Amen, brother.

I'd imagine it's what being checked into prison is like...EXCEPT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!!

Yes, when I was a kid you would have been soooooooo embarrassed if your parents picked you up at school.

Here in White Rock a lot of parents have the stickers on the back of their cars "proud parent of an honours student at XXXX high school." I would have shot my parents if they had ever done that to me.

Sounds very familiar - first drink at age 19 and first (and only!) hangover in second year university. Too much ugly alcoholism in my family to find boozing enticing, even when I was young and stupid.

My mother taught at the same school I attended. I sometimes got a ride to school with her, :haha:. A particular boy beat me up once for it and Mom found out who had done it through work, not me telling. I happened to see her pull him into an office the next day. I've no idea what she did but that was Grade 7 or so and this boy was literally my bodyguard straight through Level III graduation. No one could look at me sideways or he was on them.

Beyond that it was mostly a benefit. Mom was easily one of most loved teachers so being her kid was mainly an advantage.

I am a few years younger than your mom and everything was also locked up when I was a kid. I lived in smallish cities and also bigger cities in my youth.

I totally get this. Business or first class I could likely afford but with a family it's a huge waste of money IMO and compromises further travel.

The cattle-drive experience in economy class air travel is a product of many things, many of which have already been noted. But it's also directly related to its democratization.

My first experiences with booze and bars were around 16. At one point I lived in a relatively small place where a lot of people knew each other and I looked the oldest so I dressed nice and bought booze for all of my friends. It was a challenge to go to the LCBO and not see people my parents knew, though. We'd then smuggle the booze into high school and community dances.

I first went to bars at that age on the infamous Hull bar strip. It was some distance away from where we lived so we often couldn't justify to our parents being out until the wee hours. So we'd leave at 11 or midnight just when the real action was starting.

Street/road hockey is still alive and kicking where I live.

I think that's as much a product of school system segmentation and choices and parents' schedules as it is a security obsession.

In my neighbourhood probably 99% of the kids go to the local school right in the heart of the neighbourhood and all of them live within a km or less of the school. Of course many parents drop off their kids by car and there is some level of traffic around 8:15 in the morning but tons of kids still walk and bike there. All of the streets are filled with kids and crossing guards just before the bell.

Yikes! That happened to me too.

Remember when all you had to do when you drove up to a gas station was say "filler her up"?
You actually got service when you paid for gas as opposed to having to pump your own. It was so nice having someone do it for you and being asked if you wanted to have your oil checked or window cleaned.

I remember when self service first came out you got a small discout on your gas but needless to say that's long since gone.

Think I was about 14 the first time I went to a bar which is a joke because I looked about 10. Calgary had lots of places that welcomed underagers as long as you had money to spend which was typically the big challenge. Buying from government liquor stores was easy but also costly. There were elaborate bribery schemes like taking $60 from an ATM, giving it to a guy at the mall food court who would write a code on it. It you showed the receipt to the right cashier at the ALCB store they wouldnt ID. They kept the receipt so if they got caught, they had a paper trail back to the person who made the ATM withdrawal. My parents would have bought alcohol for me of I'd asked. They even offered to buy pot and cigarettes for me but I wasn't interested. Southwest Calgary in the 80s was out of a John Hughes movie. Lots of booze and house parties and driving parents' cars without permission. Pot and tobacco were seen as white trashy. Most of the parents were in their 30s, engineers, doctors, lawyers and business people.

My first strip bar was in some industrial area in Scarborough, ON when I was a few weeks short of 17. My roommate was turning 18. His older friends found a table in an inconspicuous location. One of them distracted the bouncer and another snuck us in. The scam worked for about 2 hours which was about when we quit spending money. Used to also go to some dance club at Queen's Quay called RPM. I hated the music but lots of people used to buy overpriced drinks for me.

I lost interest in the bar scene at around 19 and quit drinking around 20.

I heard that............GRRRRR!

I don't remember many parents driving kids to school except under exceptional circumstances or to after school activities. That seemed to change in the 90s. When my kids were in school in Seattle, busing was mandatory because the neighborhood NIMBYS wouldn't tolerate the traffic and kids getting to school on their own was considered a liability risk. One of the things I miss least about the USA.

This has been a growing trend in Quebec for years now, and has slowly and modestly spread to other parts of the country.

http://www.trottibus.ca/en/schools/

Yeah, it's terrible having to do things for ourselves now. We should totally go back to a time when gas stations coddled us. Pumping gas is hard! :( And now we can only get gas 24/7. Was much better when that wasn't so!

Kids these days. :no: Millennials are killing underage drinking! :(

Freedom. :tup:

We always keep the front door of our house locked because we so rarely use it, but when we're at home the "side door," which is actually front facing and not all that far from the street, and the back door are rarely locked, save for at night when we go to bed.

But we'll both leave the house without locking the side or back doors. If we leave for several hours at a time, like to Kitchener or London, we'll lock the side door but not the back door. And I've never locked our shed. Other than my precious bicycles it just contains the standard gardening stuff.

