not sure how much actual mileage one could replace, but in terms of number of trips, easily 80% of them could be done by a 35 mph little electric car. And, indeed, those are the trips it kills me to drive, but 40 lbs of groceries is not something I'll bike up hill 50 times a year, and the dog won't fit in the basket. But we get along fine with one car, it seems silly to get a second, even if there's a certain logic to it. Might make more sense if our electricity were 100% renewable.
*Frex yesterday I had a pair of site visits, 12 miles away, then 8, then 7 home. I've actually biked to meetings at both locations, but it would have been 2 1/2 hours of biking in the middle of the work day (vs half that by car), time I can't really spare. And sometimes the meetings are much farther than that.
2: As it happens, I am commuting via DC metro today. At a guess, I'd say cars are less than a quarter-full, and running half as often. But thanks to sound government policy and a cooperative citizenry, Maryland has the lowest case count in the country, and I bet we soon stop killing more than a half-dozen people a day via Covid. I don't have any problem riding the train.0
But when will the federal government return to DC? I hadn't seen the 2024 projection for more normal ridership. My own company is no longer talking about returning people to the office five days a week, and I am about to get on a call wherein I will try to persuade someone that we continue to need an office.
I have, until very recently, been dismissive of the idea that huge, permanent changes are afoot. But I am starting to wonder. I will say this: If people start abandoning cities to the point that I can afford to live in one, that's what I'm going to do.
(The urban equivalent of "Nobody goes there, it's too crowded," is "Nobody wants to live in the city. It's too expensive.")
I haven't had a car for a decade or so, but of course I live one of the places where it's possible. It is oddly embarrassing sometimes to arrange your life to avoid driving -- I'm about to go skiing later in the week by taking a train to Vermont and then a long cab ride from the Amtrak station to a slopeside hotel, and it does very much feel as if I'm doing something that only a weirdo would do. And my elderly father has just stopped driving but is continuing to live alone in a suburban house where there's no way to get anywhere except by driving -- he's managing by taking cabs and getting groceries delivered, but I'm feeling horribly irresponsible not being in a position, due to carlessness, to drive the forty minutes to check up on him a couple of times a week. (I have been pressuring him to move into a nice city apartment, but he's balking. Stupid people wanting to make their own decisions.)
30 and 31: I picked my new town, because it's fairly liberal, we can afford it, and it has a commuter rail stop. They are trying to develop walkable town centers, but most people will need to drive to them. The big thing limiting development though is that most of the town is on private septic systems. They realizie that this is a limitation and want to expand sewer to the small-business areas, butI don't think they are in a hurry to expand public sewers *that* much.
When I was in NYC, I swore by renting cars from Enterprise in the Hudson Valley and getting picked up from Metro North. Beautiful short train ride, all the convenience of a rental car, none of the driving in the city.
There was a brief period where my parents were able to live alone but not able to drive. It was a problem I tried to solve with grocery delivery and home nurses which my dad solved by driving regardless.
You all would not believe how much I drive. Except maybe for the LA commenters. They would at least believe it. It's very, very depressing.
My Honda Odyssey is about to cross 300K, and we bought it at 100K in 2012.
On the other hand, that counts a lot of driving that substituted for plane flights, which has to be worth something environmentally. That's not all daily toil. But the daily toil is still terrible.
I liked the article, but ajay's factual criticisms are definitely accurate and they do undermine the force of the mostly correct conclusions. I found it interesting that his solution was Garden Cities in a form very similar to Howard's original concept, which never really took off in France. (Arguably it never really took off anywhere, but some places did make serious efforts.) I'm currently reading Peter Hall's Cities of Tomorrow, which I've had for years but never got around to reading before, and it's quite good on the intellectual history of planning.
I too get to be smug about my driving. I didn't own a car until 2018 and now mostly only use my car for short trips. However, now all my driving is highway driving because I live in the middle of nowhere. It's 2.5 hours to get plantains or gojuchang at the grocery store. I'd like to take my kid to his babysitter' any bike but, you know, highway with no shoulder and big trucks.
I loved living without a car but I don't know what a community like mine would do without cars (actually I do - boats and trains (very interesting to look at how many rail lines there were historically even in tiny places like my area)). And at least I have a store in town, my colleagues have to drive 2.5 hours to get to anything bigger than a corner store.
I'm within three blocks of a grocery store, but not a very nice one.
I am too, and it's huge, but we're shopping for 6 and I can't bike home with that unless I go multiple times throughout the week.
I mostly drive too. Because groceries are heavy and there's a big hill. But mostly I go to less shitty stores that are a few miles away.
