Thirteen 107-Year-Old "Facts"

Thirteen 107-Year-Old "Facts" At work today my coworker brought a copy of Why Your Life Sucks by Alan Cohen. I flipped through the pages at lunch time and decided it would be an interesting writing resource. We writers, of course, don't want to create characters that suck. But, we do however want to show flaws. This book is written under ten basic topics (chapters). Each topic is broken down each into examples, a lot of which could be used as a specific flaw when outlining characters.. Reason 1: You give your power away. Reason 2: You expect life to suck. Reason 3: You get fooled by appearances. Reason 4: You waste your energy on things that suck. Reason 5: You keep trying to prove yourself. Reason 6: You say "yes" when you mean "no". Reason 7: You think you have to do it all yourself. Reason 8: You try to fix other people. Reason 9: You starve your soul. Reason 10: You forgot to enjoy the ride. My Thursday Thirteen was found in the chapter about how people waste their energy on things that suck like ... the past. If you find yourself getting too focused on the past, and no the present, the author gave a list of reasons to be thankful we're living in the 21st Century. In approximately the year 1900 in the United States.... Only 14% of homes had a bathtub installed. Thank the stars for indoor plumbing! Most women only washed their hair once a month. The shampoo substitute was typically Borax or egg yolks. Scotch tape wasn’t invented yet. I can not imagine life without a tape dispenser. Thank the stars for scientific progress. (1900 was the year that escalators were introduced.) Nearly 1 in 5 homes had at least 1 full-time servant. Presumably their job was to haul the water buckets back and forth to those old-fashioned tubs. Heroin was available over-the-counter and was advertised to “clear the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.” The population in Las Vegas, Nevada was about 30. There were 8000 cars, 144 miles of paved road, and the speed limit in cities was 10 mph. This morning I found a driver on I-80 that would have felt right at home. The average life expectancy was 47 years. Only 8% of homes had a phone. It cost $11 for a three minute call from Denver to New York. By today’s standards that is $219. The average wage was .22/hour or $200-$400 a month. If these figures were correct, that means the average person was working 909-1818 hours in the 744 hours that exist in a 31-day month. Talk about multi-tasking. 95% of births happened at home. Only 10% of adults could read and write. So, what has changed? Medical authorities warned that professional seamstresses were becoming sexually aroused by the steady rhythm created by using their sewing machine’s foot pedal. These sex-crazed seamstresses could be calmed down by adding some bromide to their drinking water.

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Along these lines, paleo-future.blogspot.com features some postcards that depicted what people at the dawn of the 20th Century considered the 21st Century would bring.

I postd a clipmark here at 1900 Postcards Predicting the Future of 2000.

This article (1900: A Year in the Life of America) at Genealogy.com has some similiar facts to those I found above.