Well, Scott Irv, and any others who might be curious, they have largely disappeared. But today, I'm going to take you back forty years, back to a day when we took it for granted that the products we obtained at the store, or perhaps delivered to us, would be in glass, tin, or perhaps paper containers.

Walking into a grocery store circa 1966, you would be surrounded by thousands of items packed in glass containers. Notice the soft drink aisle. Row after row of bottles, in six ounce, twelve ounce, and sixteen ounce sizes. There are also a few Coke bottles in 24 ounce size. All of them are in six-pack containers, and buying them requires either paying a deposit on the bottles, or else trading in an equal amount of "dead soldiers." Sometime in the 70's, a larger size was introduced: the quart. I recall most major soft drinks being sold in quart returnable glass bottles with twist-off resealable caps.

I'm hoping that eventually, I'll be visited by some serious paleontologists who can help me identify my finds down to the genus level. And if any of you are sharp in the field, please either leave a comment of shoot me an email and help me identify these creatures.

Feel free to subscribe to the rss feed, too. I've posted seven or eight articles in the last couple of weeks, and they will keep coming as long as I'm out there hunting!

The 50's and 60's were collectively known as the Jet Age. That moniker implied that life was being lived at an accelerated rate, compared to previous decades.

I suppose that means that the 21st century should be known as the Warp-Drive Age, because the pace we experienced forty or more years ago was quite laid back in comparison to today.

One thing about life back then that may have escaped your mind was how quiet Sundays were. I grew up in NE Oklahoma, definitely Bible Belt territory. Sunday meant

(a) That you were at church
(b) That after church, about the only thing you could go purchase was gasoline and food. Everything else was closed. Main Street was abandoned. The entire town was noticeably quieter.

One of the familiar sights that we Boomer kids grew up was an image of a sad-eyed child. The child might be accompanied by an equally sad-eyed kitten or puppy.

The paintings had a haunting quality to them. They were simple, almost primitive, but great detail was given those huge, sad eyes.

The paintings were hated by some, loved by many more, and eventually became the largest selling artwork of the 1960's. That meant that we grew up with them all over the place. Art prints, of course, but also greeting cards, magazine covers, advertisements, and probably even lunch boxes, though I'm only speculating on that last one.

The artist, Margaret Keane, was born in 1927. She describes herself as a sickly, withdrawn child who took comfort in drawing. Eventually, she met and married another artist, Walter Keane, and they ended up in Paris after WWII was over to study the subject.

A sight they frequently encountered was that of homeless, destitute children, orphaned by the war.

I'll probably be instituting a tag cloud system, a home-grown model. I guarantee nothing annoying will be involved.

I also fixed a bug in the subscription system that sent you to a non-existent web page to confirm or cancel your subscriptions. My apologies for the goof, and thanks to the reader who forwarded the error message to me so that I could fix it.

On another note, we're experiencing a nice traffic surge thanks to being selected This Is True's Bonzer Site of the Week this week. Thanks, guys! And a big hearty welcome to new visitors!

New article will be in place tomorrow morning. Everyone have a great day!

OK, enough with the exclamation points already. Obviously, all three of these particular dreams were overblown.

However, it may surprise you to know just how close we are to being a metric nation. Read on.

It all started by those lovable masters of illogic, the French, who decided we needed a logical system of measurement. According to metric scholar Pat Naughin:

The metric system used all around the world has three parts. In France in the 1790s, it was named the "decimal metric system". The system part came from John Wilkins in England, the metric part came from Burattini in Italy, and the decimal part came from the USA. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were very active in getting the French "philosophes' to use decimal numbers for the "decimal metric system".

OK, raise your hand if you knew that our founding fathers were part of the team behind the metric system. THIS history buff didn't!

What would a beach party movie be without Annette Funicello in her bikini? Fortunately, the world of the 60's didn't have to find out. That's because the two-piece bathing suit, once considered so risqué that ladies who sported one risked arrest, was a commonplace sight on American beaches of the 1960's, much to the delight of all of us who possess a Y chromosome.

The bikini's history is a venerable one. 4th century CE artwork discovered in Sicily depicts Roman ladies exercising while wearing what today would be considered bikinis.

But the Dark Ages, the Victorian Era, and predominant social mores kept the two-piece outfit that was intended to be worn in public by members of the fairer sex pretty much out of circulation until 1946. It was in that year that Frenchmen Jacques Heim and Louis Reard designed and released what was called for the first time the bikini. The diminutive swimsuit was named after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the site of the much hailed (at the time) atomic bomb tests which began taking place that same year.

However, bikinis were still rarely spotted on US beaches for several years afterwards. It was Brigitte Bardot's performance in Roger Vadim's scandalous And God Created Woman in 1956 (but not released in the US until the next year) that opened the floodgates.

Today's column isn't specifically about the grilled cheese sandwich. No, rather, it was about the technological innovations that led to the ability of our mothers to open the fridge, pop out a slice of American cheese, put it between two slices of bread, and quickly and easily create a bit of culinary heaven.

I could trace history back to Bedouin shepherds who lived thousands of years ago, but instead, I'm beginning with James L. Kraft.

Kraft had moved to Chicago from Canada in 1903. He opened a cheese production business with the $65 he had in his pocket.

Kraft was a sharp cookie, and he soon devised a method of transforming cheddar scraps, which would otherwise be disposed of, into a processed cheese. It was so innovative that he patented his idea in 1916. Kraft's cheese would also last much longer on the shelf than classic cheese, and consumers loved its taste!

Thus, at the age of fourteen, bicycling became serious business for me.

It was that way with many of us Boomers. During the 70's, we gave up our Schwinn Sting-Rays and began riding sophisticated machines that would gear down so that we could climb hills with ease, or gear up so that we could approach forty miles per hour on downhill stretches.

The ten-speed had actually been around for a long time prior to that. The derailleur gear shifting system was "invented" in 1949 by the Campagnolo bicycle company of Italy. They actually reworked an existing system that had been around for many years previously, but their innovation was such that European bicycle manufacturers began cranking out ten-speed bikes in large numbers.

However, many of us had more technologically sophisticated rides. Perhaps we inherited them from our parents or older siblings, or perhaps the non-conformists among us showed our rebellious traits at an early age by opting for them over the high-handlebarred models that everyone else preferred.

The result was the fairly common sight of three-speed bikes on the 1960's streets where we lived.

The three-speed bike has a venerable history. Before the invention of the automobile, bicycles were seen as an alternative method to getting around town for those without a horse. And let's face it: it was difficult for a city dweller to own a horse, so the bicycle may well have been an essential part of his or her life.

Thus, around the turn of the century, technological developments were taking place very rapidly on bicycles. In 1909, the British Raleigh bicycle, equipped with a Sturmey Archer 3-Speed hub, started production. Thus began the three-speed revolution.

http://www.irememberjfk.com/mt/podcasts/swine_flu_scare_5-8-2009.mp3

Anyhow, the CDC is calling for clear heads and calm. And you know what? The Boomer generation is doing exactly that. You see, we've been here and done this before.

On February 5, 1976, an Army recruit at Fort Dix told his drill instructor that he felt lousy, but not sick enough to see the medics or to skip an upcoming training hike. Within 24 hours, the soldier, 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis, was dead. Doctors determined that he was killed by the same influenza which caused the pandemic (the world's first) of 1918-19, which took a half-million US lives, and killed 20 million worldwide. Two weeks later, health officials disclosed to America that the disease, known as swine flu, had killed Lewis and hospitalized four of his fellow soldiers at Fort Dix.