My wife sometimes agitates for us to move to the country. Part of the reason I don't want to is that I like the fact that living in a city makes it possible to lead a life in which almost everything I could want is within walking distance, or if it's not, it's within 45 minutes on public transport. I also just like cities, temperamentally speaking. Financially, though, moving back to Scotland and buying a nice house somewhere in semi-rural Stirlingshire would make a lot of sense.
Sorry. I'm just jealous of people who can be car-less. I miss public transit.
Yeah, carrying groceries means shopping multiple times a week, even living alone. It's not so bad, but I could see it being a drag if you weren't used to it.
During the worst of covid, I was making every effort to go at least ten days without hitting a store. That was a lot of shit to carry.
Also, if I'm already driving a trillion miles, why save four by biking to the grocery store three times a week? I'm also wondering how many city blocks would fit in the parking lot alone of the HEB.
Yeah don't move to the country if your want to integrate exercise into your daily schedule without it being an extra thing to do.
53: Do I remember right that you live on Green Gables Island? During the pandemic I've watched most of the LM Montgomery Extended Universe with my kids, and I was struck by how much of a role the trains play. Avonlea has a train station!
37: It was part of my decision. Where I live the train is 5 minutes away by car and 15 minutes by bike, BUT it costs 2.5 times what a subway ticket costs and the monthly passes are expensive and don't include a transfer to the subway. My hospital is right at the train station, so that's doable. Right now if I'm home 3 days, then my office is home, and I can get travel reimbursed. If I go in to the city 1 day every few weeks, go somewhere car-dependent on the other days, a $28 day ($10 each way plus parking) is manageable. $300 commuter rail is pricey. Those trains seem to be run by a private company and have conductors which has to add to the cost.
I really like small city life. You don't need a car most of the time, but also don't need to go on hour long public transit slogs. Plus it's not a huge pain to have a car that you don't use the way it often is in large cities. I don't think I'd like living in the actual country. Inner suburbs can have a similar feel (e.g. Berkeley had a lot in common with living in the small city I grew up in or the large town I live in now). I don't really care whether my twice a month trip into the city is by public transit or by car, so long as on a daily basis I'm only walking or biking.
I think of myself as living in the big city but that's probably not true.
59: My pet fantasy would be bringing back regular delivery, and I don't mean on-demand Instacart, but having a milkman deliver certain staple goods on a set schedule. 2 pints of milk delivered 2X week or half a gallon once a week for a fairly low fee, because everybody else in the neighborhood also had milk delivered would be great. We do currently get toilet paper and paper towels shipped, because it's easier to monitor stock that way during the pandemic. Going to the store and finding them out of stock was a consistent drag.
We had a milkman service in Berkeley when we lived in the hills!
On the meta-thread: here's the deal. Guest posts are submitted by other commenters and put up for general discussion, but there's always an implicit "Hi, this is lurid keyaki. I read this interesting article about [corvid ethology etc] and I really liked it. Wondered what other people thought?" When the comments dive immediately into saying "it's absolute shit for ten different reasons," there is very little response the guest-poster can give that isn't awkward as hell. These links aren't just served up by algorithms; there's a person behind them who wants to have a conversation that isn't unpleasant for them. Maybe the fundamental disagreement is whether it's actually rude to respond to "what do you think of this?" with "I hate it, it's terrible." Most of us have some way of finessing this in face-to-face conversation. These range from the exceedingly accommodating "I might not be the ideal audience for this, can you say more about what good things you see in it?" -- no one but the most sensitive would be hurt there -- to "oh God not that, it's the fucking worst, sorry." I also think there's a subset of people arguing online who are very committed to the virtues of brutal honesty, see it as not just permissible but actually desirable, and are scrupulous about not taking any offense when someone belittles their opinions. (I don't think we have any of these here, but it is an extreme I've seen elsewhere.) This is not... how to put it... a pluralistic approach to social interaction.
Sometimes people use guest posts to troll. I have of course never engaged in such low behavior. But on the whole, I think people are actively uninterested in starting a fight when they share stuff.
We had a milkman in our very small town.
my kid is part of a wonderfully passionate & smart group of transit activists, among them a local high schooler who persistently obtains internal agency documents via local foia-type ordinances & it is fucking glorious. he's gotten email chains complaining about his success in obtaining docs! 🤣🤣🤣 i adore them all 💓 they are suuuuper against jarrett walker (hisss!!!! booo!!!!) - also glorious casting as the villain of the piece.
everyone in the greater sf bay area should support via donation alfred twu's run for ac transit board/at large seat. oh wouldn't it be grand if twu were our governor???? i can dream.
