Insider resents cable television. The trouble with cable is you can’t buy it., like a pair of shoes or a car. You can only rent it month after month after month. Just poor man’s cable cost a staggering $18,000 over a period of 30 years. That’s a lot of money for only a few channels – TNT, History Channel, Fox News, to name a few – that are even worth watching.
This is for old timers only: Is Insider the only one who remembers orange crates in kitchen windows during the winter months? It was back when ice boxes were standard kitchen appliances. The ice man would deliver a 25-cent hunk of ice every other day and that was refrigeration. It worked and worked well as long as you emptied the ice pan every night. Every winter an orange crate would appear in the kitchen window of every house on the block. Here was stored the butter, milk, orange juice, meats and other refrigerator-type foods. Simply raise the kitchen window and help yourself. The cold was outside, so why not use it, and the orange crate was somewhat of an insulator. It was imperfect but cheap and those were Depression times. Often times the contents were frozen solid but nobody seemed to care. It wouldn’t work today because they don’t make orange crates like they used to. However, it may help keep energy costs down.
This is a leap year, and Insider grew up with a guy in his neighborhood back in Philadelphia that was born on leap year. They entered the service today. Insider was 18 years old. Barney said he was 4 because he had only celebrated four birthdays.
Here’s another reason Insider opted years ago not to join the mad dash to the future, often mistakenly referred to as progress. There was a time when a shopper could pick up any item in any store and see the price clearly marked. And that was the real price, not to be overridden by some back room computer. Today we have progressed to the point where nothing is price marked. We’re all at the mercy of a fickle computer that will never admit it’s wrong. We don’t know the price of things until we’re in the car driving home and, more often than not, we simply shrug our shoulders and let it go because it’s often times only a matter of 50 cents or so. The problem with not making an issue of it is hundreds of other people will be ripped off at some point and likely not even know it.