Late Night Thoughts

It's Saturday night, the Midnight Special is on the radio, and it's time again for Late Night Thoughts!  This week, brought to you by the fine folks at P&G, former makers of Duz Laundry Soap.  As a young sprite in the 50's, I remember my Mom using Duz when washing our clothes in our Washer/Wringer laundry tub.  Yes, we actually owned one of these contraptions.

A washer/wringer was essentially a porcelain tub with what can best be described as oars inside of it.  You threw your clothes in the tub, filled it with water and a cupful of Duz, and then turned it on.  The oars would rotate slowly and when you thought the clothes were clean enough, you turned it off, swung the wringer over the tub, fished each item of clothing out and ran it through the wringer (also called a "mangle") by hand.  None of that rinsing shit.  When you were all done with one load, you either opened the spigot at the bottom of the tub and emptied out the water through a hose, or you just threw some more clothes into the same water and repeated.

I know ... EWWWWWWW!!!

The first lesson I remember my Mom teaching me was to keep my goddamned hands out of the electric wringer.  Good advice, because that thing would definitely fuck you up.

With the advent of synthetic laundry detergent,Tide in particular, laundry soap's days were numbered, but Duz kept up the good fight, claiming that Tide made your hands red and sore from all the dunking and wringing you had to do, and soap did not.  Which was true.  But when washer/wringers went the way of Post Toasties, Duz followed, riding quietly into the sunset.

Well, enough reminiscing.  I guess we should get on to Late Night Thoughts!

***

You know what?  I just spent the last half hour listing to one of my favorite albums ever.  Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?  What a cool album!  So it's moving onto 1 am and I'm tired and I want to go to bed.  And anyway:

I got nothin' this week.

So, join me next week, when I'll probably have a whole bunch of thoughts, unless I unexpectedly get caught up listening to another album that I really liked and haven't heard for a long time.