Tank birthday, 47+ years

[Paul B]

I saved another one this morning. Some Jiboni must have taken this cute little horseshoe crab from the surf and put her on dry land 20' from the high tide line where after the sun came up she would have been a baked crab lunch for the seagulls.

 

[Paul B]

I am going to the beach now. Maybe I should bring a fork lift in case I find a stranded whale.

 

[Paul B]

So after I changed that manifold on my boat, I was filthy so I took a shower.
When I was a kid and took a bath or shower I used soap. It was a bar and it was brown and smelled like soap.

My wife buys our "soap", toothpaste, towels, sheets, and all of that stuff so when I looked at my new "soap" I notice that now we don't use bars of soap. We use liquid stuff in a fancy plastic bottle and the stuff I have now is called "Suave, Milk and honey".

Oddly enough for breakfast I had oatmeal with milk and honey but I didn't feel the need to take a shower with it. I would like "soap".

I read the ingredients, the ones I could read on this "Milk and Honey" soap, or "body wash" and I couldn't find anything that resembled milk or honey. I also couldn't find any mention of "soap".

There were about 25 or 30 chemicals probably including Prizapro, GAC, Hydrogen Peroxide, Quinicrine something, blue something, green something, hexocloridineasphering something, Chloroflorididenachinexhaun, sulfide, REO Speedwagon, etc.

But no soap.

What happened to soap?

When I used to say a bad word, my Mother would wash out my mouth with real soap. Now the stuff probably has Agent Orange and Diet Pepsi in it and it will kill you or at the least, turn you into a Liberal.

So I don't know what this new "soap" costs but the fancy plastic bottle will sit in a land fill for 20,000 years.

 

[Lowell Lemon]

Happy 4th to you and the family Paul!

 

[snorklr]

didnt soap used to be animal fat and lye?

 

[Paul B]

Yes it was and we have plenty of extra animal fat because we have McDonalds, Chick Fillet, Roy Rogers etc and we eat meat. They normally use the bones for fertilizer but there is a lot of waste in animal parts so we used to make soap out of it.
Now we make "soap" out of chemicals and put it in plastic bottles. I like my fish tank natural and my soap. But it is hard to find.

 

[Radu]

I used to buy this soap called Reef Suds and then it got discontinued and I was left wondering if they found something bad in it.

Does anyone know what happened with this product? not enough sales?

I went to their website recently and had a laugh, it is an adult website now.

Aquarium Safe Hand Soap

Any time your place your hands in the tank, you run the risk of adding unwanted oils, impurities, or what ever could possibly be on your hands. Reef Suds make a 100% aquarium safe hand soap that you can use before and after maintenance on your tank. A single bar will last for hundreds of hand...

www.bulkreefsupply.com

 

[snorklr]

greenpeace found out they were making it out of reef safe whale blubber

 

[Paul B]

This is from a year ago.

Growing up in the fiftees.

I decided to write this because this morning we face timed our Grand Daughter who has just about anything you can imagine and is bored out of her head.

Because of Covid they had to leave their apartment in the West Village in Manhattan and go to their other home on a mountain in Vermont where they have a small pool, pool table, ping pong table, Pin Ball machine, trampoline, ATVs, (along with hundreds of acres of woods with trails) snowmobiles, A swimming pond, rope swing etc.

Anyway:

I never thought we were poor, I grew up in Queens New York but I was born in Brooklyn near Coney Island.

In those days we didn't get allowances, had no computers, cell phones, tablets or just about anything else. We also played outside no matter what the weather was like because "if" you had a TV, it was tiny and of course black and white. There was one or two shows on like The Ed Sullivan show which was a variety show where they would get "talanted" people that would sing, dance or ballance dishes on their nose.

There was sort of "Color" TV but that was a curved piece of glass that you would hang in front of the black and white TV. It was tinted blue near the top and green near the bottom so if you were watching a scene which was in a grassy field, it looked really cool, but any other scene just looked rediculous. We didn't have one of those but if you did, I would imagine you would keep watching "The Sound of Music" which had a lot of singing out in the grass.

I do remember seeing Elvis Presley on there in his first public appearence. That was the extent of our indoor entertainment and remember, there was no air conditioning.


My "Fish Tank" was the bottom of a wine barrel or an enameled basin which I kept turtles, tadpoles, minnows, and newts that I would catch in streams.

