Do Nothing

A friend called me last evening and asked, “So, what did you do today?” “Nothing,” I answered. For once it was true… at least for about an hour in the afternoon.
 
Whether from a residual Puritan ethic or a Becker-ian denial of death, most of us balk at doing nothing. We fill the time with busy work or – if there is no work we feel motivated to do – with TV, video games, and YouTube. The last three are the barest excuses for activities, but they do distract us from our thoughts and awareness.
 
An extreme approach to doing nothing is to float in a sensory deprivation tank. This had a vogue in the 1960s because of the occasional psychedelic effects, though users sometimes combined the experience with actual psychedelics. The tanks have made a minor comeback in the 21^st century. Folks such as Joe Rogan, Jeff Bridges, Elle Macpherson, and Kristen Wiig swear by them for the head-clearing and revitalizing effects. Perhaps they are right. I haven’t tried it.

Sensory deprivation tank

I was less ambitious yesterday in my inaction. I simply sat in a lawn chair and stared off into the woods. Sensory deprivation was pretty much the opposite of the point. The warm wind flowed over me, the birds tweeted, the squirrels leapt, the leaves rustled, and the distinctive odor of freshly dug dirt (I don’t know from where) was in the air. All the while I thought about nothing in particular.
 
It turns out that this is a highly recommended non-activity. Even Forbes Magazine, with its unapologetic slogan “Capitalist Tool,” notes the value of breaks like this on the job and off, as opposed to frenetically checking emails and other unproductive busyness. “Doing nothing or having nothing to do, are valuable opportunities for stimulating unconscious thought processes,” one Forbes author writes. “The suggestion here is that as well as being the best thing for our mental health, doing nothing – or slacking off – may turn out to be the best way to resolve complex issues.” The author goes on to cite Archimedes in his bath and Paul McCartney composing Yesterday in his sleep. I haven’t had any insights on specific gravity, nor did I walk away from my sit-down with the lyrics to a hit pop song in my head, but there were less dramatic benefits. The refreshment was real, and the after-buzz surprisingly long-lived.
 
Rachel Williams, writing for Chopra, says, “A mindful way of life encourages sitting down and pressing pause on your life from time to time, giving yourself space to take a deep breath and simply be.” This, I think, is the heart of it: the Zen of just being in the moment without accomplishing anything else in particular. Or, worse, relying on booze and drugs to escape the moment.
 
Is all this just an attempt to make being a lazy-ass sound like a virtue? To some extent, yes. But it helps that to some extent it really is a virtue. Find a quiet spot without distractions (kids, noise, electronics) and give it a try. The risk of overdoing it is low. Sooner rather than later something is sure to intrude on the moment and demand attention. There are so many things to do.
 

The Donnas – Nothing to Do

Underpopulation

Elon Musk confirmed rumors that he had fathered twins with Neurolink exec Shivon Zilis with the remark that he was “doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis.” Though Elon, currently a father of 9, plainly was making a quip to deflect a question, he has worried publicly about underpopulation before. Back in 2017 he tweeted, "The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care." Last year he called falling birthrates "potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization."
 
I have a lot of respect for Mr. Musk’s outside-the-box thinking and admire his acumen at turning visionary ideas into remarkable and successful companies. But that doesn’t prevent him from saying the occasional wacky thing. It is wacky to say that earth is underpopulated. There is no underpopulation problem. There are nearly 8 billion people on earth, which is more than 3 times the world population when I was born, a time when no one thought the world was too empty. (The US population was 152,000,000 then; it is 332,000,000 now.) Global population is rising by 83,000,000 per year, which is about equal to the entire current populations of the UK and Netherlands combined.
 
Let’s acknowledge the non-wacky underpinnings of his comments. Fertility rates are falling everywhere. (The fertility rate is the average number of children per woman in her lifetime: a rate lower than 2.1 will lead to a falling population in the absence of immigration.) Wealthier countries, especially in the West and in East Asia, have seen them drop dramatically in recent decades. Singapore, presently the second wealthiest country per capita in the world (after Luxemburg), is a good example. Back in 1972, fearful of a rapidly rising population and a fertility rate of 3.04, Singapore instituted a “Stop-at-Two” policy with economic penalties for a third child, including higher hospital fees and denial of maternity pay. The fertility rate then collapsed, probably for unrelated reasons since the rate also dropped in countries with no such penalties. By 1986 Singapore’s fertility rate was 1.43. In 1987 the government, with fears reversed, not only eliminated remaining penalties, but adopted the slogan “Have Three or More (if you can afford it).” Large families are now given economic benefits but they haven’t helped: the current fertility rate in Singapore hovers around 1.2. Similar, if less dramatic, trajectories were and continue to be repeated across the developed world. This has major demographic consequences for the affected countries, notably a rise in the average age in national populations. This has obvious implications for the labor market, for health care, and for social welfare costs.