65: I moved to the other island in the Maritimes. How are you enjoying Anne With an E?! It was very controversial.
Here's an example of what it used to look like with rail lines. From Charlottetown to 'Avonlea' is currently impossible to do by public transit.
https://rollymartincountry.blogspot.com/2016/03/prince-edward-island-railway-timetable.html?m=0
70 and 72: I can get it here too, but the minimum order size and delivery fee means that I don't. I figure that both could come down in price if a couple of companies/farms delivered to everybody in town.
70 and 72: I can get it here too, but the minimum order size and delivery fee means that I don't. I figure that both could come down in price if a couple of companies/farms delivered to everybody in town.
71 expresses things more precisely & eloquently than i would ever muster the energy to laboriously peck out on my phone. of course everyone is free to remain completely committed to ranting w/o any mind to where & how directed, will thereby run risk of occasionally being told to fuck off.
Further to 76. Purchases under $10.00 have a $7.25 delivery fee. It goes down to $5.25 if you get $15.00 or more. They do sell ice cream expensive meat and some other stuff, but I don't want to pay $17.25 for the amount of milk I drink. $6.00 to a local farm might be ok, because it's local and I save on gas/needing to go to the store every week, but $17.25 is too much.
71. I would respond with "fair and balanced" had the phrase not been tarnished by misuse. Perhaps there's hope for a revival-- so, 71: fair and balanced.
73: What's wrong with Jarrett Walker?
74: I have thoughts! I was not a big fan of "Anne with an E". It seemed like it was trying too hard to add 'gritty' dramatic elements that weren't in the novel, which struck me as a sign that the show-runners hadn't thought too deeply about the source material. (All the grit you need is right there in the novel.) The actor who played Anne was very good, but I didn't like the choice to make her play Anne as over-the-top 'troubled'; I think it undermines the character.
But also, I'm named after Anne's adoptive father and my sister is named after the main character in another LMM series, so I'm probably too invested.
The Other Island is my preferred island. What side of the Bras D'Or are you on?
oh wouldn't it be grand if twu were our governor?
I follow Twu on Twitter. Seems crazy bright and talented (those drawings!) and all the right policies.
jw is in the tank for system "efficiencies" & anti free service so they'll always be agin him bc they are *radical* transit activists & then they got their hands on some ill considered internal emails by mr walker. basically they are huge pitas doing their best to advocate for better transit service for all san franciscans & i love 'em. will they ever achieve all their aims? no is it glorious to have them go full crank fighting the good fight? hell yes.
also they go on these insane day long transit-only quests to the most unlikely places, - rio vista, pescadero, mountain everlovin house????? - adorable. 💕
Ah, that other island, I was thinking the other other island (which I hadn't realized is not actually a maritime despite the literal meaning of the word?).
I find the geography of the maritimes very confusing because I always forget that they're way further east than I think but also further south than I think. I was feeling sad last summer about not traveling to Scotland and was brainstorming where else I should look for good cold weather beaches. I realized "aha! I bet New Scotland has some beaches that look like Scotland!" and indeed they do, but it's literally a 25 hour drive. That's barely closer than the Pacific! (The halfway point between Chicago and Halifax on the southern route is Albany!?)
Another example that kind of blew my mind this week was the relative positions of Nova Scotia and Bermuda.
How the fuck did Bermuda get there?
I guess volcanoes. I had thought it was a Caribbean Island.
I feel like volcanic islands are more of a Pacific thing.
This is sort of the point of the "Bermuda Triangle", it's actually out in the ocean pretty far from land. Anyway, the geography is an atoll on top of an old dead shield volcano hotspot. Kind of like a larger Midway or Laysan but if the main Hawaiian islands didn't exist because the hotspot went away.
More power to teens loving transit.
That said, IMO transit outreach needs a clear boundary with more general homelessness social services. It can't be the job of transit agencies to provide comfortable shelter.
87 gets it exactly right, NASA puts it: "Islands formed in this manner are called atolls, and while atolls are not uncommon in the Pacific, Bermuda is the only atoll in the Atlantic Ocean."
They should put that in their tourist slogan.
I was trying to figure out the other day what the most economically well off country that was majority black was, but couldn't find something that had all countries and used a reasonable measure (some kind of median rather than a GDP per person which is unusable for places with offshore banking). (Not that Bermuda is exactly a country.)
yes they are all over the costs of fare enforcement (let alone the grotesque ways it is inevitably implemented) vs chronic underfunding of support services for folks living on the streets or otherwise struggling.
unrelatedly am packing for a work trip & having to face the fact that my lucky silk covered vintage pucci flats have a limited future life, this is really bumming me out.