There were no fish stores but there were toy stores and fish would be sold there and called "Toy Fish". They had guppies, mollys, swordtails and little else. Occasionally they would have a crawfish. Eventually dry food was sold by Wardley and were dried flies and ants. .

One day I heard my Mother scream, I ran there and saw here standing there holding a broom. My crawfish got out and was walking across the kitchen floor. She thought it was a mouse and squashed it.

My Dad had a fish small fish market in Jackson Heights and my Mom didn't drive. She would wait with me for the bus and then tell the bus driver to let me off in front of my Dad's fish market which was about a 45 minute bus ride. I would go by myself and sit behind the driver when I was probably 5 or 6 years old and the driver would stop the bus in front of the store (which was not even on a bus stop) and watch me go in. (Today, they would put your Mother in jail) Remember cell phones were decades away.

The fish and meat stores in those days had a thick layer of sawdust on the floor and at night they would sweep it up and put on new sawdust. It would collect the fish scales and guts.

(Today, because of lawyers, you can't do that)

I would pile up the sawdust and make a fort. Then I would take live blueclaw crabs and live lobsters and put them down and ty to make them fight. Lobsters can't really walk out of water but crabs run fast. I had a toy metal cannon and I would shoot tooth picks at the poor crabs.

(there was no plastic and toys were metal)

I would also lay some dead sardines in there for effect.

I had other toys in the fish store like rubber bands and I would shoot flies. I would feed the flies to my newts and turtles. Sometimes my Dad would give me a piece of wood, a hammer and nails and I would spend hours banging in the nails and pulling them out.

Occasionally I would ask my dad for a nickel. He would always give it to me but I had to work for it like maybe shine his shoes which entailed about 30 minutes of removing large fish scales, then shining them. After he inspected them I would take that nickel to the toy store on the corner next to the firehouse and buy some gum or caps that I used to "shoot off' with a rock.

I walked to school which was only about 5 blocks away and when my shoes would get holes in them, I would get linoleum (which was flooring) from abandoned buildings and houses and put pieces of that in my shoes. When it wore out, I would get another piece.

(My Daughter doesn't believe we did that, but it was common practice)

Someone gave me a baby chicken and in a few weeks it grew to full size. Once, the thing followed me to school and the Principal had to call my Mother to come and pick it up.

Another thing I remember about grammar school. The teacher called my Mother to school and told her I couldn't read and they were going to leave me back. I was a prolific reader and my Mother knew it so she took me and the Encyclopedia (big history text book like Google but you couldn't update it) to school.

The teacher and Principal were there and my Mother told me to open the book to any page and read it. I opened the book and started to read about President Eisenhower, (who was the President at the time)

The teacher asked my why I wouldn't read in school. I said those kids books were silly.

After that, they made me a reading tutor for kids who couldn't read.

Linoleum was a great find because we also used it in our "Zip" guns which was a piece of wood with nail in one end and a clothes pin in the other end. You stretched a rubber band from the nail to the clothespin and put a piece of linoleum in the rubber band. When you pushed on the clothes pin to open it, the linoleum would fly maybe 50'.

We had a large group of friends and once we dug an underground fort in an empty lot. It was probably 5' deep and topped with logs, then trees grew on it.

It filled with rain water and we forgot about it for many years. We remembered it when they were building a Supermarket there and a bulldozer backed over it and fell in. They had to get a crane toget it out.

We always had money because we were street smart. Main Street was about two or three miles away and we would take bubble gum, a sting and fishing sinker. You lower the weight through the subway grates down about 12' to pick up coins.

Those grates were to supply air to the trains below and they were usually on bus stops. The bus fare was 15 cents so people used to drop money there.

You could make a couple of bucks in an hour and the movies were only 75cents.

After we would collect all the change we would pick up empty bottles at horseshoe courts and take them back to the stores for the two cents.

 

[Paul B]

I have been getting tired from walking the same places so this morning I drove West about a mile away to the same beach where I live, but a little farther than I have ever gone. I actually collect my water here.

I came upon this stream that drains a small lake

 

[Paul B]

Many years ago, lit up the top of the Empire State building. Not the cement Red part you see here. I did the skinny part above it which is about 15 floors and is just catwalks with glass around it. Not much in there but radio and TV emitting equipment that makes a loud Hum.

I am sure those lights were re done a few times since I did them. I also installed the fire alarm system in the entire building from the base of the antenna to the 3rd basement. It's 102 floors.