 
Nevertheless, the developed world is not the world. According to the World Bank the global fertility rate in 2022 is a solid 2.4. With very few exceptions the countries that have fertility rates below replacement level also have large scale immigration that keeps their populations rising anyway. The exceptions (e.g. Japan, Russia, Hungary, and South Korea) discourage immigration either by intent or just by their cultural insularity, but all could be more open if they chose; so far the current residents simply don’t favor this. For most of the developed world, however, immigration continues apace or is rising. The US population, for example, despite a below-replacement fertility rate of 1.78 is expected to grow from its current 332,000,000 to over 450,000,000 by mid-century. This is based on immigration rates of the past decade, but this may be an underestimate if the surge in immigration in 2022 continues going forward. Underpopulation is not an issue. It was not an issue as long ago as 1968 when earth’s population was a mere 3.5 billion and Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. It won’t be an issue in the unlikely event 22^nd century demographic trends return the earth to its 1968 level.
 
All that said, billionaire Elon Musk is well able to afford his 9 children, and I wish him and their mothers joy of them. But no one needs to self-sacrifice just to help the underpopulation crisis. The crisis doesn’t exist.
 

The Unknown Hinson – Pregnant Again

Nostalgia for the Unexperienced

 A curious thing happens when I watch a film or read a book made or set in the 1940s. I get nostalgic. This is curious because I was born the following decade so the nostalgia is for a time I never knew – not first hand. Yet all of us have experienced it second or third hand whether we are conscious of it or not. Even if you’re a GenZ who has never watched Out of the Past or read Raymond Chandler, the tropes from them and their ilk have been recycled time and again in subsequent popular culture. The myths of modern American culture are largely tied to the 1940s and are better for it. Our values and self-images still have roots in the decade. How many of us still identify with Rick in Casablanca: cynical and egoistic on the outside but sentimental under the surface and ready to do the right thing when push comes to shove? Also, the era’s music (which played in my house when I grew up) is pretty good.
 
The flaws of the actual denizens of the 1940s were not subtle or minor – at their worst they were truly awful – but most folks were well-meaning at the core. The generation that experienced the 1940s as adults is almost gone, but those of us who knew it intimately as our parents (or less intimately as grandparents) miss the sheer competence and common sense it brought to the table – a competence born of necessity from Depression and war. Even though we didn’t know our parents in their youths, we are familiar enough with their older selves to know when the “feel” is wrong about fictional characters set in the ‘40s in modern books and movies. We also appreciate it when the feel is right.

 
James Kestrel (a pseudonym btw) gets it right in large ways and small in his noir detective/historical novel Five Decembers, which is better than one might expect from the pulp-ish cover. Just before Thanksgiving in 1941, a Honolulu detective Joe McGrady is assigned to investigate a double homicide. The victims turn out to be Admiral Kimmel’s nephew and a young woman from the Japanese consulate. As a reader one doesn’t need to be very much of a historian to see the implications of a relationship between those two, and even McGrady (without the benefit of hindsight) has a hint of it due to the diplomatic situation. Kimmel overrides jurisdictional and budget issues, giving McGrady (to his chief’s annoyance) a blank check to pursue the investigation. McGrady follows his best suspect (possibly German) across the Pacific by Pan Am Clipper to Manila and then to Hong Kong. The timing is inauspicious. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and take Hong Kong. McGrady is shipped to Japan with other Western prisoners where more intrigue follows involving relatives of the murdered consulate girl. The case doesn’t end with the war. (I normally wouldn’t mention that, but the title of the book tips it off anyway.) Kestrel, who has resided in Taiwan and Oahu, did solid historical research for his book and visited sites he mentions on the ground. There is romance along with the action, and it is both seedy and innocent in that peculiar 1940s way. If you like noir-ish detective fiction, I can’t recommend this book enough.

