Friday, July 4, 2008

Independence Day 2008


Thanks again to our friend Jade for the great drawing.

Happy Independence Day To All!

Not much going on today at Fartwood Manor. The big plan for today was for me to clean the fireplace brick. This is the first step in the preparation for the family room fix-up. After that messy part is done, I can paint and then the new floor will be installed. Yippie! Or I might just pick some peaches and do some laundry and call it a day.
Later on I'll grill some burgers for dinner and then we'll mosey off to Wilson Park to watch the fireworks. You can sort of see them from our street, and many people do watch from here, but I like being THERE, laying in the grass with the colorful explosions overhead.

Since this IS Independence Day and I'm feeling all thankful and stuff for the freedoms I enjoy, I thought I could exercise some of those freedoms and share this little cartoon I have. Can you guess when it was drawn? Last week? Last year? How about more than THIRTY years ago? A few weeks ago, Dale was purging some old magazines and other assorted stuff from the mid-Seventies to early-Eighties and we had great fun looking through them. This image was just loose in the box, so I don't know where it came from, but the other side of the page has a photo of Nixon and Ford, so that places it somewhere between October 1973 and August 1974. One of the captions says "Jail to the Chief".
Most of the things depicted are still things that are issues today, though I guess we're not too hepped up anymore on switching to the metric system and the Cold War threats of the Soviets and the H-bomb have been replaced by "evildoers" and "devils" of a different stripe and tactic.
Especially prescient is the exposed breast of The Spirit of Justice that was symbolically covered in 2002 to save us all from "Moral Decline".
I'm not too sure about what the "Canadian Nationalism" was all about, but I'm pretty sure they still don't want to be part of us.
As much as things change, they still stay the same, huh?

Remember MeesterCranky's Flag Etiquette lessons today kids!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i'm also into those things. care to give some advice?

Lisanne said...

Did we EVER switch to the metric system?!!

MaryRuth said...

Lisanne-- if we did switch, I didn't get the memo! I have to do mm to inch conversions all the time at work, so I straddle both worlds in a way.
I do remember though, during the Arab Oil Crisis (the first one in the 70's) that gas prices were listed in LITERS instead of gallons. I guess to soften the shock of gas suddenly going from 29.9/gal all the way to 75.9/gal--this way it "looked" like it was cheaper!
Thanks for stopping by my blog.