80: I can't even describe Matthew's death without choking up. And yes, too much unnessicary gritty-ness was my feeling (why I skipped it, besides Matthew's death). LMM just has a huge undercurrent of sorrow that doesn't really NEED to be played up.
I'm on the west side, in French country.
83: We're very particular about maritime vs. Maritime vs. Atlantic provinces. Also about the pronunciation of the big island.
Distances within here are weird too. It takes forever to drive anywhere. Like 100 km takes 1.5 hours somehow.
Cuba always throws me off. It's like right there. And the latitudes of Europe. I need to look at a globe more.
84: think the climate of Bermuda is kind of interesting. It's not really a winter destination - more like April to October. Jet Blue use to have ads in the subway highlighting the fact that they could get you to a hotel in Bermuda faster than you can drive to the Cape.
84: New Orleans is west of all of South America.
I try to be good about local shibboleths (Shetland not the Shetlands, Kama'aina and Hawaiian mean different things etc.), but haven't actually been to the maritimes yet so haven't learned them there.
96: Cape Cod. It's not totally comparable, but I did think about pricing out cheap flight and an air b n b, vs renting a house on Cape Cod and the aggravation of Cape Cod traffic. For 2 people, it might not cost that much more. 1 person who would have to rent a car to get to Hyannis might find. Bermuda vacation more affordable.
they are these: https://images.app.goo.gl/SuDRUXkBqjzDLeLo7
not exactly those individual shoes obvs i love them so. indeed i am loving them to death.
re: 94
Yeah, Aberdeen is further north than Sitka, Alaska, and the Shetlands are further north than the southernmost tip of Greenland. Europe is really far north when compared to the USA.
Maybe you can wear crocs until you get to the hotel?
I remember Lancaster in June and thinking how the fuck do people sleep here when it's night for like four hours only.
Lancaster in England. I've never been to the one in Pennsylvania.
Yeah, the two northernmost places I've been are weirdly almost exactly the same latitude: Fraser, BC (at the top of the pass into the Yukon) and Shetland.
The southernmost place I've been (Franz Josef Glacier, New Zealand) is only 43.4 compared to 60.5 in Eshaness Shetland.
94:1: Exactly!
My dad's from Cheticamp. He's still got a little cabin in St JdM. I love it but you're exactly right about the distances. (also: that wind is absurd.)
My 'that can't be right!' latitude fact is that Edinburgh is north of Labrador City. I spent a winter in Edinburgh once without a winter jacket.
The way to get less confused by latitude is to think about daylight hours rather than weather. It may not be cold in Edinburgh in the winter, but it's definitely dark! (This can be tricky with Scotland though because you have to remember the sun is still there even if you haven't seen it in days.)
I think the furthest south I've ever been is Disney World.
It is always such a privilege to work with Twu. I expect great things.
Epcot *is* Disney World. At any rate, Epcot is south of Magic Kingdom.
Disney's Hollywood Studios is even further south than Epcot!
It didn't exist when I was last there.
45
But when will the federal government return to DC?
No idea. My office had been reevaluating it every two weeks since November if not earlier. Last week they announced that the next phase of going back would start on Feb. 28. But we don't know what that means for my team specifically; we might never be asked/told to go back in person on a regular basis. I like living where I do. The fact that it's biking distance from my office is one reason but not the only reason. If my job officially becomes mostly/totally remote, the only changes for me might be needing to plan exercise and socializing more.
103: stan smiths for flights & cab or car to-from airport & hotel!
btw seriously wth is up with the terminal deterioration of la's cabs? were always pretty lame, now hopeless. can only get them at airport & even then sometimes they run out. have given up on trying to get one from hotel to lax, so have to order a car & harangue them to just send a damn sedan rather than a sherman tank. whole sitch absurd & depressing would be fixed with a damn train.
I haven't been to Los Angeles since 1985, but I'm going to guess the problem is Uber.
108: Ha! Now I'm guessing your last name based on that. I work with one but he's from an Ingonish family.
Agree winds here are crazy. We have an amazing view - mountains on one side, ocean on the other - but that means no wind break (also cuts down on the bugs).
The local transit agency is commissioning a bus-network redesign which seems to be entirely anti-JW. From appearances it's based on the idea of maximizing the number of people who could ever get a bus, but with zero consideration of how long it takes to get anywhere or of how things connect - just lots of long, meandering lines spread out across the streetscape, taking two hours to get from one far-flung suburb, through part of the city, and then out to another suburb. I half-suspect the entire project as being an attempt at sandbagging the whole concept. The other half, though, I'm terrified that it might actually get implemented.
