I can't believe that this shitty discussion about, whatever, is running when there is a perfectly delicious writeup about condom mints sitting in the submissions moderate. Damn.

    I've recommended this book before, but it's worth mentioning again: Otto Bettmann's (yes, of the Bettmann Archives) The Good Old Days-- They Were Terrible!. It's not meant as a serious scholarly work, so don't go into it expecting reams of statistics or even a very balanced take on the US compared to the rest of the world. I like to think of it as the book version of a cantankerous grandparent who wants the grandkids to understand that his peers are leaving out more than a little when they reminisce about how life used to be. (Nothing personal, skeeter.)
     The book rings true to me in part because of the decade I spent working at a nursing home. While I didn't have a lot of contact with the residents (worked in the kitchen), and they aren't the most representative sample (being sick and/or near death, for the most part), I still picked up stories and personal flashes that counteracted a lot of the boosterism from, say, Tom Brokaw and the rest of the nostalgia industry. Vain and humble, smart and dumb, wise and foolish-- the residents weren't all that different from the younger folks I'd see after work, or all around the town. No better, and certainly not worse, just faced with a different set of circumstances.
    Do I get nostalgic once in a while? Certainly. I miss being young, with all the optimism and potential that goes along with it. I regret several of the choices made back then- regret is nostalgia's dark twin, eh?- like to remember the days before those mistakes. I'm definitely homesick, which adds an extra layer of fuzziness to the camera lens of memory. But nothing is going to turn back the clock . . .

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

My grandfather would often harp about how when he was young (he was born in 1925) his first (used) car cost him $20.  This was all well and good, but then we'd ask him how much his weekly salary was - and he made a whole $10 a week.  It's simply not valid to compare to the past without factoring in inflation. This becomes very obvious when you look at graphs of gas prices - take a look at this chart, for example.  If you don't adjust for inflation, it looks like gas prices have gone steadily up since 1979 and have gone through the roof since 2001.  Adjusted for inflation, however, we see that they peaked in about 1980 and then slowly dropped until bottoming out in the late 1990s.  While the prices we're paying now are historically high, they're not all that much higher than what we were paying in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

And not to keep picking on you skeeter, but a lot of grocery stores do still deliver (particularly in more urban areas) for a fee (my local grocery store allows you to order online and have it delivered, or you can order online and have it all packed and ready for you to pick up at the store).

It must have been a golden age back then. Just look at all the people smiling at this lynching. Good times, good times.

In regione caecorum, rex est luscus.

Actually, food costs, as a percentage of income, have fallen dramatically as a result of industrialized agriculture.  Rising fuel costs look set to reverse that trend, but grandma probably paid a much larger proportion of the family income for groceries than you do.