I didnt know that about you!/Share outside of Monsters!

[Hepcat]

I love the music too Hep you have a sweet vinyl collection. Sorry to say my hearing has gone down the pooper...depressing.

Yeah, I guess my hearing has declined with age as well.



But I still enjoy my stereo and records!

[Mike Scott]

I have 6 toes on each hand!

[Hepcat]

Doesn't that make it difficult for you to write?

[Mike Scott]

Doesn't that make it difficult for you to write?

You get used to it.

[ChristineBCW]

As a child, Mother had me reach the tiny parts in her sewing machines to retrieve, re-install, and finally I could fix the units entirely.  At Age 10, the IBM PS/2s arrived and Father brought one home, along with the magical 2nd Hard Drive, which I installed when he wasn't around.  I've been an equipment tinkerer since my youngest cognitive years.

I was a model from age 13 to 21 when I married this chap from Texas, which is our home-base. 

I own a downtown boutique, eventually bought the city-block it was on, then bought the adjacent block, too, on my way to mogul-dom, I suppose. 

My husband turned me into a huge Old Time Radio Fan early in our marriage, and while I'd seen American comics, his collection let me enjoy them completely and improve my own drawing skills (for fashion designs).  His musical heritage (and band) have let me learn guitar, piano, other stringed instruments and performance, but I actually enjoy flailing away at the drums if our band's drummer takes a break.

We have one or sometimes two weekly gigs for 4 months a year, down from year-round, then 6 months, because other bands are worthy of ongoing financial support from such gigs, too.  We keep the atmosphere more vibrant with more working musicians, not less.

With two children, we decided to start school-volunteering because of the argument "Why tell kids 'school is important' when we can show it, by being there, by helping?"  We are in year 9 of that experiment, two mornings a week. 

We do blood-donations every other week, lately designating the Harvey-damaged small churches southeast of Austin so those ministers can spare some hospitalization expenses for their congregations, and then to three small clinics scattered across Puerto Rico, and of course the latest, Sutherland Springs.

For 12 years, we've worked at Meals On Wheels from Sept thru December, and five years ago we installed beehives around our park and donated 8-10 quarts of honey each week.  And either sell or consume the rest.

I'm an avid history reader, particularly 19th Century onward, trying to understand why our world is the way it is.  I have some interest in 9th Century-and-Beyond Europe, mostly in answer to the religious and economic forces that flexed their muscles.   

I sometimes get into True Crime readings but those are results of focused questions like, "What made this serial killer into his incarnation?"  Or "What was Manson REALLY thinking, himself?  He had a REAL reason for the two most heinous crimes, and those had nothing to do with the Helter Skelter nonsense he tricked 'his Family' into spewing.  Why Cielo Drive?  Why that LaBianca address?"  (Ed Saunders' THE FAMILY answered those questions for me.)

My questions in life remain:

(1) Why are Jews picked on?  They're always a distinct minority wherever they've settled and, if they really secretly ruled the world since ?? 4th Century onward ??, why aren't they living in Hawaii?  I mean - really - if I was going to rule the world, I'd do it from Hawaii.  Wouldn't you?  I used to think they were picked on because of the Big Lie about their economic networks, fomented by The Pope(s), but apparently I'll never get an answer. 

(2) What do Muslim farmers do with pigs?  According to some devout Muslims, pigs aren't allowed on farms since they can't be eaten and can't be raised to be sold to infidels.  However, I've yet to hear from Muslim farmers, so those 'experts' who've answered my emails are necessarily degraded.  I keep thinking of SE Asia, fairly ripe with Musilim heritage but also an area where pigs are common.

And finally,

(3) Why do I like the films I like?  For every axiom I develop, I discover as many exceptions to those as I do subscribers.  Understanding "Why I like what I like" seems to be a question I'll carry forth for the ages.

[Mike Scott]

(2) What do Muslim farmers do with pigs? 

What do you do with things you have no use for?

[Hepcat]

(1) Why are Jews picked on?  They're always a distinct minority wherever they've settled and, if they really secretly ruled the world since ??

Simple stupidity arising from religious fanaticism. The two phenomena are closely intertwined. First Christians, then Muslims, resented Jews for refusing to embrace their version of the "truth".

[Hepcat]

The curtain coming down on the past year prompted me to look back at the "significant" events of my own life from the year that ended fifty years. I completed tenth grade in the spring of 1967, and it was a year of further refocusing away from the things of my childhood to the things that would occupy my interests in my early adult years. (And here I'm not talking about the girls aspect because that's the obvious one.)

