Search for the historical Laura Ingalls Wilder (2019)
montanapress.net
montanapress.net
Whether the real-life Laura is like the one in the book is kind of interesting, I guess, but anyone who didn't pick up on how poor they were and how little success they had at farming from the books was reading them superficially.
Perhaps not as explicit, but it is hard to miss, and anyone familiar with humanity probably can guess the rest. Most people know they’re reading a book.
LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life. One boss I had was Mennonite, and his wife, after decades of growing and processing the family's food, started shopping in stores. She remarked how wonderful it was to have store bought canned food, which I guess is a partial explanation.
Farming is hard, the boom and bust cycle is harsh. Most early farms were too small in scale to survive.
Not to criticize LHOP here, but generally there is a sort of romantic idea of a family farm that for large chunks of time wasn’t sustainable financially no matter how hard they worked.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative#Unite...
Only up to a certain point. For example, everything about Albert. And Colonel Sanders didn't visit the town when they were starting up the chicken restaurant.
The later the series ran, the farther they strayed from the books.
FWIW the Blu-ray version is great, although they didn't remaster the audio to remove pops/hisses.
Do you do this for every show/film that is set somewhere outside of SoCal but obviously filmed there?
We're about even though, every time she sees a horse on screen she says "Why can't I ride a horse to work instead of driving our 20 year old Mazda?" Having lived in Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming, and having mucked a few horse stalls in my day--I know why we 9 billion people don't still ride them.
There’s not that much in TOS which is distinctly SoCal, since even most of the planetside “outdoors” sets were soundstages, with matte painted backgrounds.
On a side note, there was a rumor that the Capricorn One movie was filmed on location too:
Well, there is a reason for that, and a reason why it is often more noticeable in older works:
Just enjoy the show!
The actress who played Nellie said she used to get hate mail from fans of the show, who apparently couldn't distinguish her from her character. (She said IRL she was friends with the younger Melissa, and some of the cast attested to how nice she was offscreen--both from a special feature on one of the DVDs) Man, we aren't that far gone. It actually is the best part of our day, spending time making fun of Landon's hair.
Oddly enough, they did do a couple in Sydney Australia - that, and Aussie lawyer "Mic" (Mick, ffs!) were probably an attempt to sell the show in another anglophone market.
As if you've never maintained someone else's code and didn't make any kinds of comments about how bad it was or anything similar. Just shut up and do your job!
https://www.wired.com/story/stop-calling-everyone-tech-bro/
Tech bro does not describe me (I agree they should have an eye kept on them though), I'm a 55 year old man who watches LHOTP on a 10 year old DVD player, has 10.5 years of Visual Basic programming, and wears sandals with white socks.
Last week I had to look up "sh*tpost" and "edgelord", and before that "know your meme" when those were leveled at me. Maybe people on the Internet and social media too need to understand, like TV show fans, that it is NOT reality. It also doesn't foster the kind of wonderful, 20+ year marriage we've had--we are BFFs forever my wife and I, like Mr. and Mrs. Ingalls in some ways. I also reserve my right to laugh at the incongruities of the Internet--I have a headache from laughing so hard at it today, so I will spare everyone more annoyance and quit for a long time.
"Yore a poo-poo face, Laura, shut-up. I'm an idiot and this is my Internet." @WillyOlesonXXII
"Don't you try to josh me, Willy Oleson, I know durn well there ain't ever been no idiots on the Internet, you sh*tposting, edgelord jasper!" @LauraIngallsIV
"Now you two, I was on Usenet before either of you was kneehigh to a grasshopper. Couple of half-pints is what you are. 'Don't feed the trolls' we used to say, then ignore our own advice and throw 'em a handful of ASCII quotations." @CharlesIngallsVIII
"Are you aware of my law?" --Godwin
-- Stooge, er Stew-J
P.S. I'm going to do what the founders of this site are probably doing now, enjoy a good book with cup of coffee.
There was also a roller rink near where they lived. LH is a work of fiction. When I read the series it was advertised as such. I don't think it discounts the story much, because the real story is about Laura and how she experienced the world. Laura lived through quite a bit and the story was shaped to emphasize those things.
Wow.
It's called the Iowa School for the Blind. It would never have occurred to the audience that the education wasn't provided by the state. It's called the.. never mind, I said that already.
https://unherd.com/2022/06/the-myth-of-american-conservatism...
