Sunday, December 9, 2012
Coffee Cake Mom Style
This was a recipe of a wintertime childhood favorite - coffee cake that my Mom used to make and serve at breakfast. From a folded out envelope, I typed out what I could read of the ingredients and instructions. Nothing better on a cold winter morning. I think I might have misread the instructions. The butter, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla extract are not mixed into the flour but drizzled onto the cake dough. The crossed out sugar ingredient in the cake dough might be 3 tsp sugar? (Click the pic to enlarge in a separate tab)
Astrology
The pseudoscience of astrology dates as far back as 2300 BCE in the Babylonian and Sumerian kingdoms. Astrology posits that the configuration of stars and planets at one's birth controls ones destiny. Early Christians would have been familiar with, if not adherents of, this science of divination. 300 - 400 years after the newborn science of astronomy began to depose astrology, people still believe in this system of fate. A similar concept of fate is the Catholic, or Christian, concept of original sin; that the act of being born a human being marks one as sinful and doomed to eternal perdition except for the saving grace of Jesus Christ. The concept of fate is popular - as it was fated to be.
The Good Old Days
Are you fascinated with the stream of interesting things one encounters every day? Some of it hints at an underlying order, or the solution to a mystery. Some of it is contradictory. A few years ago I found a few old newspaper pages in the wall of a building built just before World War I. While reading it, I was struck by the fact that, almost a hundred years later, there was little to distinguish the news of that day with the news of this day. Someone had been run over by a horse in the downtown area; that piece of news was unusual for our current age. What really distinguished the newspaper were the ads for "new" electrical products like an iron and the deals on agricultural feeds that one would not find today in the newspaper of a major city.
I wondered about the men who had constructed the building and what their day was like over a hundred years ago. Had they read the newspaper while taking a morning break? Did they worry about war? How did they get to work that day? Did they have a family, children? Did they dream about what the future would be like? It seems like people of all ages conjure up visions of the future.
We leave so much behind in the dust as we carry our dreams along our trail. This is some of that dust.
I miss the good old days when science fiction started becoming reality:
- a phone that was not attached to a wall. One of the early cell phones, the system consisted of a corded phone attached to a big black box mounted under the front seat of my van, with an external antenna mounted on the roof. I sat in my car and made phone calls just like Gene Barry did in Burke's Law (look it up). The service cost $200 a month ($420 in inflation adjusted dollars) plus ungodly per minute charges but it was cheaper than driving a few miles to find a pay phone that worked in order to return a page from a customer.
- voice pagers. No longer did I have to pay a service to answer the phone, then periodically call in to get messages. Now an operator would send a voice message like "Call Joe at 555-1212." After several years, the new and improved system would allow - sit down, now - a caller to send a message directly to the pager.
- a box that heated stuff really fast. A Montgomery Ward 500 watt microwave with a roasting broiler element could cook a small roast in 25 minutes and heat up leftovers in a minute or so. That brusier weighed 60 lbs and lasted almost 20 years before the magnetron unit went out.
- a TV channel that showed movies with no commercials! HBO marketed a system with a roof-mounted microwave antenna that I pointed northwest to the broadcast tower on a nearby mountain. Included in the package were the signal broadcasts of the local stations that my rabbit ear antenna couldn't get very well because I was at the bottom of a hill in a large western city.
- The power of a computer. In 1988, I bought a Compaq DeskPro model, an IBM clone, with a whopping 20MB hard drive, one so huge that it would last me a lifetime before I filled it up, or so the salesman said. It lasted 6 years until I loaded the Windows 3.1 operating system and ran out of room soon after. The Windows operating system was infamous for its bloated size. In the late nineties, a reporter asked a NASA engineer if they used one of the newer Intel Pentium computer chips to navigate rockets to the space shuttle. The engineer answered that they used a "486", an older 1980s chip architecture. When the reporter expressed amazement that NASA would use such outdated technology, the engineer responded, "Well, it isn't Windows. It's rocket science."
- RAM that was almost as expensive as silver. In the early nineties, I spent $40 to get an additional 8MB "stick" of RAM, the short term memory of a computer. Computers today have several hundred times more short term memory. When I needed another 8MB of memory, I found out the mother board on my computer had no more room for memory sticks. So I had to fork out a lot of money to replace all the old memory sticks with larger capacity sticks. A 1GB memory stick - with 125 times more capacity - now costs $10.
- The wonder of tele-computing, of electronically "talking" to other people hundreds of miles away. I dialed into a bulletin board (look it up) via a "speedy" 1200 baud modem. This was 7000 times slower than the current 8+MB download, but four times faster than the 300 baud modem I had used earlier. I would download the latest messages, topics of discussion, then close the phone connection. I would then read the messages offline, respond, dial in again and upload any response. There were hundreds of communities of people who shared information, experiences, and - yes - gripes.