During the school year I maintained the study habits I'd developed at boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine the previous year. I was equally good at both number crunching and the humanities and I was put in the grade eleven "brain" class. That meant we were the class out of eight at the school "privileged" enough to take an extra credit, either Geography which I took or Spanish, in addition to English, French, Latin, History, Mathematics, Physics and Phys-Ed. My single minded focus was to get the best marks in the class (which I succeeded in doing in grade twelve). I was quite simply a bookish nerd and hung around at school with the other nerds. The prodigious feats of info absorption of which I was capable such as memorizing word-for-word several pages of definitions from the back of my science textbook now make me cringe when I think back on it. While I suppose my academic aptitude probably served me well into my adult life, I can't say it was a happy time in my life. It was simply nothing but a grind.

One happy side effect of my devotion to my studies though was that I had all exemptions from my final exams meaning that I finished the school year in May a couple of weeks earlier than most students. Most of the summer I spent hanging out on the street or at Thames Park with the other neighbourhood kids including the girls. I had the best radio, a really large strap-held transistor radio with which we listened to CHLO in St. Thomas which was the local Top 40 radio station! By then of course I was much too old and sophisticated to play baseball like some little kid.

The only comic I bought in 1967 was Doctor Solar 21 and that was the last comic I would buy until mid-1972.



Nor did I renew my subscription to Warren's Eerie magazine when it expired.

What I read in their place was the local London Free Press newspaper. And we had a subscription to Time magazine which I absolutely devoured from cover-to-cover. To this very day I know who the leaders of the countries in the news such as Vietnam, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Algeria were in 1967 and even many of Canada's cabinet ministers but by a few years later I'd completely lost track with all the changes.

I continued to read for recreation. I can't recall what I was borrowing from the local library, but I took up buying and saving all the Pan James Bond paperbacks:



I wanted to be like James Bond of course with all these gorgeous women draped all over me! I didn't realize at the time how troublesome that would likely prove.

I'd lost interest in most of my other childhood pursuits although I still built the occasional model plane. I believe that the last three I built were in 1967:







Both my Monogram Ferrari 330P/LM slot car and Cox Spitfire with the .049 Thimble Drome engine just sat gathering dust, however.



TV still wasn't a big part of my life. I'd watch the televised games during the CFL season but there were no more than two or three per week and I'd watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I'd usually watch the reruns of Wild Wild West after school and often The Beverly Hillbillies and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and sometimes Bonanza or the Ed Sullivan Show Saturday and Sunday evenings but that was it.

I did get to take the train to Montreal to visit Expo 67 in the company of twenty or so other Lithuanian kids from the London area. Everything about the trip was a thrill. I stayed at a grownup second cousin's house in the Montreal neighbourhood of Westmount and thoroughly enjoyed both the world's fair and the entire experience.



The summer of 1967 also heralded the start of my working life when my father placed me on a tobacco farm just north of Delhi in late July for a five week stretch. My horizons were further expanded when I got my trembling hands on the September issue of Playboy in the bunkhouse:



As the gatefold attraction the issue featured the luscious Angela Dorian, a.k.a. Victoria Vetri, who went on to become the Playmate of the Year:





When I got back home just before Labour Day, I had $495 in my bank account and I was fully intent on buying some of the records to which I'd been grooving on the radio. I went ahead and made the new exotic Beatles' album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, my first purchase at Bluebird Records in downtown London. I quickly followed up this purchase by acquiring the Beatles' first three Canadian albums, Beatlemania, Twist and Shout and Long Tall Sally. I then stepped outside the box in October and bought Big Hits - High Tide and Green Grass by the Rolling Stones. I was floored! I found the Stones' record far edgier than the comparatively tame Beatles' albums. Then of course there was the innovative for the time booklet of their pictures included within the double sleeve:



I wasn't entirely sure which Stone was which at the time but the brooding, mysterious Stones appealed to me in a way the Beatles did not. I went out and added Flowers to my swiftly growing record collection within a couple of weeks and then a few more Stones' LPs. By December I believe I'd bought these LP's by other groups as well:











Note the absence of bands such as the Monkees whom I knew had been created to target pubescent girls. My intent was to buy the LPs of only those groups/artists that fit my category of "serious" rock musicians. I pursued my record buying, collecting and cataloguing with the same intensity and focus that I'd previously applied to my bubble gum card and comic collecting efforts. As a result within a year I had a shelf of records far exceeding that of any classmate or kid in the neighbourhood.

I also immediately aspired to replace our family's little mono record player that had been bought used in 1962(?) with a Seabreeze stereo(!) record player with detachable speakers. But my father was adamantly opposed to such a profligate waste of money since we already had a "perfectly good" record player so I put that project on hold for the time being. It would be resurrected though!

And now here I am today, still very much a fan of the Rolling Stones, blues-rock in general and hi-fi stereo components as well as monster model kits, comic magazines and the other sundry kid stuff from my formative years!

