You know, for a not-very-wealthy neighborhood

[conuly]

we certainly have a lot of classic cars. Not just old cars, but old in very good condition and the sort that even people with no real knowledge of cars (hi!) can say "Wow, that's a nice looking car!" over.

Yesterday when I walked the dogs with Eva, we passed one such car with a front bench seat.

Me: That's a nice car!
Eva: It's weird, it doesn't even have two seats in the front.
Eva: Wait, it has three seats. COOL! So you can have six people in the car! Why don't they do that now?

I didn't know the answer, but here it is. They were an option for much longer than I thought! I'd assumed they were regulated away, but apparently not. Whodathunk? (Random tangent - I wonder which is more common in English, "whodathunk" or "whodathunkit"? Google ngram viewer is completely unhelpful here.)

Anyway, today I saw three nice Cadillacs from the 50s or 60s... though given that they were all together, there was probably a thing they were going to. And last week I ran across an Oldsmobile that I'm pretty sure is from the 40s.

So as you can see, we do have a lot of classic cars in this neighborhood that you might randomly run across.

**********************

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'50s Ladies in Kodachromes: Looking Back to Women Fashion Over 60 Years Ago

Chickens may illuminate how humans developed sharp daylight vision

The story behind the dark Times Square subway poem (Yo, that's a really long tunnel, btw.)

Mosul celebrates first Eid without Islamic State in years (I didn't know henna was an Iraqi thing, but judging from those pictures I guess so...?)

Eid al-Fitr: What you need to know (Starting this year, NYC schools take off for Eid, but they're doing it tomorrow. And then I think school ends Wednesday. This is typical of the NYC school system. It'd make just as much sense to not take those two random days off in June and then end the year last Friday, but noooooooo. Don't know why I'm complaining, I don't have to deal with that nonsense, anyway.)

Muslims in Asia pray for peace as Ramadan holy month ends (There is a girl in one of those pictures wearing a red hijab with white polka dots and Minnie Mouse ears. It is so adorable, it must be seen to be believed.)

A Middle Eastern Spin On A Classic Latino Dessert: Rose Cardamom Tres Leches (Tres Leches is apparently quite popular in Turkey nowadays anyway.)

This Common Butterfly Has an Extraordinary Sex Life (Extraordinary and a little stomach-churning.)

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Gay pride parades sound a note of resistance - and face some

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Philippine, Vietnam navies play sports on South China Sea island

The decline of electric guitar

Websites and apps are designed for compulsion, even addiction. Should the net be regulated like drugs or casinos?

Joe Arpaio on trial over immigration actions echoing Trump's

A Battle Over Prayer in Schools Tests Canada’s Multiculturalism

A risky fix to repair a city's gutted streetlight grid

The TSA is going to look through your books but promises not to notice what you're reading (When we talk about things that we should never have accepted as normal, the TSA and their shenanigans is top of the list.)

Journalists Condemn Trump Press Restrictions, But Don’t Expect Them To Boycott Briefings

Two factories Donald Trump bragged about saving are now laying off workers

Canadian leaders have given up on Trump—so now they're going around him

Shifting Dollars From Poor to Rich Is a Key Part of the Senate Health Bill (No shit.)

Pro-Trump group's health care offensive warns GOP senators to get in line

The Danger of Yemen's Secret Prisons (Content note: like all descriptions of torture, this is nauseating)

Comments

[oloriel]

During a vacation in Scotland, when we observed that a lot of B&Bs had fantastic old furniture in very good condition, a regular comment was "Aye, our family could never afford to let it break or throw it out". I wonder whether that might apply to some of the cars in your neighbourhood, too? Classic cars have the advantage of sturdy materials and reasonably straightforward mechanics too. So if you know what you're doing, keeping and maintaining a really old car may be cheaper (at least in the short run) and more manageable than investing in a new car (or a modern piece of junk). And if you didn't look after it well, it would break down on you at the worst possible moment, so keeping the car in good condition is in people's own best interest...

[conuly]

I suppose that's possible.