The building of course doesn't have any external fire escapes but at the time when it was built (for docking the Hindenburg Zeppelin) a building needed fire stairs so they are inside.

They spiral around the core of the building air shaft which is a shaft that goes up to the 86th floor and is about 15' square. That was because there was no air conditioning then so offices could open the doors to that shaft to get "fresh" air.

When people jump off that building, they jump in that shaft which is why we don't hear about them to much. So many people used to jump there that they installed a big net at the bottom of the shaft. The Building porters have to clean up the "mess".

I also used to eat my lunch at the base of the antenna which was the tallest part of the world at that time.

This is the observation deck at the 102nd floor

 

[Paul B]

When the original King Kong movie was filmed, TV was not yet invented so Kong was able to stand on top of the building with no antenna.

After the Hindenburg crashed and burned, they had no need for such a tall building but luckily soon after, TV was invented and they needed a high place to put the antenna.

And it is still there.

 

[jgirardnrg]

Always enjoy reading your posts.

 

[Paul B]

I am glad.

 

[GBRsouth]

Linoleum was a great find because we also used it in our "Zip" guns which was a piece of wood with nail in one end and a clothes pin in the other end. You stretched a rubber band from the nail to the clothespin and put a piece of linoleum in the rubber band. When you pushed on the clothes pin to open it, the linoleum would fly maybe 50'.

Interesting you mention "zip" guns Paul. We had something similar when I was a kid. What you call a clothes pin, we call a clothes peg here, so ours were called peg guns. It had the nail in one end like yours with a wooden peg with a steel coil spring as the trigger. you loaded three tied thick rubber bands together. But instead of linoleum as the projectile we used another peg coil spring attached to the three rubber bands as the projectile.

We used to have great fun shooting each other with these until the day one back fired and took out a classmate's eye. We were banned from using them after that! ;Blackeye ;Sorry

 

[Rybren]

We used to have Pea Shooters - basically a big straw. We'd buy a bag of dried white beans for a nickel, load a handful of beans in our mouth and blow the beans at each other.

We also made our own zip/peg guns, and bows and arrows.

Our parents never knew where we were, but they knew that we'd be home for lunch and supper, and when the street lights came on.

 

[Paul B]

In a big empty lot someone dumped 8' flourescent lights. Hundreds of them, so of course we threw them at each other like spears.

They make a loud BANG when they break. We didn't know or care about the phosphorous or mercury in them at the time, but I glowed until I was 16. ;Wideyed

 

[atoll]

For some reason now and again I stop getting alerts when somebody posts on your thread here Paul

 

[atoll]

So after I changed that manifold on my boat, I was filthy so I took a shower.
When I was a kid and took a bath or shower I used soap. It was a bar and it was brown and smelled like soap.

My wife buys our "soap", toothpaste, towels, sheets, and all of that stuff so when I looked at my new "soap" I notice that now we don't use bars of soap. We use liquid stuff in a fancy plastic bottle and the stuff I have now is called "Suave, Milk and honey".

Oddly enough for breakfast I had oatmeal with milk and honey but I didn't feel the need to take a shower with it. I would like "soap".

I read the ingredients, the ones I could read on this "Milk and Honey" soap, or "body wash" and I couldn't find anything that resembled milk or honey. I also couldn't find any mention of "soap".

There were about 25 or 30 chemicals probably including Prizapro, GAC, Hydrogen Peroxide, Quinicrine something, blue something, green something, hexocloridineasphering something, Chloroflorididenachinexhaun, sulfide, REO Speedwagon, etc.

But no soap.

What happened to soap?

When I used to say a bad word, my Mother would wash out my mouth with real soap. Now the stuff probably has Agent Orange and Diet Pepsi in it and it will kill you or at the least, turn you into a Liberal.

So I don't know what this new "soap" costs but the fancy plastic bottle will sit in a land fill for 20,000 years.

There is only one soap I buy here now in the UK it's called shield. All the other so called soaps aren't designed to get grubby hands clean which IMO defeats the object. Like you Paul I get my hands dirty either making something gardening or working on the car etc. I think these fake soaps are designed to make you smell nice and they charge you more for them. Seems modern soaps aren't designed for cleaning you. How strange, must be a girly woke thing

 

[snorklr]

always used palmolive dish soap to wash my hands...you can refill those fancy liquid soap bottles with it so it doesnt look so stupid by the sink...that stuff and a nail brush will remove almost everything