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Love for the ‘paper book’

library

by Aunt Clara –

Aunt Clara loves to go to the library, a place where the old and musty pen and paper books are housed with the newfangled computers, music CDs and reading devices. Although these reading devices have their place, Aunt Clara’s heart will always be with the old fashioned paper edition of any book.

Aunt Clara’s test for books is beach, bath, and bed. Paper books certainly are far superior to any electronic device in the bathtub. Many Graftonites will remember many years ago that Sally Trustman got badly burned while using a curling iron in the shower. Aunt Clara does not like to tell tales out of school, but there was one schoolteacher back in the day who was badly burned when his electric razor fell into the toilet. What this man was doing is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice to say that the man was never the same.

When going to the beach the paper book is also superior as one can leave it on a chair while swimming knowing it will be there when one returns. If the book gets a little wet while Aunt Clara is drying off it is none the worse for wear. With an electronic gadget it would behoove one to keep it dry and away from sand.

In bed an electronic edition of any book can be read and most e-readers have a built in backlight for reading in the dark. However there is something to be said for curling up with a book that you can smell and feel and one that allows you to turn the pages. You also would not have to worry about your batteries running out or finding an electric outlet.

Of course the content of the book also matters and I am sure that my dear readers will agree that they do not write books like they used to. Aunt Clara read the best-selling book, “The Girl on the Train” while riding on a train to Boston. This book deals with an alcoholic young lady who becomes entwined in the lives of a young married couple who she does not even know. Besides putting the reader through public displays of inebriation the book also deals with murder, mayhem and misogyny.

Not a book any young lady from a good family should be seen reading. Aunt Clara supposes that this is one benefit of the e-reader. Strangers on the train will not know if one is reading “Fifty Shades of Gray” or the Bible. Teachers, nuns and mothers could all be reading the most salacious material all while appearing as pious as a priest.

Back at the library, Aunt Clara finds most of the patrons are using the computers while she browses through stacks of books. Thoughts go back to time spent searching through the card catalog or “prehistoric Googling” as it is now called. The card catalog has been replaced by a computer catalog of books and one can search for any book in the whole state of Massachusetts. If the Grafton Library does not have the book on the shelves then a request will go out and the book will arrive within a few days. One would suppose that is progress of a certain sort.

The library used to be a place for a boy to meet a girl and fall in love over a good book. Now the kids at the library are either on the computer or on their phones. Aunt Clara wonders if they really feel that the virtual reality in hyperspace is more interesting than the reality right in front of them or are they missing out on experiences and life that were so much a part of our formative years back in the day?

Aunt Clara remembers sitting with a book at the Grafton Library when Tommy Sutton came up and said those words every girl yearns to hear, “If you are a book you must be overdue because you are so fine.” Now that is better than a text message any day.

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Video games vs. Erector Sets

Erector Sets

by Aunt Clara –

Aunt Clara has some very elderly friends. In light of our existence in the 21st century (and the popularity of video games) she is no longer going to speak about age in terms of years. From now on, dear reader, it will behoove all of us to refer to years of age as game levels. The game of life! I now have a friend who is just defeated level 94. Now that is an accomplishment. She also has many of her health points left. The local teens are always bragging about how many levels of some game that they have defeated, but in the game of life they are only on level 15 or 17. Not much of an accomplishment considering that so many people have defeated level 70 or even 80.

And will any of these low level life gamers ever become architects or scientists? Hard to imagine when they are spending their hours playing games about killing reanimated human cannibals and racing in cars that they will never be able to afford. In Aunt Clara’s day, young boys played with Lincoln Logs, invented by the son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, which tells you that young minds in the early 1900s were much more active. Frank’s son was using his time in creating something that would last for many generations. Children of today only create YouTube videos that are forgotten 10 minutes after they are loaded onto the world wide computer web.

Lincoln Logs are notched so that logs may be laid at right angles to each other to form rectangles resembling buildings. Children who played with them were learning geometry and how to put things together. Children who play video games learn only how to destroy and annihilate. Over time Lincoln Log sets became more elaborate and led to the inventions of Tinker Toys and Erector Sets.

The child who played with Lincoln Logs became the pre-teen who worked with an Erector Set, which consisted of various metal beams with regular holes for assembly using nuts and bolts. Other mechanical parts such as pulleys, gears, wheels, and small electric motors were also part of the system. What distinguished construction sets like Erector, was the ability to build a model, then take it apart and build something else, over and over again. A child’s natural curiosity and imagination was all that was needed to build many elaborate structures using the Erector Set.