I remember Lancaster in June and thinking how the fuck do people sleep here when it's night for like four hours only.
Blackout curtains.
Re: car-oriented development, I'm a big fan of the Not Just Bikes Youtube channel and the Strong Towns movement that inspired it, but I do worry it's mainly because they confirm my prejudices as a non-car owner. Feel free to demolish them with facts, Ajay.
122: What does JW stand for? And is this open to review by the public for comment?
121: the name translates loosely to "soft (diminutive)."
It's only been in the last generation or so that people have really built houses with that 'ocean + mountain' view. My grandparents' generation-- and my dad's-- built down in the valley, I think out of a reasonable fear that their houses would get blown into the sea. (That actually happened to the roof of the school in the Moine.) My dad's cabin has a beautiful view of the mountains, or it would, if there was a window in the wall facing the mountains. But there isn't, because, well, wind.
My grandparents are buried in the cemetery in the Moine. At sunset, it's the most beautiful cemetery in the world. Mountains to one side, sun setting over the sea to the other.
bostonienne "jw" refers to jarret walker, a well known (as these things go) transit consultant. he's known for 1) (re)designing transit systems to (re)balance coverage vs efficiency, and 2) beefs with nole ksum. see e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-20/elon-musk-doesn-t-understand-why-mass-transit-succeeds
the thing about sf is that there is no *good* reason to not have a dense, nay duplicative!, frequent & cheap cheap cheapity cheap system. lots of bad reasons, sure.
126: Thank you for the background DQ! I am very invested in Nathan's transit system and would like it to be improved.
I was recently in the BA and was surprised by how underutilized mass transit was during the day. It should be free, of course.
Now it's time for me to quit procrastinating and go get in my car and drive home. Wind-chill is well below 0 F, but I only have 3/4ths of a block to walk to my car. It'll still be cold most of the way home . . .
128: Do you have remote start and heated seats? So worth it in moments like that.
No remote start. It takes less than 10 mins to get home, so the seat warmer only just gets really noticeable when it's time to get out.
It doesn't work for cars, but you can warm toilet seats with rubbing alcohol and a match.
I mean, it works for cars. It works for anything.
89: someone else must have noticed this, but it's become absolutely normalized that any policy proposal (or startup, or fad diet, or idea, or blog comment) must solve *literally all the problems*. No you can't have better buses - the buses have to solve homelessness *as well*. I am not sure when this started but it's really common. The other thing involved is just generalized rhetorical escalation.
32: another thing on the Gorz - I am not convinced cars were all that much of a "mechanical mystery" even when he was writing. Replace a spark plug compared with literally any exercise in farriery? This is of course much less true of today's small data centres on wheels although they don't demand anywhere near as much maintenance. But the main thing here is just that it's a New Left trope and he's using it. It's interesting that he came down on the side of garden city/semi rural rather than, like the situationists, going Jane Jacobs on steroids.
133.2: true. Pre-1930 cars broke down a *lot* more but they could be maintained and repaired remarkably easily. If you drove, you had to know how to maintain. And, often, they were maintained by the exact same people who did horse maintenance. I'm rereading "The Nine Tailors", set around 1928 or so, and one of the characters puts his car into a ditch and bends the front axle, and the response is to get some horses, drag car out of ditch, and tow it to the village blacksmith, who is quite happy to take the axle off and straighten it again.
This went on into the 50s and 60s. Dave Barry had a rather insightful column about some 50s pop songs having really quite a lot of technical detail about cars, because it was stuff you had to know to keep driving - "I have a Honda Accord. It has a 1.6 litre engine. That is, I assume it has an engine. I've never had a reason to look. There could be anything under there.")
I like the fact that living in a city makes it possible to lead a life in which almost everything I could want is within walking distance, or if it's not, it's within 45 minutes on public transport. I also just like cities, temperamentally speaking. Financially, though, moving back to Scotland and buying a nice house somewhere in semi-rural Stirlingshire would make a lot of sense.
We have managed to split the difference on this by finding a house in a small town which is cycling or walking distance from work, shops, etc, but still has countryside etc nearby - we're currently right out in the country and you have to drive to get anywhere except the one pub 15 minutes walk away, which is a bit of a grind.
No cinema in the new town, though, which is a pity; we're thinking of opening one, consisting of an old coach house, a laptop, a projector, a big white sheet, and Barry Freed as projectionist and film chooser.
I'm in!