[springviolets]

There’s even an honest-to-goodness vagina dentata. (on the butterfly link)

NICE

i remember the bench/three-seaters! as a kid being stuck between the person driving, who probably elbowed me at some point (or knocked my legs around while shifting gears), and the adult passenger was not fun lol.

[conuly]

But you had a great view!

[randomdreams]

The hip thing when my mom was dating was to get leather seats and buff and condition them heavily. That way when you took a hard left turn, since there were no seatbelts, the person in the passenger's seat slid over whump! into the person driving.

[conuly]

Clever.

[mindstalk]

Right turn, surely? At least in the US? Hard turns push someone to the outside.

[randomdreams]

Oh, you're right. Clearly I'm not an expert at this.

[adrian_turtle]

Because I have nothing better to do with my morning, I looked at the "'50s Ladies in Kodachrome." That page looks a mix of fashion models and ordinary people taking pictures of each other in happy moments and leaving the film at the drugstore to be developed. Young adults smiling on beaches. Family groups on vacation. Old ladies who look like they're dressed for church. Little girls in communion dresses.

All the pictures are of white people. The person who collected them probably didn't notice. I looked at some of the related links--nostalgic photographs of the 1910s, of the 1930s, of the 1970s, of the 1990s. All white, except the '90s (which included "Chicano gang members.) The last few pages have more pictures of celebrities, and fewer of ordinary people--they considered Little House on the Prairie typical of the 1970s, and David Bowie, and Star Wars, and David Letterman. Lots of pictures of each. It inspired me to look at the other decades. They had one picture of a black woman in the 1980s photoset--shown in one of the "pioneering pictures of domestic violence." (Her face badly bruised, or made up to look like it.)

[conuly]

All the pictures are of white people. The person who collected them probably didn't notice. I looked at some of the related links--nostalgic photographs of the 1910s, of the 1930s, of the 1970s, of the 1990s. All white, except the '90s (which included "Chicano gang members.)

Nobody ever does seem to notice, and half the time when you point it out to them, they get pissy.

[ioplokon]

unsurprisingly academia is up in arms re: the TSA book thing since you know... there's a much higher likelihood of us reading controversial and/or foreign language material. Not to mention, if the TSA is gonna leaf thru every book I bring in carry-on I'm gonna miss my flight!

honestly tho, way to take what's already a civil liberties nightmare and ratchet it up a notch. :/

[conuly]

And we've let it become normal. There's nothing normal about having to dump out water bottles and take off shoes before hopping on a plane. Nothing normal, and nothing helpful, either.

[ioplokon]

right? i hadn't flown in a while (mostly busing it for $$ reasons plus was living in europe prior to that) and when I flew in the states again for the first time, I was like wooooooooah this is so unsettling?

otoh i'm not principled enough to refuse scans & be groped/miss my flight to make a statement. :/

[conuly]

I feel ya.

[randomdreams]

One of the weirder classic cars ever was the Matra Bagheera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matra_Bagheera#/media/File:Bagheera_Type_I_01.JPG
Yep, that's three bucket seats in the front, with three more in the back. It wasn't a particularly wide car, either.

[randomdreams]

Oop, I was thinking of a different Matra/Simca product. The Bagheera just had three front seats, no rear.

[conuly]

Never even heard of it, but I'll keep an eye out now.

[randomdreams]

They are wicked rare: not a lot were made in the first place, and in the second, the manufacturers decided to not bother galvanizing the steel frames, so they rusted to nothing in a decade.

[conuly]

That's one way to ensure they'll skyrocket in value, I guess...?

[stardreamer]

Notice, in those 1950s photos, that almost nobody is obese. This could have been either conscious choice or unconscious bias on the part of the collecor, but I grew up a decade after that, and I remember that obese people made up a much smaller proportion of the people you saw on the street at that time. What changed? The switch from a meat- and fat-heavy diet to a carb-heavy one, and the increasing prevalence of flour made from hybrid dwarf wheat instead of the traditional variety in our bread products.