Bill Sewell was one such curious boy. Having built every conceivable model using his set (and then being admitted to the Yale School of Medicine) he built the first artificial heart, which, in 1949, he used to bypass the heart of a dog for over an hour. After being chased out of Yale by the dog’s owner (who was also Bill’s anatomy and physiology professor) he went on to create the precursor to the modern artificial heart. He could not have done that playing Atari 2600 or Nintendo.

Give a child a video game and they might be happy for an afternoon, let a child explore and create using Lincoln Logs and an Erector Set and that child will find lifelong happiness and one day move out of your basement.

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Reflections of the last ‘blood moon’

Blood_moon

by Aunt Clara –

Aunt Clara was so excited to be in Grafton during the recent “blood moon” experience. So many of our friends and neighbors were out with their cameras and telescopes. The last time Aunt Clara experienced the “blood moon” was the summer of 1982. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, a gallon of gas was 92 cents and you could buy a home in Grafton for $40,000. In 1982 nobody would have believed that the son of the current vice president, George Bush, would one day become president.

It was in 1982 Burt and I went to see the Stephen Spielberg film, “E.T.” In the film an alien being that loves Reese’s Pieces, finds friendship in America and tries to use a phone to get home. One interesting thing about the candy used in the film is that Spielberg wanted it to be the popular chocolate coated treat, M & M’s.

The Mars Company refused to let their tiny alphabet candies be part of such a strange movie so instead the Hershey’s company agreed to let the film use their brand new peanut butter creation. The local cinemas filled their shelves with Reese’s Pieces so that children could enjoy eating the candy in their seats with the alien character in the film. In this way E.T. became the first interactive film and a precursor to our 3D films of today.

In 1982 the common commercial of the day on television was “Raid kills bugs dead,” Nike shoes had their first television advertisement, and Fred the Dunkin’ Donuts baker said, “time to make the donuts” for the first time. Burt became addicted to the brand new Weather Channel, and we saw the first ever compact disc player show up at the local RadioShack. The first disc Burt bought was a recording from 1979 of Claudio Arrau performing Chopin Waltzes. Oh how Burt loved those waltzes.

In Time, for the first time ever, their man of the year was not a human but a computer. Over 2 million computers were sold in America. The magazine discusses the new Apple computer coming out called “the Lisa.” For $10,000 (about $25,000 in today’s dollars) you could own it, which also included the first mouse. Of course all computers of that time had a big floppy hat disc. Somehow the words you would see on the computer screen were all kept on that disc; at least that is what Burt told Aunt Clara.

Burt did buy himself a Commodore 64 computer in 1982 and for the life of Aunt Clara she never understood why. Burt would sit at the ugly looking thing for hours poking and pecking out what he called code, finally making a ball bounce across the screen. Burt would jump with glee as he would call the neighbors over to see his work of genius. Too bad Burt did not live to see the World Wide Web computer of today.

All the young kids were wearing Deely Bobbers in 1982. The Deely Bobber was a headband to which was affixed two springy protrusions resembling the antennae of insects. Most kids would have pom-poms or light emitting diodes on their Deely Bobbers. Unbelievably these things were patented and they made someone a millionaire. Just goes to show people were just as silly in the 1980s as they are today.

Aunt Clara has done a lot of living since that “blood moon” of 1982. She owns a smartphone that is smarter than most people she knows as well as a state of the art computer with a mouse and everything. Remembering passwords is easy mcbreezy for this grande dame. Aunt Clara’s password is always “incorrect,” of course, that way as she gets more forgetful her computer tells her “your password is incorrect.”

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A union by temperance

by Aunt Clara –

Aunt Clara’s mother, Matilda, would not have approved of the recent push to legalize marijuana. She was a proud and active member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and devoted herself to positive reform based on Christian principles. She became an activist after her father was run down and killed by an inebriated wagon driver with six mules. Abolishing alcohol became her life’s mission.

Mother always used her powers for good, founding a mission for errant girls, a Sunday school and a temperance reading room. Before she founded the reading room almost all meetings and social gatherings were held in inns and public houses. Men would go to a meeting, drink a few pints and accomplish nothing. The temperance rooms were places where people of high moral character could go to discuss important issues without dealing with inebriated speakers.

Mother supported the WCTU White Life for Two program where men would reach women’s higher moral standing — and thus become woman’s equal — by engaging in lust-free, alcohol-free, tobacco-free marriages. My father had his last taste of liquor the night before he married Matilda when she spoke those sweet words of love, “Lips that touch wine will never touch mine.”

Soon prohibition was born. Mother worked tirelessly to close down the “Blind Pig” establishments, places where one could pay to see an attraction, such as a blind pig, and get a free drink. This way alcohol was not being “sold.”