I didn't realize you'd already made the big move out of London. Congrats though you'll be much missed at any future meetups.
135:. Aha! So that was the new job Barry was hinting at!
We're currently negotiating his flexitime contract, as he will naturally also be expected to solve 1 local murder per week. The sticking point is that Barry is holding out for a level of quirkiness in his assistant which we regard as impractical to sustain on a long-term basis.
To say nothing of the depopulation issues that 1 local murder per week will lead to.
No, we have a plan to keep replenishing the population through encouraging immigration. Barry's hiring followed the mysterious violent death of our previous projectionist.
Speaking of not being able to build your way out of the roads being jammed, a few years ago they were talking about how they absolutely had to have a way for more cars to get into the city from the eastern suburbs. Then they gave up. I think it was all about getting funds for the Mon-Fayette Express way, which they got. Only it doesn't connect places people want to go because there are neighborhoods in the way.
That is, they built a road that is useless for getting from the eastern suburbs to the city. Still only two lanes into the city.
I always wondered what sort of attractions Cabot Cove held that kept people moving there despite the horrific violent crime rates.
Old people liked moving there because it was the one place where they'd never meet anyone under thirty who wasn't stupid. And because Sheriff Tupper had a ten inch penis and no actual work to do.
Anyway, highway projects never die. The Mon-Fay was planned as a way to connect centers of steel production and over the years shifted to being a way to revitalize areas hurt by the collapse of the steel industry. Anything but spending on the transit system or non-highway roads.
some 50s pop songs having really quite a lot of technical detail about cars
Andrews Sisters songs often have a technical reference to music. I've wondered before whether their audiences had more musicians in them.
146:. There was a time not that long ago, when selling sheet music was a big business.
My mom lives very well without a car in downtown Tel Aviv, but as we discovered when we got caught in a horrible traffic jam coming back into the city during a typical rush hour, it has become very car-centric. My sense is that many people said they should try to avoid the mistakes of American cities, but for most Israelis becoming like America was the dream.
Andrews Sisters songs often have a technical reference to music.
And indeed:
I heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the LORD,
But you don't really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this,
The fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall, the major lift...
149: obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2583
Also: https://the-accompanist.net/track/993143/the-song-that-goes-like-this-from-the-musical-spamalot-in-f
Would watch 138. Perhaps as a substitute for extreme quirkiness you could consider the assistant having a *different* regional accent or red hair?
151: hmm. The Selkie could step in, I guess, if she puts on an accent...
Also the area floods periodically (this week, for example) which has all sorts of possibilities for the big end-of-season finale episode.
149: Oddly, it appears that the Andrews Sisters are one of the few musical acts that have not covered this song.
I had not thought about how Bermuda was fairly unique. I think I assumed the Cayman's would be characterized as an atoll, but I guess the difference is that they are composed of limestone and dolomite that were uplifted, not a reef on a volcano.
This article (paywalled, sort of) from Natil Geo gives the details: "The volcano that built Bermuda is unlike any other on Earth"
"After 50 years of people doing geochemical research on oceanic lavas, no one has found the signature we've found in Bermuda,"
Surprise Nova Scotia connection: To crack the case, the team examined a 2,600-foot-long pillar of rock that is the only core sample taken from Bermuda. Drilled from near an airport back in 1972, the core had been kept in storage at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia and was gathering dust.
That's why you should always cover your core samples with a cloth.
There's an Etsy shop, but you wouldn't believe the cost for a hand-stitched core cozy.
147: And absolutely lasted into the Andrews Sisters' era. The piano I inherited from my grandfather has a bench full of standards from the '40s, as well as individual pieces of classical music. Largely individual pieces, not books.
Went to see the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and the conductor said that in the 1920's, there were 30,000 orchestras in America. (I just checked. There are about 20,000 towns so maybe 30,000 orchestras is possible if half of them had two orchestras. Maybe 30,000 is high.) So that audience would understand when the Andrews Sisters sing about "eight to the bar".
I had kinda pooh-poohed Jane Jacob's statement that civilization can lose things and then lose the knowledge that we had them but the concept of 30,000 orchestras in America made me re-think that.
155, 156; Maybe it was on purpose.
"We accept any and all dust. Help us meet our goal, only 8,500,000 motes to go!"
The secret cord: https://twitter.com/bshoup/status/1336423185999388678
I am so confused by the trucker convoys.
My sister works for a port and is their liaison to the drayage fleet (apparently drayage means "drives port cargo") and meets hundreds of truckers. She says they are fifty-year-old immigrant men. In three years, she doubts she's met one for whom English was their first language. So who are the truckers making up the right-wing trucker convoy? Non-drayage and the demographics are different? Fifty-year old immigrant men are deeply right wing?