[Wicked Lester]

Well here it is at 2:00 AM and dealing with massive insomnia for mos I found this old thread.
To look at me,I literally look like an aging biker,you wouldn't guess that I am a pretty big fan of the old Little Lulu comics.
Even have a few volumes of the Another Rainbow HC editions.
Point is,never ever judge a book by it's cover.

WL

[Hepcat]

I don't remember precisely where and when I encountered my first pinball machine but it must have been over sixty years ago and I've loved them ever since.

As a youngster in the early sixties I was usually required to attend supplemental Lithuanian language classes Saturdays between 4:00 and 5:30 PM during the school year. These classes were in the basement of St. Peter's elementary school just north of downtown London on Richmond Street by the cathedral. Dreadfully inconvenient to be sure.

There was a silver lining though. I'd be given $0.50 or so to go see a movie downtown prior to classes plus bus fare there and back. But St. Peter's was only about a mile and a half away from where we lived in Old South London. So I could walk there anyway. The bus fare I could then spend otherwise!

Sometimes I would indeed take in a movie. But often I'd elect to deploy my cash in other ways.

One temptation was a pinball machine at a diner that was right across from the Wishing Well Beverages bottling plant on Richmond Street which was on the southern edge of the downtown area about halfway to St. Peter's. I believe that it was this Gottlieb Sweet Hearts machine released in 1963:





Gottlieb Sweet Hearts in action

But pinball machines were then banned in Ontario as "illegal" gambling devices" until January 1976. But when the new student recreation center at the University of Western Ontario was completed in 1971, it had five pinball machines! One of them was the Gottlieb 2001 released in 1971 which ended up becoming my own gateway machine to a lifetime of sordid pinball degeneracy.





Gottlieb 2001 in action

Now I was never short of cash as a student and so I fed many a quarter into that machine. But it couldn't last. You see under the law it was an "illegal gaming device". Accordingly a City of London police officer appeared at the rec center after about three months, played the machines for two or three hours to satisfy himself that they were indeed illegal gaming devices which could very well corrupt students, policemen and whoever else for life, and the machines were gone for good the next day. Yes, seized they were by the fascist State!

While the draconian law was repealed a few years later, I've never forgiven the bastiches. Smash the State I say!

When pinball machines were legalized in my environs in 1975 or so, two specific machines acted to set me on the path to permanent pinball degeneracy. These were both to be found at the York Hotel in downtown London directly across the street from the CNR passenger train station. The first was the Wizard released by Bally in 1975:





A very well designed game, it sold over 10,000 units which smashed Bally's previous production record of 5254 for a pinball machine. I had the game completely mastered and built up a total of nineteen free games on a single quarter one afternoon before I succumbed to fatigue.

The other game was in the other room by the old fashioned greasy spoon lunch counter attached to the York Hotel. (How I miss those greasy spoons now!) It was the Royal Flush machine which Gottlieb released in 1976:







Gottlieb Royal Flush in action

I had my best run ever on this machine one afternoon. I'd hit everything and I had the machine lit up like a Xmas tree. I was already up to five or so free games but I wasn't even targeting the free game hole. My timing was so good that I was hitting the silver ball hard enough to propel/bounce it right off the glass and I just wanted to keep hitting. And then believe it or not but a hippie watching me with astonishment leaned on the machine so hard that he tilted it thus ending my best run of all time. I wanted to belt him!

So no, I've never needed drugs or alcohol. Pinball, model kits, comic mags, gum cards and other baby boomer kids' stuff, muscle cars, and rock music and stereo equipment were all it took to set me on the path to ruin. I don't know whether I should laugh or cry.

[Hepcat]

To look at me,I literally look like an aging biker,you wouldn't guess that I am a pretty big fan of the old Little Lulu comics. Even have a few volumes of the Another Rainbow HC editions.

Post some pics from your collection then!

[Wolfman]

Avid tennis player. Been playing since I'm 16. Gonna be 64 next month, and still playing 4 to 5 times a week. A USTA rating of 4.0, which is a pretty competitive level. Also like going to the gym. Love watching football (big Browns fan), baseball (big Red Sox fan) and tennis (big Nadal fan). I also have a pretty big vintage sports card collection. Love listening to music also. Love classic rock along with music from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's.

JP

[Hepcat]

Love listening to music also. Love classic rock along with music from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's.

You might therefore want to check out the mangy mutt's show here:

https://www.crf2.com/showthread.php?t=66468&page=18

[Wolfman]

You might therefore want to check out the mangy mutt's show here:

https://www.crf2.com/showthread.php?t=66468&page=18

Cool site!

JP

[Hepcat]

I also have a pretty big vintage sports card collection.

What sports and which years?

Love listening to music also. Love classic rock along with music from the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's.

What are some of your favourite bands then?