The next novel I picked up (by no coincidence) was Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore. This is a sequel to his novel Noir, which was published a few years ago. It is possible to read Razzmatazz as a standalone but I wouldn’t recommend it; there are far too many callbacks to the first book. In Noir, set in 1947 San Francisco, the protagonists aren’t special. Sammy is a bartender and Stilton (“the Cheese”) is a waitress. When they by happenstance become embroiled in murder, corrupt police, renegade federal agents, and a secret organization of one-percenters, the two must punch seriously above their weights to survive. To throw a characteristically Moore-ish absurdity into the mix, behind all the commotion is a mysterious event that took place in Roswell, New Mexico.
 
In Razzmatazz we are back with Sammy, Stilton, and side characters from Noir. The plot this time centers on murders in two of the city’s lesbian drag king bars (based on two real establishments of the time), the recovery of a dragon statue to settle a debt with a Tong gangster, and flashbacks to pre-1906 China and Chinatown. Moore again captures the ‘40s patter, taking it over the top just enough to be enjoyable without falling into outright parody. Moore warns us up front of the book’s era-appropriate un-PC dialogue. Again there are absurdist elements. The opening line to Chapter 9 (“There was a lot more tap-dancing involved in the shoot-out than I would have expected”) is the tamest example. “Scooter” (from the Roswell incident) makes a reappearance along with elements that really would be a spoiler to mention.
 
It’s a fun read, but read Noir first. Really.
 
So now I’ll somewhat reluctantly leave the ‘40s behind for a while (to the extent any of us ever can) but not before slipping some ‘40s tunes in the stereo cd disc tray – maybe some Ella Mae Morse who was always five-by-five in a better sense than in her song.

 

Ella Mae Morse – Mr. Five by Five (1942)

Housepainting Blues… Or Browns

The back of my house faces south and so gets baked by the sun. Accordingly, while the exterior paint on the window trim and doors elsewhere on house lasts five to seven years on the back of the house it lasts only two. I repaint the surfaces myself for the same reasons I mow my own lawn: I’m cheap and the task is within my skill set. I’ve purchased the brown paint. I’ll probably break out the drop cloths and brushes sometime in the next month. (I didn’t say I was ambitious.)

 
The paint purchase raised the question (because why wouldn’t it?) of how long homeowners have been slathering protective paints on their walls and trim. It seems like something even ancient Sumerians would have done but apparently this is not the case.
 
Painters as artists expressed themselves far back in prehistory, sometimes with stunning results such as in the caves at Lascaux. Yet they didn’t just paint the walls a monocolor (white, blue, or red, or whatever) in order to brighten up the cave. Nor were later huts and houses so decorated. They were left natural mud or brick or wood or whatever the walls happened to be. By early Greek times colors were sometimes mixed into the finishing plasters, but those are not house paint in the usual sense. I’m referring here to private residences, by the way. Public buildings and palaces received special paint treatment, as did statuary. The stately white marble of ancient Greek and Roman temples looked quite different back in the day. The Parthenon, the archetypical stately temple, originally had garishly painted friezes and architectural elements. It must have been awful. The private homes of the wealthy in classical times often had elaborate interior murals, but again that is quite different from simply painting a wall (inside or out) a solid canary yellow.
 
The reason was the difficulty in ancient times of producing paint in anything more than small batches using animal blood, charcoal, ochre, oils, colored clays, minerals, egg whites (really), and various other organic materials. If you are going to go to all that trouble you might as well do something more with the end product than smear it on a wall. So, paint was mostly for art and the ornamentation of public structures. It had to await better large batch production techniques to be affordable for average homeowners, which didn’t come along until after 1200 CE. Medieval housepainter guilds formed about this time to protect their secrets, restrict competition, and keep up prices – a clear indicator housepainting finally had caught on, particularly after 1500. Those fun-fearful Puritans, of course, objected: in 17^th century colonial Massachusetts they made colorful paint jobs illegal since they displayed vanity and frivolity. The non-Puritan colonies were more experimental.
 
In the 19^th century chemistry became more scientific and paint mixing was largely mechanized. Several major paint producers still in business today got their start then. Safety and environmental concerns (notably the removal of lead from housepaints) altered the mixes in the 20^th century.
 