My other question is that truckers seem to be independent contractors whose livelihoods depend on trucks that cost at least $100K and a whole lot more if they are new. How can those people be risking having their livelihood and such a big capital investment impounded?
Back when I was going to a lot of demolition derbies, the best one I went to had an RV derby. Oh my. RV's are made of cardboard and duct tape. They are so, so flimsy.
I had kinda pooh-poohed Jane Jacob's statement that civilization can lose things and then lose the knowledge that we had them but the concept of 30,000 orchestras in America made me re-think that.
At some point I picked up a CD, for the title as much as anything, Music of a bygone era with a variety of what used to be piano standards.
It was odd to read the CD booklet and realize that performer used to have his own television show and had played piano in stadiums for tens of thousands of people.
All sorts of live entertainment used to be more common, and attract more people -- square dancing, rodeos, swim meets, etc.
It is absolutely a loss, and a cultural shift, and it's particularly visible in the classical music world* but it's not just an upper/middle-brow phenomenon.
168 ctd, from the wikipedia page, this is an entertaining article.
Yet it's also a career uniquely reflective of its times, and virtually any conversation with Glazer glitters with musical lore. He played vaudeville in his teens; had his own television show during the early 1950s, that medium's golden age; and, with his wife, Ruth, co-founded a concert series in Maine during the state's 1970s cultural renaissance. In the 1930s he studied with both Artur Schnabel, a leading interpreter of the Viennese masters, and with Arnold Schoenberg, whose atonal compositions were the antithesis of Viennese lyricism. A longtime champion of contemporary composers, Glazer nonetheless devoted his latest recording to the showy salon pieces that were in fashion during his youth.
"It's all part of the same life to him, and what's really valuable is that he gives us a sense of the continuity of musical life," says Parakilas. It's something particularly valuable for students, to whom, say, American composer Aaron Copland "seems as old as Bach," Parakilas says. "Frank knew Aaron Copland. That allows him to put things in perspective." ...
This has been a good comment thread because it is reminding me to put all the Northern California demolition derbies on this year's calendar.
161 is great (also I've never seen one of those signs; mind-boggling).
159.last: To me that concept is very believable because so much of urban and architectural history is like that. The upstairs doors in my house are pine faux-painted by hand to look like oak; that was a common thing 100+ years ago, essentially unknown now. The semi-mythical transcontinental interurban trolley route.
I saw somebody a week or two ago talking about how we have a cultural memory of milkmen because they were embedded in cartoons and sitcoms and such, but they were wondering about similarly quotidian things that had passed out of memory because they didn't make that leap.
Twitter is kind of fascinating on this mode: on the one hand, formerly obscure knowledge gains heft as the knowers can find each other, then becomes visible to dilettantes. Actually, I'd put the aforementioned interurbans in that category: time was the only people who held that knowledge were rail buffs and transit-minded urbanists. But now I'd bet that anybody on Twitter with even a casual interest in transit is aware of it. But on the other hand, you see cultural memory dying in real time, as you see things like millennials who cannot grasp that there was a reason for the 1994 Crime Bill other than evil politicians. Like, one of the central facts about the world in which Gen Xers were born and raised--mass urban crime--simply isn't on the radar of a lot of people born after 1990.
re: 168
I have one of his Satie recordings on vinyl. I found it in a second hand shop, years ago, and picked it up as I knew he was meant to be known for Satie.
re: the musical continuity thing mentioned in 169, Charles Rosen's book Piano Notes is pretty amazing. Rosen died in 2012, and was performing more or less right to the end. Amazingly, Rosen was taught by Moriz Rosenthal, who was taught piano by Liszt and philosophy by Brentano. So, there was only one degree of separation between Rosen and Liszt, and two between Rosen and Chopin. When he talks about how Liszt or Chopin played something, he was talking from having spoken to people who heard them in the flesh.
I taught the Lead-Crime Hypothesis and Thomas Midgley Jr (hat tip to LB) just last night.
Dialing a phone number to get the time.
re: 175
I highly recommend "Piano Notes". He's a brilliant writer and memoirist, and manages to combine anecdote with accessible writing about music theory, performance, the history of art, etc. It's a short, witty read, too.
My fencing teacher once told a story about a guy he fenced with that ended with "and he was fencing master to president Teddy Roosevelt."
