I am not a fan of baseball, it’s a seemingly never-ending boring game, interrupted only by an occasional bloody action in the stands or a non-lethal hot-dog drive-by. Baseball promoters tried to combat the dreadfulness of the game by creating sources of distraction, like bringing a herd of sheep for the 1963 Kansas City Athletics – Yankees home opener which was played on April 8th and lost 8-3 by the Kansas City team.
The following book excerpt talks about the 1963 season (scroll up and down inside the window):
Pretty interesting article about a local (now-defunct) piano seller. It’s notable how in 1940 people didn’t think twice about the phrase “salesman lures the farmer’s daughter into the truck”
In 1989 I was in the military and the events in Berlin went largely unnoticed in our little installation. We watched the news as long as it didn’t distract us from the our main occupation – counting days until the discharge. 20 years later, when the excitement of breaking down a hated symbol of the Cold War died down many people are still not sure if it was a good thing.
In a poll this year, 50 percent of easterners agreed with the statement that “East Germany had more good sides than bad sides.” Eight percent signed off on the statement: “People there were happier and better off than today in reunified Germany.”
Just as some easterners long for their lost paradise, many westerners think they would have been better off without reunification.
In the end, the Wall couldn’t really exist any longer and the resentment most likely resides in the generation who had to bear the brunt of the reunification and all the hardships associated with it. History is moving along and today is a good day to take a look back at the way it was just a short 20 years ago. The image below was painted in 1990, later destroyed and was being repainted last summer.
The best and the funniest movie about that time is the award-winning Good Bye Lenin! It’s truly worth suffering through the subtitles.
On the tingling eve of the big high school football game, drama was being played out in thousands of U.S. cities and towns. Girl students swirl like autumn leaves as they lived and breathed their hopes and fears in high-pitched whispers. The biggest men in school, the football stars, brooded over their assignments and the hundreds of friends who were counting on them. Mass pep rallies in front of school or on practice fields built up the excitement. Coeds mooned over their heroes in class and the popular girls set their caps for coveted dates with the team’s star players.
The tension of the adult world – even college football – seems tame beside the bubbling pressures of high school football. In Lawrence, Kan., a city of 33,000, the pressure is even greater for the Lawrence High Lions have the longest current winning streak in schoolboy football – 45 games. As Lawrence, on the weekend reported in these pictures, prepared for its big game against Shawnee-Mission North, the 1,100 students urged the ream on with usual fighting, go-get-‘em slogans. But the players themselves faced things a little differently from most. Booted in the strict religious environment of Kansas, they attend a prayer meeting and Bible discussion at a barn outside of town, where on of them wisecracked, “He who playeth hardest beateth Shawnee-Mission North.”
When I was growing up® we thought that the American food was magically delicious, something like what unicorns would eat, if we knew what the unicorns were. That’s why when we had foreign visitors in our schools, there were specific and strict instructions not to show our guests that we have any interest in their snacks and especially chewing gum. Chewing gum was worth more than its weight in gold and the sneaky elderly capitalists knew it when they were throwing it out by handfuls from the bus window, just to see the kids swarm and fight each other for the precious sticks. It was not uncommon to hear “Let me chew your gum” from someone in school and they didn’t mean a new wrapped one. Slowly but surely the American foods made their way Behind the Iron Curtain, first it was Pepsi in a long and complicated international deal, then McDonald’s.
The line to the first McDonald’s was so long, they made a whole video clip out of it.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amx-JHhtsHw
Since then most people had enough time to realize that’s not everything is as good as one imagines it to be. Even people who invented McDonald’s and made it in what it is today, a place to get formerly cheap foul-smelling slop, are now looking to previously shunned ethnic cuisines to get their fill of interesting, healthy, unique and delicious foods.
The image below was painted in 1990, later destroyed and was being repainted last summer.