I don’t know how the Puritans would have felt about my window trim. Brown isn’t very colorful really. It is not far off the natural color of the wood. Somehow I suspect they would have found something objectionable. The most objectionable paint is inside the house, but it is hidden. The housepainter (deceased for decades now) who painted my house when it was new had an artistic streak and a personal quirk. He also hung wallpaper, but he always painted and signed a mural somewhere in a house before he covered the wall with paper. We all hope to have an impact beyond our time on earth, and this was his way. He knew that eventually the wallpaper would be replaced, and his artwork and name would appear again. So somewhere underneath the grasscloth paper in my living room is a mural signed by Lenny. I don’t expect ever to see it, but someone someday probably will. My window trim paint, on the other hand, will need another coat in only a couple of years.
 
 

Robbie Robertson – I Hear You Paint Houses

An Even More than Usually Self-Involved Blog Post, But at Least There Are Trees in It

My case of COVID-19 some months ago (yes, I was vaccinated and boosted but got it anyway) was mild enough that I didn’t bother to mention it in my blogs or social media. The weather was still sufficiently unwelcoming at the time that staying at home for a while (longer than the CDC protocols) was not a big departure from what I would have done anyway. I felt lousy for a week (much like a standard cold) and then felt fine. Almost. There was one lingering aftereffect: my energy and stamina took a hit that did not recover on its own. I felt perfectly normal when sitting or just standing around, but just walking 100 feet was as taxing as it previously would have been to run an all-out 100-meter dash. I needed to stop and catch my breath – no exaggeration. It was such a mortality reminder that I actually was motivated to revise my will and end-of-life documents – though if the stock market and consumer prices continue to perform the way they have lately, those won’t be of much consequence to anyone anyway.
 
My response was to attempt to build stamina back with daily walks. Many people much older than I run multi-kilometer races and work out in gyms, of course; back on April 3 I blogged about Edward Weston who in 1909 walked from New York to San Francisco in 105 days at age 70 and then walked from Los Angeles to New York in 78 days the following year. I’m not as ambitious as any of those people. I just wanted again to be able to walk from my car to the supermarket door without wondering if I’d be able to walk back. Lots of my neighbors walk on my street – a lightly trafficked cul-de-sac – for exercise, usually with their dogs, but I prefer a more solitary hike. I live on five acres (two hectares), four of which are wooded. Years ago I hacked a trail through my woods with enough twists and turns to make a fairly lengthy path.

The trail

c. 200 y.o. stone hedgerow. Someone
once worked very hard on this.

 
Did walking in the woods help? Yes, though for a few weeks I wasn’t sure it would. At first I literally (not figuratively) would have to stop every 50 or 100 feet (depending on the slope) to catch my breath. Sometimes more often. But by the end of a month I could walk the full circuit without stopping or gasping. Now I’m pretty much back to normal. (Normal by the standards of my pre-COVID 2022, that is: I’d prefer normal for my 1973, but we take what we can get.) The wood trail also promotes personal serenity, or so I’ve always found, which is why I made it in the first place. There is something about being surrounded by leaves and trees instead of people that eases the tensions.
 
With the exception of four college years in downtown DC, I’ve been fortunate always to have woods a few meters from my door – not always deep woods but thick enough to enter and see only trees, at least in spots. A good part of my first 6 years was spent actually in a tree: there was a tree at the edge of woods by our house with branches that made it ideal for climbing. In 1959 my family moved to Brookside. In back of the house was a hillside stretch of woods with a marvelous path that went all the way to the elementary school I attended. It was my most common way to get there and back when the weather wasn’t bad. This is now a linear park, but at the time it was still the R.O.W. of the long defunct Rockaway Valley Railroad, so I rarely encountered other walkers. The school itself abutted woods with trails and a stream (which the kids for unknown reasons dubbed Balboa); we were forbidden to enter it during unsupervised (!) recess so of course that is where we went. My own first home (sold in 2000) was a cabin in the woods. What of those four years in DC? Sometimes I would walk from 19^th St NW (near F) across Arlington Memorial Bridge all the way to Theodore Roosevelt Island, a wooded park in the Potomac with an entrance on the Virginia side. It was a bit of a hike (check a map) but I did it without a thought, which explains my nostalgia for my 1973 stamina.
 
Anyway, (once again) I’m not ambitious enough to try to emulate Mr. Weston or even some of my dog-walking neighbors. However, I need to stop at the supermarket today. It’s a simple joy to be able to do it again without gasping for breath in the parking lot. Afterward the woods trail beckons. It’s no Appalachian Trail, but for my purposes it is long enough.