Seattle has milk delivery, which grew a lot during the early pandemic (I treasure the memory of their note saying that, as dairy, they were scrupulous about cleanliness standards. "Our industry had to be regulated to limit cholera and TB!" they did not explain.) I don't know if they're keeping customers; I hope so, for the density/efficiency reasons. They are carrying an interesting assortment of more stuff for surprisingly grocery-store-equivalent prices.
OTOH we didn't bury our waterfront highway. Or not really; we buried the one that was on a viaduct, but the smaller surface road beside it got a whole lot bigger. They try to call it a boulevard but it's more pleasant for cars than people so far. I try not to worry about it as AFAIK it doesn't float and therefore sealevel rise is likely to enforce a road diet.
some 50s pop songs having really quite a lot of technical detail about cars, because it was stuff you had to know to keep driving
♫ I got it one piece at a time,
and it didn't cost me a dime ♫
Well, it's a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56
'57, '58' 59' automobile...
similarly quotidian things that had passed out of memory because they didn't make that leap
Cleaning the knives is my favorite of these. Forbes, in youth, was slightly besieged in a warehouse in China with only other male foreign clerks, so they had to actually do the housekeeping chores themselves, and they made the Portuguese clean the knives.
172.2 is super common in classical music that your teacher comes from a "line" & often it's not that many generations to get back to a "big name".
164: the Canadian 'trucker' convoy wasn't really a convoy of truckers. There are something like 500,000 commercial trucks in Canada, and more than 300,000 truckers. At its peak in Ottawa there were around 400 trucks involved. I'm going to drive past that many trucks on the 401 this evening. Overwhelmingly the people in Ottawa were just your regular fascist-adjacent conspiracy-theorizing white guys who drive F-150s, not big rigs.
More than 15% of Canadian truckers are South Asian, and the vaccination rate among truckers is the same as in the general population. This was pure astroturfing.
The 401 was insane traffic. Not as bad as New Jersey, but bad.
183: You probably have a Castilian clean your knives.
183: It's obviously done that way because then your fingerprints aren't on the knife. Of course nowadays it's done with DNA matching.
172, 181: this is gloriously true in dance. my first contemporary teacher had literally danced with William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt, and Forsythe worked with Merce Cunningham. Not long ago, A/nna du B/oisson literally broke out a correction she got from *Rudi* in the middle of her weekday open class.
There's something interesting in that although it's the most alien-to-me thing I regularly do, it also hits just where that kind of ultra blokey regimental lineage thing does.
183: Cleaning the knives in Europe was Very Hard Work, but very strongly marked as male work, although maidservants did what seems like even heavier dirtier work. There were special tools and clothes and bags and inventions until the invention of stainless steel made it moot.
Apparently, in the unsettled conditions of a siege, "hard" won out over "manly". I assumed Forbes' behavior on the way to his opium fortune wouldn't be taken as admirable.
re: 187
You get the same thing in some styles of martial art where lineage is very carefully described and taken seriously. People go to a lot of trouble to fake their position in some lineage, too, especially where there's some cachet, financial or otherwise, to be had in claiming a connection to some person or other.
In western martial arts, there might be celebrity coaches, but the idea of a lineal transmission is much less of a thing.
189: regular feature of novels from the period, "the boy who cleans the knives and boots". Low-status male servant work.
I spent a while looking for why it's male -- it just was, so far back that it may be left over from when any steel knife was a treasure of the house and there was a special servant for them.
Boots possibly the same. Blackleading the range and scrubbing the doorsill white, female.
Anecdotally, cleaning the silverware was also man's work. Washing dishes and cooking utensils, maid's work.
I can't remember who cleaned the silverware when I was growing up and mom would get out the real stuff for Christmas.
194: In my household, Stevens insisted on doing it himself.
194: In one of my grandmothers' houses, that was part of what the women of the family were expected to turn up early and do for every feast while the men were fishing and/or watching football. This persisted well into the era of all the adults having paid jobs and the women having to take vacation days to clean.
We were also pretending to enjoy the togetherness, and maybe most of us were, and in hindsight it was valuable experience, but it was also stressful and unfair.
The other grandmother just used the good silver so regularly that it stayed pretty shiny. Put it through the dishwasher, in fact.
Nobody in my family fished and we watched just enough football that no one would think we were communists. That said, my dad didn't really cook or clean until my mom lost her memory.
187: Stevens read this, gasped one last time, and died. Blessed release!
199: How did that happen? It was supposed to be "197.3:"
I have inherited the cooking grandmother's recipe notebooks. So many cake recipes, carefully noted with who they're from. I don't know if they ate that much cake or if cake recipes were an abstract social currency.
Or a way to pass coded information to the OSS.