The Good Old Days or the Future is bright?

You can slurp it up from your trencher.

 

Strange women laying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a form of government!

 

boolean, either/or thinking is reductive and sucks the oxygen out of the room. It is polarizing but offers no real insight (nor the opportunity for it.)

Dreading the future and assuming the worst or that the present will create 'lazy kids' is just the fear talking....

don't give into it. I have very industrious kids who are quite accomplished and who will be part of the very large group of young people who will lead the world when their time comes... I'm not worried at their work ethic nor ability nor any of the other terms we use a lot when we are just afraid.

The world is full of HUGE challenges... just as it was in our great grandparents time. We make it through. We have HUGE untapped potential and we tap into more of it all the time.

 

^^^ What the hell is it that makes folks "afraid for the future" as they age ? With each successive generation you will hear it from a significant portion of the elderly.

It's like a switch is flipped.

If each "younger" generation was crappier than the last wouldn't we be back in the dark ages by now ?

 

Was this at Vermillion?

 

The Bayernhof Museum, in Pittsburgh.

 

Hmm, haven't heard of it, but would love to go. Beethoven wrote a piece, Battle Symphony or Wellington's Victory, for a huge music box called the Panharmonican. It seems to have been something like those ice cream/pizza parlor contraptions that play drums, woodwinds, and brass. Lorin Maezel, inventor of the metronome, made this.

On another note (badabing), society's view on disabilities has undergone some fairly profound changes. My wife had a distant nth-generation relative who lost her sight when she was in her 30s. She spent the rest of her life in bed, as was common in her part of the country and time period.

In the first season of Mad Men, a large group of advertising employees in the early 60s were horsing around with a riding lawnmower. Some company that hired the firm and sent over the riding lawn mower has a gag. While celebrating, a secretary lost control of it and ran over a young advertiser's foot. When a group of senior partners were leaving the hospital room, where the younger guy was staying after having half of his foot amputated, they were shaking their heads at the bad luck of the guy. "He could have had such a great career." Implying that missing half a foot is the end of the career of an office worker.

 

A number of there devices played drums, cymbals and xlyophones. Another included a pair of violins. My favourite was this mechanical banjo:



EDIT: I know you have trouble walking, Larry, so you would have issues with the tour. The former owner of the mansion was quite eccentric and the tour goes through a number of secret passageways and narrow spiral staircases.

 

Personally, I have little faith that many new technologies won't be used against people rather than to benefit them. Human nature hasn't changed with the advancement of those technologies, and I can't help but wonder what certain....um, (being very careful here)... 'world views' of the not-so-distant past could do with such powerful 'tools'. Other things will be wonderful, but this one is a concern to me.

 

Experience makes you cynical. Youthful optimism fades as the real world reaches up and bites our collective asses.

 

Plus, we just can't stop ourselves!

 

Yes! When I think about how the phonograph and radio attacked my poor grandmother!

And Reddi Kilowatt! The whole rural electrification program RUINED country living!

The bad guys will always try to use technology to do evil.. the evil is in THEM not the stuff man! The good guys win! there are more of us and we are just as smart and good... and we all want to see what is next (and make it!)

What is the nature of the wheel? Well, to turn and so it does!