Rival Sons – Back in the Woods Again

Getting It Wrong

t may come as a surprise to the reader that I’m occasionally wrong. I presume there is much about which I’m wrong all the time, though I could be wrong about that.
 
There are many ways to be wrong. There are moral wrongs, but these can be fuzzy since there are different moral systems. (The Nietzschean view is that those out of power devise moral definitions that make it only “fair” that they gain power, while those in power embrace moral definitions that make it only “fair” that they stay there.) People sometimes experience religious or political conversions and decide their former views were wrong. (These are often deeply unsettling in a way analogous to the five stages of grief, since former views are typically integral to sense of self.) In my experience, to the extent such conversions are philosophical rather than just emotional reactions to some event, they usually involve a reexamination of first principles about what it means to be human in the presence of other humans. (Goethe: "Once you have missed the first buttonhole, you'll never manage to button up.”) First principles can differ. One simply can be mistaken about facts (e.g. believing an object is closer or farther away than is actually is), either from misperception or misinformation. (This implies that there is an objective reality – a truth about which to be wrong; this is a matter of more philosophical contention than one might think, but it is useful to posit it as true in ordinary circumstances.) We can misspeak and we can make false assumptions. My mom, who was spontaneous in social settings, was famous for both.
 
Three of my favorite mom “oops” moments also illustrate why we hate being wrong. Decades ago she was at a neighbor’s backyard tennis party where all the women (except her) wore bright white tennis outfits. She had intended to say, “It looks like everyone here has been using Clorox,” which she later admitted itself would have been a somewhat snippy remark. What she in fact said was, “It looks like everyone here has been using Clairol,” which was met by silence. Not long afterward at a meeting of local businesspeople (she was a real estate broker), she spoke to a local storeowner [I’ve changed his name]: “Hi Brad. Is this your mother?” It was his wife. At another business association dinner a waiter placed a bowl in front of her. She sampled the contents with a spoon and assumed it was some kind of gourmet cold spicy soup. After a few more spoonfuls, another person at the table spoke up, “Robina, are you really going to eat all of our salad dressing?” Each of these was a minor faux pas in the scheme of things but each was also mortifying in a way we’ve all experienced at some time or other but never want to experience again.
 
Much as we hate being wrong, we find pleasure in pointing out the wrongness of others. We don’t even seem to care if it is our own knowledge and skill that prevails. Who has not had one’s statements (say, on the price of a new Tesla) fact-checked in real time by someone Googling on a cell phone? If any discrepancy turns up, no matter how small, the satisfaction of the Googler is as real as if he personally had memorized the MSRPs of every model beforehand.

 
There are many books on error, but there is one in particular I enjoyed reading this past week. In her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, author Kathryn Schulz examines all the various ways we get it wrong, how we acknowledge it, how we (all too often) deny it, how we (also all too often) blame the error on others, how we persist in error against solid evidence (e.g. confirmation bias and sunk cost bias), and how we (at best) grow from the experience. Schulz, journalist for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Nation, et al., has an informative but breezy style that doesn’t talk down even while she shows genuine erudition. She relies heavily on recent research but is just as likely to discuss a classical author. When she writes about Sully, or Plato, or Shakespeare, or Freud, or Proust, or whomever she always has something interesting to say without an assumption that the reader is unfamiliar with the works in question.
 
Many of our errors result in ultimately minor humiliations. Others can be truly destructive. Take the wrongness of memory. Many minor arguments are over conflicting memories. Schulz mentions an overheard argument at the train station between a husband and wife because the husband bought pound cake instead of crumb cake. “You said ‘pound cake,’” he said. “I said ‘crumb cake,’” she answered. “You said ‘pound cake,’” he repeated. “I said crumb cake.” The exchange went on. One of them was wrong – maybe both if she said “round cake.” I had a similar incident the other day. I recounted to a friend a story involving my dad and uncle during World War 2. Against policy after the Sullivan brothers died in the same sinking, they by pure chance had been assigned to the same ship. Taking place in the port of Naples, the story includes the Shore Patrol and a German air raid. “You told me this story before, but you said it was Marseille,” my friend said, happy to correct me. “I said it was Naples,” I answered. “I always say it is Naples. The story wouldn’t even make sense in Marseille.” “You said it was Marseille,” he insisted. One of us remembered wrong. I’m quite sure it was my friend who was wrong, but absolutely 100% sure? After all he is almost certainly right that I told him the story before (I’ve told it enough times over the years that I don’t remember who has heard it and who hasn’t), so one must admit the possibility (though I still regard it as unlikely) that I misspoke rather than that he misremembered.
 
