In the 1950’s, my Dad found that to get customers at his gas station, he had to hand out Green Stamps with a gasoline purchase. (And he complained a lot about the cost!) I think I remember my wife redeeming a big stack of them for something or other, soon after we married in 1977. Probably most of them were collected in Michigan, and redeemed in New Mexico where I was serving in the Air Force. I don’t recall anything to do with Green Stamps after this.
I’m wondering if what finally killed the trading stamps was that welfare authorities realized that you could collect green stamps while spending food stamps and use them to get unapproved items. If they banned getting them when shopping with food stamps, that might have eliminated enough of the people who chose stores for the trading stamps they handed out, that stores decided it was safe to discontinue the stamps.
That’s the first written reference to something very like American baseball, but it’s not the beginning. Boys and men had been hitting balls with sticks for centuries before this, probably starting the day a ball strong enough to survive being hit was invented. But adults left children’s games to the children and did not write about them.
There is a much earlier written reference to a game that appears ancestral to cricket (the weird British form of baseball), called “stump ball” or “stool ball”. It was written by a late medieval priest complaining about men having fun on Sunday after church. They’d put a mug or something on a stump or stool. One man would throw a ball to try to knock the mug down. That was too easy, so another would try to block the ball with a stick, and everyone would rotate through the two positions.
I figure that sometimes the guys waiting would have to chase a ball that was batted away, and eventually they must have thought of having the batsman score points by running somewhere until the ball was brought back. Everything evolved from there.
It could be a very simplified drawing of the British WWII PIAT, which was a (very short range, shoulder-breaking) anti-tank gun rather than a rocket launcher.
It’s not an RPG, because it has a butt pad for going into the shoulder where there should be an open-ended tube for the backblast from the rocket to come out. It could be a very simplified drawing of the British WWII PIAT, which was a (very short range, shoulder-breaking) anti-tank gun rather than a rocket launcher.
Did the PIAT have an arming delay to ensure the shell could not explode until it was a safe distance away? (All the modern RPG’s do, but the PIAT was one of the first anti-tank weapons with a shaped charge shell, so I’m not sure.) If it didn’t, Guard Duck is bluffing because it would kill both of them. If it did, it would hit the guy with a very hard punch, but not be fatal, or knock him down unless it was surprise rather than the actual momentum. The shooter of a PIAT has to absorb equal momentum.
There was some overlap. Joplin died in 1970, and there’s a Youtube video of Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane performing White Rabbit at Woodstock in 1969. I think the Smothers Brothers video where they literally put Slick on a pedestal to sing the same song was a year earlier, but I’m not sure.
In the 1950’s, my Dad found that to get customers at his gas station, he had to hand out Green Stamps with a gasoline purchase. (And he complained a lot about the cost!) I think I remember my wife redeeming a big stack of them for something or other, soon after we married in 1977. Probably most of them were collected in Michigan, and redeemed in New Mexico where I was serving in the Air Force. I don’t recall anything to do with Green Stamps after this.
I’m wondering if what finally killed the trading stamps was that welfare authorities realized that you could collect green stamps while spending food stamps and use them to get unapproved items. If they banned getting them when shopping with food stamps, that might have eliminated enough of the people who chose stores for the trading stamps they handed out, that stores decided it was safe to discontinue the stamps.