We feel comfortable doing this because there are more Jane Jacobs-style eyes on the street around here, what with the B&Bs, the tourists and just generally being closer to downtown. The petty drug-fueled crime and asshole-ish behaviour of the underclass mostly happens in the bleak apartment blocks on the outskirts of town, and not so much in the gentrified districts of stately Victorian homes closer to the centre.

It wasn't in SW Calgary but it fits my youth in the 80s to a T. (That reference to pot and cigarettes is spot on.) Like a John Hughes movie or the (then) present-day town in Back to the Future. A bit of Fast Times at Ridgemont High as well.

Lots of smaller gas stations are still like that in Sherbrooke. Several of them are big banners (Shell, Ultramar, etc.) but not gigantic new stations, and probably still family-owned.

(I never ever say "fill her up" though, I always say "put $5 in her so I can manage to reach my habitual Irving station in New Hampshire". And I'm not ashamed of being a cheapskate.)

God forbid you contribute to the financial resources of your country. Too bad all Canadians don't buy gas in the US so that we can really show the government who's boss!

It's a conscious decision, not only because it's cheaper. I'm also a NH taxpayer as a landowner there. And I'm putting effort and money into increasing the long term value (both from a taxable and from an economic POV) of those properties, which I could easily have acquired instead in Quebec rather than over the border. I'm hoping to be able to vote there someday. I've been a FSP member for over a decade so I'm doing what I can to contribute - and choosing to pay my gas taxes there is a little part of it.


Actually, if we all did that, you can bet gas taxes in Canada would soon be drastically reduced... :P

C'est quoi FSP?

"Free State Project", the goal is to show through a real life example how running things with libertarian tendencies (as much as possible, realistically) can work well economically. The project aims to gather a somewhat critical mass of people who value small government and put them in the same jurisdiction; NH was chosen because it already had the basic tendency to an unintrusive government. Several FSPers have been elected to the state legislature already. I think the project is doing reasonably well overall; a good number of people have moved due to it. (Still tiny at the state level, obviously, though.)

Ahhh... yo comprendo.

I can't see it being too successful. I have it on good authority that New Hampshire is a drug infested den.

It's all that personal freedom ... ;)

At least it's an Irving station that he buys his gas at! :D

I almost pointed that out - surely there's a fraction of a penny per gallon that ends up in coffers somewhere in New Brunswick :P

However, there's a Citgo in the town as well, and sometimes that's where I fill up....... isn't that Venezuela's state-owned chain? Shame on me.

CITGO is half-Venezuelan, half-Russian. (50.1 to 49.9% split, respectively). But Americans don't really care about that, as long as they're getting a deal out of it. Profit before principles.

Just so you know though, I've also been contributing economically to Quebec as well, not only through taxes but also by helping densify and beautify downtown Sherbrooke (though we could have densified it even more if the City didn't force me to turn a four-story brick centenarian building into a parking lot..... story for another day) as well as by helping multinational corporations continue their activities in Quebec by providing them with competitively-priced quality services in our field of expertise.

So, I'm not going to let myself be shamed if I also spend money on the other side of the border. (Actually, buying gas in NH is absolutely irrelevant compared to how much I spent on improving properties and by extension neighborhoods in a certain city in FL that I could've spent home instead. If you want to try to shame me, you've got a better case with that.)

I don't think I was the one doing the shaming.

No, you definitely weren't :) (unlike vid.) However, even though both of you are mere strangers on the internet, I find that I can't say I don't care at all about your esteem of me; I suppose there's a reasonable chance we'll get to shake hands some day. So that's why I added that explanation, for your benefit, so that you don't get the wrong impression I don't care about Quebec, which is still home. (even though I really do have a soft spot for rural NH; it seems to check all the boxes for the things I love about the Eastern Townships of Quebec, just even better.)

Awwwww.... shucks! :)

Serious though, I wouldn't base my esteem of you (or anyone else) on something like that. :tup:

https://content.invisioncic.com/Mnhl...08_4_22138.jpg
worthpoint
https://scontent.fybz2-1.fna.fbcdn.n...7e&oe=5FB3423A

https://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2...ture%20315.jpg
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H_qVyVvy8.../jiji20042.JPG
4bp

great shots of tattered taverns: https://www.flickr.com/photos/archiv...h/10292588665/

I've been in the process of buying a building in my hometown that's an old hotel that's also got a bar/tavern on the first floor. I've grown quite fond of the place now. The customers are mostly old guys. I had pickled eggs there a few days ago and confirmed they have tongues too. It's probably one of at maximum a handful of such places still operating in this city. If MolsonExport is ever near downtown Sherbrooke in the next few years, all he has to do is let me know and he'll get a few Molson Ex's and pickled eggs on me.

BTW I'm absolutely NOT the one running the bar; I wouldn't want that. (It would drastically cut my SSP Free Time!) Just being landlord to it.

So... they could choose to discontinue pickled eggs at some point, I can't promise.

Sometime, I'll take you up on that offer of Ex's and pickled eggs (who can say "no" to pickled eggs?). It has been years since I have been near Sherbrooke (my father's gravesite is in striking distance).

