Just another incel fantasy of a nuclear war putting “strong men” in charge again

When you resort to advocating a global catastrophe (because what else even IS a world war?) maybe, juuuust maybe, your cause isn’t so noble or righteous as you think.

re: printed flour sacks – Both of my parents were Depression kids who were raised on farms in Iowa. My mom used to tell me about the “flour sack dresses” she had to wear to school and she hated them because everyone was familiar with them and the prints were (apparently) readily identifiable.

Even if they were well-enough off not to have to use them to make clothing, people still used the flour sacks as handkerchiefs, toweling, and linens. And then, quilt material.

I’ve always thought printed feedsacks were quite brilliant, as they built brand loyalty (one would be enough to make a shirt for a kid, or a dress for a small kid, but if a grown woman wanted to make herself a dress she needed to save up two or three sacks in the same pattern), while encouraging recycling by making the package the product came in into a bonus item. I think with many companies you could also send them a stamped self-addressed enveloped and get free sewing patterns designed to work with the measurements of the fabric you got from the feedsacks.

isn’t that pretty much what “small beer” was? (as in, very low in alcohol and mainly a way of making water safer and more palatable to drink?)

(or is that one of those “everybody knows” things that are really just a vague myth?)

Also, does that have anything to do with the popularity of tea in China?

Incidentally, my friend (who is ethnically Chinese) told me that Chinese people always want to drink their water warm*. As in, not necessarily boiled but at least microwawed, presumably to get the same feel. This is supposedly a cultural habit that people may justify by claiming the heating evaporates some “harmful gases” from the water.

*Also here in Finland, where tap water is excellent.

@big titty demon

But why does that make you cry?

Oh gosh, now there’s a question. Let’s just say that, for various reasons, child poverty is something that I can’t apply my normal detachment to.

But I totally agree with you on the general brilliance of utilising materials like this. I’m a big fan of reduce, reuse, recycle. I do most of my shopping in charity and second hand shops. And I hate waste. Seriously, like viscerally. So I love the idea of what would otherwise be packaging being reused like this.

When I’m dictator for life Prime Minister there’ll be a policy that what is now waste should be set up so it can be used for something else. Like if you use stuff to protect goods in transit it should be suitable for home insulation etc.

@Alan: Thank you for improving my last sentence with your editing. 🙂

I also want to be in BTD’s apocalypse clan. My husband likes beets.

Let’s just have a WHTM clan, I definitely want Elaine and her Marine with us too. And all the ladies who spin, weave, and sew. We’ll keep some chickens to eat bugs, lay eggs, and make fertilizer. We’ll ferment what we can for “beer”, regular or small. I’d put our chances at much better than an incel clan. Plus we’ll have fun stories and jokes to tell around the fire.

Since we’re going to be eating organic, even the vegans are going to swallow a bug or two. I have a couple of small fruit trees in my garden and am in the habit of cutting the delicious tree-ripe noms open, because while I’m not vegan, I prefer not to eat any more bugs than is necessary. We’ll dry the figs and the overripe fruit becomes some kind of booze naturally.

Flour sack clothes were definitely a big thing. My parents grew up in the South in the Depression. Mom’s family was well-off, but others in town weren’t. Dad was literally an Ozark hillbilly, and for both of them, the ultimate put-down of an upper-class woman in my life was “Her dress looks like it’s made from a flour sack.” But everyone used flour sack dish towels.

@Victorious Parasol: I love the Bannerless books, and Vaughan’s work in general.

@Threp: welp, at least they didn’t become jerky?

We had flour sack dish towels when I was growing up in the 1950s to the 1970s. They had belonged to my grandmother, rumored to have been not a very nice person, who died in the 1940s. So those towels lasted a long, long time. They were gray with age and I loathed them. In light of climate change, I’m now making my own dish towels last until they give up the ghost — but I don’t think I can make them last thirty years. They’re not as sturdy as the free towels.

@GSS ex-noob

The Bannerless books are great, though I haven’t been able to re-read them the way I did before the pandemic. But the Kitty books are still comfort-reads.

@opposablethumbs:

PS can we have a Pfand system? And a limited number of standard sizes and shapes of glass jars and bottles too, to make re-use by manufacturers even PS can we have a Pfand system? And a limited number of standard sizes and shapes of glass jars and bottles too, to make re-use by manufacturers even easier?

Something I’ve noticed about Coca-Cola’s two-liter plastic bottles in the US: their determination to display the iconic hourglass shape would cost them some volume at standard height, and so they tower arrogantly above the rest of the soft drink ranks—and thus don’t fit into a lot of refrigerators.

@FM Ox: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 2 liter Coke bottle of hourglass shape. All the ones that have ever come into our house are standard 2 L shape. But maybe because all we buy are diet? And also Pepsi and 7 Up diet?

The only curvy Coke bottle in the house is from Mexico, where Coke is still made the way God intended it. I have about 2 of those a year, when I’m really jonesing, usually in the summer.

Mostly I drink fruit-flavored fizzy water, or tea if I need caffeine.

@GSS ex-noob:

 I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 2 liter Coke bottle of hourglass shape. All the ones that have ever come into our house are standard 2 L shape. But maybe because all we buy are diet? And also Pepsi and 7 Up diet?


The only curvy Coke bottle in the house is from Mexico, where Coke is still made the way God intended it. I have about 2 of those a year, when I’m really jonesing, usually in the summer.

On second thought, the 2-liter Coke bottle has more of a flapper dropped waist—but a waist notwithstanding, and the Coke bottle towers above its competitors beyond the effect that perspective would create:

http://rethinksurvival.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2liters.jpg

mouse sparrow “… just that it’s hard for me and I’d probably be a burden to the WHTM apocolypse clan.”

The great thing about survival and subsistence level skills is that anyone and everyone can contribute most of the time. My dad used to line up all our friends (primary school age) at the dining table to help with cutting and peeling, pushing and poking fruit into jars for preserves during summer holidays. (Seeing as those friends continued to visit they must have enjoyed it.) But he didn’t get these not-very-strong 9 yr old girls to handle the huge jugs of boiling syrup or any of the really heavy and/or dangerous tasks required for processing.

Expert weaving or needlework or any other skilled activity is only possible if the practitioner has been through all the beginner stages _and_ has rehearsed, practised, reworked, and practised over and over and over again consistently since then. Normally I knit without looking at my hands. But I’ve neglected it for several years and now that I’ve taken it up again I find I need to watch a fair bit to maintain speed and fluency of motion.

You can learn. Just don’t expect the skills pf your mentors-coaches-teachers to transfer instantly to your novice attempts.

lumipuna This is supposedly a cultural habit that people may justify by claiming the heating evaporates some “harmful gases” from the water.

I’d think that’s the ‘lore’ arising from the biological law that boiled water is safer than not. Somewhere or other I read that, on the goldfields, in addition to the routine racial rejection of the Chinese, many superstitious miners conjectured that there was some kind of secret oriental magic the Chinese used to keep themselves more or less immune from the cholera and other water borne diseases that swept through the camps with horrifying regularity.

Not really. The Chinese simply boiled their drinking water because they drank it as tea when they could get it and hot and comforting but plain when the tea ran out. (Though I’d expect they did the usual poor people thing of reusing tea leaves over and over again.) Boiled water = less water borne disease.