Breathtaking
View of the Day
by SashaQ
Here's the view from Eastham across the Mersey at
low tide.
Historical
Moment
Sentimental Journey to the 1940s
by Bluebottle
Enjoy a flashback to the 1940s as we visit this July's
festival: the Isle of Wight Steam Railway's 1940s Weekend.
Educational
History Corner
by DG
Mt. Washington. Grandview Ave. Caller said she hit a pothole so big that the airbags in her car deployed.
Pittsburgh Scanner, Twitter
Video
of the Day:
The
Food Cart Has Arrived
(DG)
Starring assorted cows enjoying their dinner.
Hopeful
Photo of the Day
Good things to come!
cucu, Dmitri
Gheorgheni, Editor
'If the words 'clap eraser' don't mean anything to you - you're either too young - or not American. We had blackboards at school that we cleaned with wooden implements called dusters, rubbers and wipers.
ReplyDeleteI did particularly enjoy seeing the video showing green grass and cows, though. Grass is one of those things you never really think about until it turns to dust and dies.
So you called them dusters, rubbers, or wipers? Were these words interchangeable, or did they stand for three different types of blackboard cleaning?
ReplyDeleteYou're a lot younger than I am: did you have whiteboards? As an instructor, I have used whiteboards with markers and what are called 'dry erasers', or erasing cloths.
If you had chalkboards, did you have to clap any of these types of cleaners outdoors to remove the chalk dust? Or did you always have dustless chalk?
I remember teachers and university faculty who always got covered in chalk dust - some were famous for it - and one teacher who had to use a special chalk holder due to allergies.
There's a lot to be said for smartboards, I think.
I'd've said those words were fairly interchangeable, of course a cloth wasn't wood-backed.
DeleteSometimes the chalk was dusty. A lot of the teachers just used to use bits of chalk they'd found around underfoot, the geography teacher had lots of bits he'd found with ammonites or their impressions in. A big advantage with chalk over smartboards is that you don't find whiteboard pens naturally beneath your feet every day.
Excellent if you want to play hopscotch.
My aunt as a child drew an octopus in chalk on an interior brick wall of her childhood home, and that picture was still there decades later.
So chalk landscapes can actually be used for writing? Cool! (I thought they just messed up your teakettle.)
DeleteThe landscape in this region tends to yield water - or oil, or natural gas. My relative have their own quite-old gas well on a 200-year-old farm. But nothing to write with. You can find a fossil, but it will be embedded in shale.
If you go up to New England, the farmers in the old days used to get graphite out of the mountains there as a side hustle - for pencils.
I don't know about using an entire chalk landscape, as lifting a cliff or two would be quite heavy and the cows and sheep grazing on it would fall off, but you can write with small lumps of chalk. It is very soft so you end up trying to write with a ball, but perfect for doodling hopscotch on the pavement.
DeleteThat's a new word, 'teakettle'. In my experience the hard chalk water is more likely to muck up a washing machine or dishwasher, so it's important to keep them under warranty. A kettle's only about a tenner and many come with inbuilt water filters anyway.
The teakettle bit was my own experience - I don't know anything about chalk downs, but the area around Cologne and Bonn, Germany has a chalky substrate. In the Dark Ages, when I lived there, we had these plain old teakettles made of metal that you put on a stove or hotplate to heat water for filter coffee. It was periodically necessary to bang the bottom of the kettle and then rinse it out to remove the deposit. Otherwise the kettle held much less water than heretofore.
DeleteSpeaking of cows dropping off, I wonder if the chalk affects the milk, butter, and cheese? The arid landscape of Greece and the quality of grazing available make Greek cows' butter intolerable, even to the locals. Of course, the goats do fine on it.
Oh, you mean limescale? Yes, kettles get limescale now and then, nothing that a quick regular rinse through doesn't remove.
DeleteI must admit I'm not a dairy farmer but I've never had an issue with local Isle of Wight milk and wouldn't have thought a calcium-rich environment would be detrimental to dairy products. An online search stated that the clovers and wildflowers associated with chalk grasslands do affect cows' milk, making it sweeter and that as chalk drains exceptionally well, cows are cleaner and healthier than those living in damper soil environments, making milk purer. But that's from the internet, so is it just saying what it thinks I want it to, or is it true?
That all sounds true - plus, the calcium is good for milk-producers. The Cologne Bight is fertile, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd aha, limescale's the word! Thanks. If you move around a lot you tend to develop a state-based memory, and when the moving around involves changing languages...the word for 'crusted with limescale' in German is 'verkalkt'. (It can also mean 'senile'...)
Great videos!
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a student at university, in the first two years there were blackboards, and the lecturers wrote nice and big, as the chalk didn't allow for fine detail. In third year the blackboards were replaced with whiteboards, and the lecturers wrote much smaller text with markers (more like ordinary pens for handwriting) - tricky for me to see as the wheelchair space was always at the back of the room... When I became a tutor, my tool of choice was a pen for writing on acetates for an overhead projector - meant my small writing could be magnified for everyone to see :-)
Now THAT'S a good point about blackboards vs whiteboards. I appreciated overhead projectors, too.
ReplyDelete