There used to be taverns of that sort all over the city, and even in most smaller towns. I know, I spent way too much time in them during my misspent youth (back in the mid eighties they didn't "Card" people very much, and I had fake id anyhow). Objectively they are sort of shitty, but that is part of the "charm"

I miss being able to go to the US whenever I wanted. Usually crossed at Sarnia and it really was nothing more than a stop sign.

I remember all of the family driving down to Florida for March break and when we got to the border you weren't even asked for ID little alone a passport. You only got the 3 standard questions and then were told to have a nice trip.............citizenship, where you are going, and how long you will be all of which took a total of 30 seconds.

When you are young, you often wonder what the future will hold and what we will be doing and I was the same. There is one thing however that I never imagined............that most of the stations will still be playing the same music I was brought up in and most of the kids listen to it more than they do their modern crap.

In 50 years they will still be playing the same music I grew up with and everything post 2000 will have been long since forgotten and justifiably so. This is one of those odd memories that are not rose-coloured.............the music since the late 1990s really has been absolute crap and the music of the mid-60s to late 80s really will always be considered the "Golden Age" of music and nothing will ever change that.

I love a legit old time bar with pickled eggs and terrible macro beer. My French is definitely not good enough to attempt to hang out there though. Most of them are gone now in Toronto, and the one's that survive are a bit... too grim. Lots of good dive bars still, so long as they survive the winter.

Places from the 80's in Toronto now gone: Canada Tavern, the Morrissey, the Jolly Miller (Yonge/York Mills), the Brunswick Tavern.

Places in KW gone....the station hotel and some other dives I recall in downtown Waterloo.

Ottawa/Gatineau..had the British Hotel, les Raftsman, and still has the Prescott and the Carleton Tavern.

https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/201...rs_of_toronto/

I don’t think I’ve ever seen pickled tongue (slices? strips? chunks?). “Waterloo County” was more pickled sausage territory.

LOL you are so out of touch it hurts! Sure thing buddy I betcha people were saying that about 50s music back in the 80s. Oh yeah, and the Charleston will never go out of style, see! :haha:

Anyway the reason why you're still hearing only 70s-90s "oldies" on the radio is because the demographic of radio listeners hasn't aged along side the music. Do you honestly think people in their 20s and 30s are the bulk of the listeners of FM radio? Let alone "most of the kids"? Let me introduce you to something wild, they all listen to this new fangled thing called "streaming music". It's music piped in over the internet ya see!

And this is coming from a 30-something who agrees with your preference for 70s and 90s music.

My teenaged kids most definitely do not listen to "my" music.

The 'best music' is whatever people were listening to when they were 13-15. Usually, anyway. Formational years and whatnot.

Enjoyed this.

I don't know how people can listen to standard FM radio. And morning talk shows or whatever radio hosts in the morning are called these days? Yuck.

One of my favourite podcasts now is about nu-metal. I loved that shit when I was 13 so it's extremely nostalgic. It's also very Bad Music and the podcast hosts who are around my age have similar views. It's great. If my potential future kids like nu-metal I'd have some very serious questions.

Errr... if anyone is actually interested check out the P.O.D. Kast https://thepodkast.libsyn.com/

Yes it's true, music from the formative years has special influence because that's when your tastes were formed. Ssiguy the radio stations you listen to are targeting your demographic. However, today there is more accessibility, many more ways to listen to music, more specialized and curated choices than in the pre internet days. The music is more varied and available, not so dependent on large record corporations for production and distribution, and sixties or seventies music etc. has become just another genre.

Nonsense. None of those photos depict a cafe. You showed people on the street or commuting. In all likelihood, they don't even know the person next to them. People, back in the day, did read newspapers daily from front to back. But when they went to a cafe they talked to each other. The generation today would rather be on their phones than talk to the person right in front of them. That's VERY different than how things were before.

Your 20th century memories (pre-2000) are a little cloudy. Or are you talking about an era you weren't even alive to experience?

It's true, younger people talk surprisingly little because they are stuck on their phones.

I like to call it "anti-social" media................it allows you to communicate with everyone and talk to no one.

Cool thread idea.

re: pickled eggs and sausages at taverns..Man, it's been a minute since I've seen them displayed on or behind a bar..Usually next to the salt and vinegar chips.
When my wife and I ,along with another couple, tripped down to Montreal maybe 12 years ago, we split up and my pal and I discovered a cool little bar near the old forum called "Grumpy's" Everybody was singing along to some random tracks being played.It was like Cheers..Anybody from Montreal hear of this place?..Also, here in Ottawa there is a place called the Prescott Tavern..2 days before our wedding, I brought my out of town dad there for a quart. He loved it there! If anything, because the server had one of them old school change dispensers on his belt. That, the big bottles of Molsons, and the tavern itself put a smile on his face. I vaguely remember when those change dispensers were a thing, but my father just smiled and reminisced when he saw it still being used..It brought him back I guess.

Renowned for its meatball sandwich.