Frivolous gym "exchanges" or stealing?

a reply to: ThatDamnDuckAgain

Well said, whosoever you are.
I'll keep that in my memories.

You know "frivilous" as opposed to serious things you might find.

Like Columbus found America.

Finders-keepers hey?

a reply to: halfoldman
I've kind of been putting it off but my sock drawer is looking a bit sparse.....
I'm wondering. ...if you're going to the gym again soon....
Do you mind keeping an eye out for any strays???

Once you're in a club or team I guess it's no longer so important.

Functioning as a unit.

My underpants today, yours tomorrow.

Toothbrushes - not so much.

The abandoned toothbrush - lonely, I'm so lonely ...

Screw whatever politics, but humans are communal animals.

That was the biggest fear about the Kibbutz - you have to share toothbrushes.
All nonsense.

It is communal, but if you could handle summer camp with a few explosives - I'd say go for it.

But I'm literally talking decades ago.
I'm not sure millennials even know what a "Kibbutz" is.

Well, let uncle halfoldman tell you all about it.

A "Kibbutz" is a huge farm in Israel, and once it was considered fashionable to send young layabouts there. It entailed communal living. I mean like guys bunking with guys, and so forth.

Mostly all I recall is oranges.
You had to pick oranges twelve hours a day.

You got paid (average, but it wasn't slavery), and there was a bar and some entertainment.
Then there were the military vehicles chasing up the orchard: "When I say FALL you must fall"!

So somewhere in the late 1990's, the Kibbuz fell out of fashion as the place to spend your gap year.

I'd say that milieu had quite a bit to contribute to the early trance music scene, because with some money in your pocket and the dreadlocks growing the next stop was Goa in india.

originally posted by: halfoldman
Screw whatever politics, but humans are communal animals.

I'd say we are no longer communal in America....

a reply to: JAGStorm

Hard to say, maybe some people are also more sheltered than others (I see some even think washed second-hand clothing is "gross").

Maybe it's not so much the country.
I recall, for example, seeing an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight guy where an entire male team of 10 or 12 guys were using one bar of soap.
And that was definitely in the US.

Maybe it's also a gender thing.

a reply to: halfoldman

A WHOLE bar between a mere twelve men???

It's this kind of extravagant decadence that makes me mistrust the reality of what I see on the television these days!

i always like your threads halfoldman, but this one caught me offguard.
a lol then a shrug, if you want those wet pants so be it.

Well three choices for those underpants: staff takes it, I take it or they get thrown in the bin and perhaps become an environmental problem.

No ways at that point the owner could have gotten them back.

Me taking them and washing them (and soon using them) was the least of evils.

Regarding communal figures in the US, I stumbled on the following regarding legendary baseball player Babe Ruth, who spent his formative years at St. Mary's (part reform school, part orphanage), which was run by the Xaverian monks, and despite it's chaste monastic conditions had no privacy for the boys who were sent there. Thus it is not surprising that embarking on his baseball career it was noted about Babe Ruth:

The nickname his teammates gave him now, "Babe" (on account of his innocence and youthfulness), could barely have been apter. Ruth was in every sense but the physical a little boy. With his first paycheck he bought himself a bicycle. In hotels, when there was nothing else to do, he rode the lifts for hours. His years of communal living had left him wholly innocent of modesty when naked or on the lavatory, and with virtually no sense of private property. His first roommate, Ernie Shore, was dismayed to discover weeks into the season that throughout that period Ruth had been sharing his toothbrush.

[Cited from Bill Bryson's One Summer, America 1927. Transworld Publishers: 2013, pages 126-127.]

Not to go into details, but teammates reported that once Ruth discovered that a hefty paycheck could supply copious amounts of food and ladies (although he was married at 19 to a wife aged 15, whose name he misspelled in his memoirs) it wasn't unusual to find him indulging in both simultaneously in communal hotel rooms, although a reporter from the The New York Daily News remarked on his taste in women that they "would really only appeal to a man just stepping out of prison after serving a 15-year sentence" [Bryson 2013: 127]. Later in the chapter Bryson refers to a paternity lawsuit which was eventually dismissed due to lack of evidence (Ruth and the team weren't in that town at the time), but to everyone's great embarrassment a hapless Ruth first couldn't remember whether he was actually guilty or not.

But flip, what a fantastic baseball player!

P.S. Imagine somehow owning the shared Babe Ruth/Ernie Shore toothbrush nowadays.
I'm sure that could be worth a pretty penny.

Just a footnote to the above post, but Babe Ruth (in German it was pronounced "root") was of German heritage.
Not really mentioned in Bryson's book, and his "swarthy" appearance on some black and white photos hardly make it clear.
Strangely he was often mocked, due to his appearance, although it's not clear whether this was due to anti-German sentiment.
Nevertheless he was a "Deutschamerikaner ":

George Herman Ruth Jr. was born in 1895 at 216 Emory Street in the Pigtown section of Baltimore, Maryland. Ruth's parents, Katherine (née Schamberger) and George Herman Ruth Sr., were both of German ancestry. According to the 1880 census, his parents were born in Maryland. His paternal grandparents were from Prussia and Hanover.

en.wikipedia.org...

And looking at the black and white photo in Bryson's book I was wondering - was he Italian, was he indigenous, was he mixed race?
It must be something "exotic".
Ha, meanwhile, he's like me, his parents were ethnic Germans.
Of the course the full-color pics in the Wikipedia entry make that more obvious.
But hey, I'm also a bit "exotic" you know.