- Tele-computing with no long distance phone charges! AOL for DOS. Using a local phone number, I could access AOL, which had their own graphical interface (as many apps did in the late eighties, early nineties) to access news, weather, financial, message boards, email. I bought access time in one hour blocks.
- The first time I pulled the trigger on a Makita Cordless Drill - mid 1980s, I think. Free at last from the bounds of electricity! Well, almost. I think it was 7.2 Volts and ran out of juice pretty quick. A few years later Makita came out with a 9.6 volt model that had good power (for the time).
- Sometime in the late 1980s, early1990s, tire technology improved a lot. Driving around town a lot, I used to get my fair share of flat tires. I think I have had one flat in the past few years.
- Carbeuretors. Oh, wait, I don't miss those. I have one on my old Grumman Step Van.
- Last, but not least, I miss loved ones - and liked ones - and really liked ones.
I wondered about the men who had constructed the building and what their day was like over a hundred years ago. Had they read the newspaper while taking a morning break? Did they worry about war? How did they get to work that day? Did they have a family, children? Did they dream about what the future would be like? It seems like people of all ages conjure up visions of the future.
We leave so much behind in the dust as we carry our dreams along our trail. This is some of that dust.
I miss the good old days when science fiction started becoming reality:
- a phone that was not attached to a wall. One of the early cell phones, the system consisted of a corded phone attached to a big black box mounted under the front seat of my van, with an external antenna mounted on the roof. I sat in my car and made phone calls just like Gene Barry did in Burke's Law (look it up). The service cost $200 a month ($420 in inflation adjusted dollars) plus ungodly per minute charges but it was cheaper than driving a few miles to find a pay phone that worked in order to return a page from a customer.
- voice pagers. No longer did I have to pay a service to answer the phone, then periodically call in to get messages. Now an operator would send a voice message like "Call Joe at 555-1212." After several years, the new and improved system would allow - sit down, now - a caller to send a message directly to the pager.
- a box that heated stuff really fast. A Montgomery Ward 500 watt microwave with a roasting broiler element could cook a small roast in 25 minutes and heat up leftovers in a minute or so. That brusier weighed 60 lbs and lasted almost 20 years before the magnetron unit went out.
- a TV channel that showed movies with no commercials! HBO marketed a system with a roof-mounted microwave antenna that I pointed northwest to the broadcast tower on a nearby mountain. Included in the package were the signal broadcasts of the local stations that my rabbit ear antenna couldn't get very well because I was at the bottom of a hill in a large western city.
- The power of a computer. In 1988, I bought a Compaq DeskPro model, an IBM clone, with a whopping 20MB hard drive, one so huge that it would last me a lifetime before I filled it up, or so the salesman said. It lasted 6 years until I loaded the Windows 3.1 operating system and ran out of room soon after. The Windows operating system was infamous for its bloated size. In the late nineties, a reporter asked a NASA engineer if they used one of the newer Intel Pentium computer chips to navigate rockets to the space shuttle. The engineer answered that they used a "486", an older 1980s chip architecture. When the reporter expressed amazement that NASA would use such outdated technology, the engineer responded, "Well, it isn't Windows. It's rocket science."
- RAM that was almost as expensive as silver. In the early nineties, I spent $40 to get an additional 8MB "stick" of RAM, the short term memory of a computer. Computers today have several hundred times more short term memory. When I needed another 8MB of memory, I found out the mother board on my computer had no more room for memory sticks. So I had to fork out a lot of money to replace all the old memory sticks with larger capacity sticks. A 1GB memory stick - with 125 times more capacity - now costs $10.
- The wonder of tele-computing, of electronically "talking" to other people hundreds of miles away. I dialed into a bulletin board (look it up) via a "speedy" 1200 baud modem. This was 7000 times slower than the current 8+MB download, but four times faster than the 300 baud modem I had used earlier. I would download the latest messages, topics of discussion, then close the phone connection. I would then read the messages offline, respond, dial in again and upload any response. There were hundreds of communities of people who shared information, experiences, and - yes - gripes.
- Tele-computing with no long distance phone charges! AOL for DOS. Using a local phone number, I could access AOL, which had their own graphical interface (as many apps did in the late eighties, early nineties) to access news, weather, financial, message boards, email. I bought access time in one hour blocks.
- The first time I pulled the trigger on a Makita Cordless Drill - mid 1980s, I think. Free at last from the bounds of electricity! Well, almost. I think it was 7.2 Volts and ran out of juice pretty quick. A few years later Makita came out with a 9.6 volt model that had good power (for the time).
- Sometime in the late 1980s, early1990s, tire technology improved a lot. Driving around town a lot, I used to get my fair share of flat tires. I think I have had one flat in the past few years.
- Carbeuretors. Oh, wait, I don't miss those. I have one on my old Grumman Step Van.
- Last, but not least, I miss loved ones - and liked ones - and really liked ones.
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