That example is of little consequence, but there can be devastating consequences to the faulty memories of eyewitnesses. For more than a century (early experiments were conducted in 1900) it has been known how poor and malleable eyewitness testimony can be. Witnesses primed with mugshots, for example, commonly pick from live lineups someone from the mugshots rather than anyone who was actually at the scene of a crime, and the false memory hardens with time. Vividness of memory has little to do with its accuracy. The Innocence Project reexamines cases of people convicted of crimes based primarily on eyewitness (sometimes face-to-face eyewitness) testimony by testing DNA evidence when it still exists. So far 375 convictions have been overturned, often after the falsely accused person had spent years in prison. In the 1980s there was a spate of convictions based on “recovered memories.” Within a decade it became clear just how unreliable such memories were, leading to the most egregious cases being reopened.
 
Schulz in her final chapter has an optimistic message: “We get things wrong because we have an enduring confidence in our own minds; and we face up to that wrongness in the faith that, having learned something, we will get it right the next time.” I hope she is right about that.
 

Depeche Mode – Wrong

Milkshake Slake

Spring arrived late this year in my part of the world. Chilliness long outstayed its welcome. Something approaching summery weather at last has arrived, however: enough so that I treated myself to a milkshake the other day. (Vanilla, no apologies; I don’t dislike chocolate or more exotic flavors but in truth I prefer vanilla.) At one of my favorite diner haunts, it came garnished with whipped cream in a container that was fairly common (not typical, but fairly common) when I was a kid though infrequent today: still in the tall stainless steel mixing cup rather than a glass. It was a generous serving and a satisfying one.
 
Naturally it caused me to wonder (because why wouldn’t it?) just how long ago one could order a milkshake. After all, iced drinks date to ancient times. Runners in ancient Rome, China, and Mesoamerica would bring snow down from the mountains for sale in town; if they were fast enough, some wouldn’t melt. Milk has been drunk since prehistory. Ice cream in the modern sense dates to the 1600s. So all the ingredients have been in place for a long time. Yet, there is no mention of it in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1785) or in 19th century recipe books. The current Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word “milkshake” can be documented by 1885. If you ordered one in 1885, however, you would be in for a surprise. It was milk, egg, and whiskey – a sort of rough-and-ready eggnog. Ice cream was not an ingredient. There still are milk-based alcoholic beverages, of course, but they have other names such as White Russian (vodka, Kahlua, and milk or cream) and Cow Shot (Southern Comfort and milk). [Digression: de gustibus and all that, but IMO Southern Comfort is dreadful on its own (what was Janis Joplin thinking?) but makes an excellent mixer in lieu of bourbon.] Nonalcoholic (and non-egg) “milkshakes” appeared in soda shops by 1900, but they did not include ice cream either; the ingredients were milk, malt, and various favored syrups.
 
It turns out there is a precise answer as to when, where, and by whom the modern milkshake was created. In 1922 Ivar “Pop” Coulson was working the soda fountain counter at a Chicago Walgreens. Malted milk (milk, malt, and chocolate syrup) was already on the menu, but he decided to add two scoops of vanilla ice cream to the blend. The concoction was a hit and by 1930 this version of a milkshake was offered at soda fountains nationwide. The malt was optional and different flavors (primarily chocolate and strawberry) and garnishes appeared almost immediately. In the 1930s Fred Waring invented a dedicated blender to speed the making of milkshakes, and that is pretty much where things still stand today.

Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)

Soda fountains and malt shops were once much more prevalent than today. Some were specialized shops but up until the mid-60s almost every drug store had a soda counter that offered milkshakes as well. My parents, who met in high school in the 1940s, got to know each other over milkshakes after movie dates. (He was a chocolate man, she usually ordered strawberry.) Dedicated malt shops have become rarer since then, but they have not entirely disappeared. Milkshakes are readily available elsewhere, of course, such as at fast food outlets and diners.
 
So, since this year happens to be the 100^th anniversary of the modern milkshake, on June 21, which is not only the solstice but National Vanilla Milkshake Day (really), I’ll drink a milky toast to Pop Coulson.

 

Jerry Lee Lewis - Milkshake Mademoiselle (1957)