True, outhouses had "savor".

What? Didn't Expedition Everest add savor to your son's life? Are we supposed to stick with Big Thunder Mountain forever?

He'd have been just as happy riding the Mighty Mouse at a local fair thirty years ago and I wouldn't have to leave NH.

I thought that the proper emotion upon receiving a telegram (not that I ever did) was terror.

David:

Ah, it's the not knowing that's thrilling.

N109 84 DL=HANOVER NH 22 1055A
MR ORRIN C JUDD =
BROTHERSJUDD.COM BASEMENT HANOVER NH

THE 19TH CENTURY IS OVER STOP GET OVER IT STOP MOVE ON WITH YOUR LIFE STOP QUIT PINING FOR A PAST THAT NEVER EXISTED STOP
SINCERELY
HISTORY

Stop pining for a past that never existed? Aren't those fighting words on a conservative website?

The struggle against Evil must never be abandoned.

Well, there goes another cover for the Landshark.

Bryan -

Pretty funny.

And here is OJ disseminating his viewpoints via tin cans and string...

Bruce:

Only because you all won't come over and sit in my basement and chat every evening.

Has anyone on this blog ever received or sent a telegram?

Robert:

You never saw your grandad get or send one?

Not me! A telegram was sent on the auspicious occasion of my birth, but I didn't have much to do with that.
The non-existent past that Orrin is pining for is the past where everyone was always polite to each other simply because they rode trains and if only the government forced everyone to ride trains again we would enter a new golden age.
I'm a conservative, so I think that human nature is pretty unchanging regardless of what lefty social engineers like Orrin want. People were nasty to each other in the past on trains, they're nasty to each other now in cars and they'll be nasty to each other when our great grandchildren are mentally jaunting from place to place.

Bryan:

Highways were, of course, engineered by the Military-Indistrial complex, which is why they're anti-human.

Does this also mean the end of the Candygram?

Railroads were engineered by what passed for the Military-Industrial complex in the 19th century. Telegrams were the 19th century equivalent of the fax machine. You've got no legs to stand on in you assertion that trains and telegrams are somehow more pro-human than cars and faxes. All you've got is that you like them and you're going to go through all sorts of intellectual contortions to somehow make this into a conservative vs. liberal thing. To liberals like yourself the personal is the political, so it can't just be a matter of "Hey, I like trains." No, it's got to be some kind of crazy overriding political theory that trains somehow embiggen the human spirit and cars tear it down. They are only just human constructs made of steel and wire.
PS: Welcome back, you sockdologizing
old mantrap! This place was a tomb without you!

Bryan:

Obviously it would be better if we didn't go anywhere at all, but trains were at least a democratic and sociable means of transportation. They were the least bad alternative.

You can still use this: http://www.retro-gram.com/

You never invite us, and you're probably out of beer anyway.

And if we came over, wouldn't that violate the time zone rule for most of us?

jd:

Most of you need out of your godforsaken timezones.

Now if we can get the banking industry out of the lobby long enough for e-mail to do to "wiring money" what it did to the telegram.

The cost of sending money via web/cell should be about a half-cent, but banks, anti-terror legislation, and Western Union do what they can to make sure you have to pay $15-20 to wire money.

John: Candygram lives.

P.S. the man who invented the Candygram was the father of a friend of mine. After the invention he moved to LA to run the company. My friend grew up in Beverly Hills. The next time I saw my friend was freshman year at the UofC. The poor kid had learned some bad lessons in 90210. He got into drugs and "new left" politics. Within year or two he dropped out and moved to Bolinas. He is probably still there delivering groceries and cleaning septic tanks for a living.

"To liberals like yourself the personal is the political, so it can't just be a matter of "Hey, I like trains."

David, you have convinced another.

Bryan: very funny. BTW, what does "sockdologizing" mean?

OJ: Telegrams were usually a sign of serious illness or death. That is why nobody missed them.

Robert:

Only rarely, but a fax telling you they're dead is unbearable.

BTW Donald Sensing has a post on the end of the telegram, and another on notifying next of kin, which links to a very good series in the Rocky Mountain News.

So "Progress" never adds savor to life? Ummm, didn't "progress" create telegrams in the first place?

Guy T. beat me too it: Retro-Gram is a hoot.

Bryan: Funniest comment in weeks.

I am left wondering how long any of us could sit in OJ's basement with him before violence ensued.

And, BTW, I have recieved a telegram or three, but not in the last couple decades.

Robert: the words "sockdologizing old mantrap" are probably the last words Abraham Lincoln ever heard.

Papaya:

Yes, life was better before telegrams.

OJ,
No, my grandparents had a phone.

Telegrams were cheaper.

Two summers ago, I was riding in the car with my good friend Dan, his wife, and son Andy; Andy is the same age as my oldest (now 13). Dan mentioned that his first job was delivering telegrams by bicycle in downtown Cleveland.

Andy says, in absolute innocence, "Dad, what's a telegram?"

My reply, "It's what we had before we had e-mail."

I recieved, from my Congressman, my first and only telegram in my life in early 1975 congratulating me on my appointment to the US Air Force Academy. I still have it.

And no one saves an e-mail or fax.

OJ:

I've given some thought to the modern situation regarding email, which is that many early communications and thoughts of future historical figures will be utterly lost when they go into the "delete" bin. At least with letters and telegrams, there was a chance this stuff would survive for future examination.

Future generations won't get the "Eastern Onion" jokes in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Progress never adds savor to life.

When I read that, I thought of you and prehistoric SpongeBob, sitting around eating coral. Enjoying the smell. Wondering which part to scratch the bugs out of today.

Ahhh....

I think you are conflating the timeline - what you should have said was "Any progress after today is only going to take the savor out of life as we know it". Which people have believed for millenia.

No. All "Progress" after the 19th Century and most after 1776.

Matt: Email is impossible to get rid of.

David Cohen:

In general, yes, but I'm talking particulars.

If you folks would use a rather modern system like Google, you would find out that the prototype of the fax was invented -- need I say by a Scot? -- in 1842, though it was not really commercially viable until 1924, when various advances had been made. This should, I am sure, comfort OJ greatly.