If you want Ayn Rand that makes sense, read We the Living, in my opinion, by far her best work. As a matter of fact, I'd say Ayn Rand's three major works, can be rated worst to best with length being the determining factor. Worst -- Atlas Shrugged. If ever a book needed an editor of steely resolve, it was that windbag of a novel -- would have been great at 1/2 it's length. The Fountainhead was tighter and better. But We the Living is the best because it is set in the world of her youth and makes her rah-rah cheerleading for capitalism and her deep hatred of communism completely relatable in context. The story never leaves the Soviet Union, so it's very different from her other work.
I love capitalism, but reading Atlas Shrugged left me feeling like this is one hard woman. Reading We the Living left me feeling like now I get it -- I'd be hard, too.
> Laura hated wearing sunbonnets and yearned keenly for beautiful, stylish dresses.
Oh no! What a monster! Cancel her NOW.
> Neither Charles and Caroline Ingalls, nor Almanzo and Laura Wilder, could manage to make the promise of free land come true. Never did they ever make a living wage solely from farming.
Even worse! She sold lots of innocent little girls a dream they could never have. The criminal.
Farming is a dream. Sometimes it works out; sometimes it doesn't. I'd rather have a population of dreamers than a population of soulless drones.
I just read it as a thoughtfully developed history of a familiar subject, published in a regional lifestyle magazine, but you seem to be responding to it as if its some moralizing Twitter screed.
Did I miss something?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/little-house...
a heading is "To Live the Impossible Dream." Do we find any sympathetic treatment of Laura in this article? Or is it purely debunking?
Readers, it would seem, are expected to come out of it having something fresh and interesting to talk about on their hike or over Sunday dinner.
If there’s something political in your experience of it, that would seem to be through subjective associations of your own, not a subtext.
Thank you for today’s most quotable metaphor!
What I did not realize, and subsequently caused me to regard his farming skills with greater generosity, was that during the first fifty years of his life, the percentage of people working on farms went from 20% of the US population to 2%! So, even if one were a good farmer, there was still a very real chance of getting squeezed out.
I'd never succeed at it, although nowadays, I'd hire a farm manager. That guy might keep it afloat, but then I wouldn't make any money off it because I'd be paying him.
Then in the mid-late 1970s came those shows and movies you mention, less comedy and more drama, more a sort of glorified frontier days theme. I think some of that might've come out of the 1960s hippie/naturalist trend, although it's a bit different.
I watched them all in the 80s, in syndication on the local channels, and my parents' VHS tapes had a lot (all recorded from TV). But in retrospect there were at least two related but different trends there.
For those who aren't familiar, this expression refers to the mistaken belief that if you cultivate the land with crops and you planted trees, this would cause a change in the local climate. They thought that each little homestead (farm) would convert the local clime to an overall wetter, more productive one.
Bad luck, family tragedy, and other factors played into the failure of the Wilders to succeed, but make no mistake: many did succeed on that land.
I mean, FFS, the family ended up living in a dirt hole dug into a damn riverbank! Not a nice hobbit home, either: we’re talking a raw dirt hole. Pa was bug-fuck crazy and anyone who reads the books as an adult can see it writ large.
Edit: whoa! No offense intended, fans of the myth, but again: dirt hole. That ain’t the behaviour of a fully rational adult.
Maybe when gambling against nature, the odds are with the house.
Another asks "Were homesteaders the ones being farmed? By the railroads? By a government?"
Today's crazy is yesterday's contextually-appropriate levelheadedness.
Presumably part of the reason was to create more states without a history of slavery, to avoid another Civil War. And also at the same time, to have more settlements to control the natives.
Lincoln said the Homestead Act was to "elevate the condition of men." By which the ex-Indian warrior meant "except Indians." Not surprisingly, it also included freed slaves, because moving west would be less uncomfortable than moving north, Lincoln having a history of that racism, too.
And the railroads didn't want to give away land. They were busy reclaiming it via eminent domain for their own profits. The abuses of railroads and banks who could not properly insure savings turned folks like Jesse and Frank James into folk heroes.
I don’t think that everything bad in the 1800’s was caused by racism and greedy corporations.
It wasn't the only political or economic goal, but a pretty explicit purpose of the Homestead Acts was to make it impossible for Native Americans to return to their historical territories.
Isn’t it always more complex than we can detail?