“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”
“Fairy tales are more than moral lessons and time capsules for cultural commentary; they are natural law. The child raised on folklore will quickly learn the rules of crossroads and lakes, mirrors and mushroom rings. They’ll never eat or drink of a strange harvest or insult an old woman or fritter away their name as though there’s no power in it. They’ll never underestimate the youngest son or touch anyone’s hairpin or rosebush or bed without asking, and their steps through the woods will be light and unpresumptuous. Little ones who seek out fairy tales are taught to be shrewd and courteous citizens of the seen world, just in case the unseen one ever bleeds over.”
Here’s an easy way to date yourself: what’s the earliest technology upgrade – not the oldest device, but the earliest upgrade from an existing one – that you remember getting?
The earliest technology upgrade I remember is when my parents got cable TV for the first time. Our TV didn’t have a coax port – most didn’t, at the time – so we got a large set-top box that wired into the antenna port. It had seven thick, black buttons, one per channel, that had to be pressed with considerable force in order to engage the mechanical switches within; when you did, the button you pressed would lock into place with a loud, metallic CHONK while the previously selected button popped back to its unengaged position. It was covered in synthetic wood grain and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
if it happened at all, it happened like that 