Mother was also part of the group that tried to have all references of alcohol removed from the Bible and to ensure that real wine was not used in communion. “Surely God cannot live in an alcoholic beverage,” mother surmised.

Her greatest accomplishment was tying prohibition to fighting World War I. Matilda succeeded in winning wartime bans on strong drink by arguing that barley used in brewing beer could be made into bread to feed American soldiers and war-ravaged Europeans. Even with mother’s best efforts wine was still permitted for religious purposes (the number of questionable rabbis and priests soon skyrocketed.) Drugstores were allowed to sell “medicinal whiskey” to treat everything from toothaches to the flu. With a physician’s prescription, “patients” could legally buy a pint of hard liquor every ten days. This pharmaceutical booze often came with seemingly laughable doctor’s orders such as “take three ounces every hour for stimulant until stimulated.”

Bootleggers produced millions of gallons of bathtub gin and rotgut moonshine during Prohibition. This illicit hooch had a famously foul taste, and those desperate enough to drink it also ran the risk of being struck blind or even poisoned. Quinine and methyl alcohol tainted booze killed hundreds of poor drinkers but mother wanted to continue standing strong. President Roosevelt felt differently and when the 21st Amendment was ratified he stated, “What Americans need now is a stiff drink.” Mother was appalled at his weakness but her cries went on deaf ears. The depression had left the government coffers bare and Roosevelt needed those alcohol tax dollars to get the country moving again.

Father did go out and get drunk the day prohibition was repealed. Everyone thought that Matilda would make his life not worth living, but the next day they were seen holding hands in the park and mother had a huge smile on her face. Come to find out, Father did come home drunk and vomited all over the bathroom after breaking a lamp when he fell down. When mother tried to clean him up he adamantly exclaimed, “Get away from me lady, I have the best woman in all the world waiting for me at home!”

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Who is this Ashley Madison?

by Aunt Clara –

Aunt Clara has had a dear reader request for her about this thing that happened on the world wide Internets. It seems this busy body woman named Ashley Madison has been creating all kinds of mischief. It is this reporter’s understanding that since Ashley Madison was a young woman she was trying to be a match maker. It started with people she knew locally and then, as her reputation grew, more and more matches were made. First in person and on the telephone and then on the whole Internets.

The problem is that some of these people Ashley Madison was finding matches for were already engaged or even married. To other people. Dear me, how was this possible? Reminds me of a busybody that Aunt Clara knew growing up, Miss Sylvia Knott. Sylvia was the teacher’s pet from the first grade on and was both a tattle tale and a little miss know-it-all. If Billy Hosier only ate half his Spam sandwich for lunch, you better believe that Sylvia would be the first one to tell his mother. If Chippy Wooster would not share the blocks at playtime, Sylvia would be right up there at the teacher’s desk before you could say Lincoln Logs.

Sylvia also considered herself a matchmaker and was sure she knew who should and should not be together, just like Ashley Madison. I am sure Ashley Madison was an impudent child when she was young, just like Sylvia Knott. Sylvia could have used her powers of persuasion to be class president, or work on big things like curing cancer or world hunger (she was certainly smart enough) but instead chose to use her powers for more frivolous ventures like matchmaking.

Aunt Clara would assume that Ashley Madison was the same. Just the fact that she was able to get so many people to come to her for matchmaking advice — millions if the press can be believed — makes one think she had the power to influence many.

Aunt Clara would never have believed that anyone in Grafton would ever feel the need to seek out the advice of Ashley Madison. But if the statistics are accurate, there are more than a few. Aunt Clara has always been able to pick out a cad in any group of gentlemen, and I am sure that my dear readers have probably run into a few in town.

You know the type, smile a little too bright, shirt a little too white, shoes always shined, and quick with a compliment. These were the types of men Aunt Clara’s mother warned her about from the time she was a little girl. “Don’t go in the cabbage patch with that scalawag,” mother would say, pointing to a smiling young man with a rose in his lapel, or “that man there will only try to give you a green gown,” she would admonish when a certain frat boy would walk in the room.

We girls certainly know who the “cabbage patch boys” are in Grafton and who is most likely privatizing their computers on Ashley Madison. It’s as plain as the trimmed eyebrow hair on their face. Aunt Clara could tell these cads that there is nothing in Ashley Madison’s web of deceit that they cannot find in their own homes in Grafton. Just remember what Aunt Clara’s mother told her the night before she got married. “I’ve learned that marriage is the best teacher of all. It teaches you loyalty, forbearance, meekness, self-restraint, forgiveness and a great many other qualities you wouldn’t need if you had just stayed single!”

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