7 ms·

My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD again currently. She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look s

by stew-j 4y ago

My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD again currently. She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look strangely like Southern California?" She read the books as a girl, but boys generally didn't in the '70s. Our elementary school in Kansas distributed a screen play for one of the episodes as part of a literacy program. When I went to school in New York, many people had the idea that we still lived like that, way out west in Kansas. One of the first episodes of the TV show was about a Typhus plague, and how the population cooperated and sacrificed to survive. My wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books, but I'm sure TV moves even more away from the reality of Laura's life. LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life. One boss I had was Mennonite, and his wife, after decades of growing and processing the family's food, started shopping in stores. She remarked how wonderful it was to have store bought canned food, which I guess is a partial explanation.

stormdennis 4y ago
We planted our own trees 15 years ago and now, we cut, split and dry our own firewood, it's a lot of work, though it is an extra pleasure to sit in front of such a fire I can see why people stopped doing it.
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  And even with today's tools, cutting and splitting firewood is still very dangerous.
  - stormdennis 4y ago
    Correct and hard on your back! I do get a kick out of it though. Makes me feel like a real man in a way my sedentary day job does not.
  - stew-j 4y ago
    My father taught me how to chop wood in the early seventies at the age of 8 in the remote territory of suburban Connecticut. More dangerous was the wasps whose nest I disturbed near the wood-pile, and my face swelled up like a balloon. We didn't call an apiary to humanely remove them back then, my dad used kerosene to burn the nest.
- stew-j 4y ago
  Although some of their time was freed up by not having to diagnose issues with CI pipelines on the cloud, or writing meta-manager code to tame Slurm :)
paulcole 4y ago
> She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look strangely like Southern California?" Do you do this for every show/film that is set somewhere outside of SoCal but obviously filmed there?
- theflyingelvis 4y ago
  I do
- morelisp 4y ago
  And every alien planet which seems to resemble Canadian prairie.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - noSyncCloud 4y ago
    They didn't even film Alien on location, smh
    - slillibri 4y ago
      At least Kubrick had the good sense to film the moon landing on location.
      - stew-j 4y ago
        A Kubrick-directed LHOTP would have been a different series, too, I imagine. I don't think NBC had a Kubrick level budget either. On a side note, there was a rumor that the Capricorn One movie was filmed on location too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One
  - ksaj 4y ago
    And every NY or Chicago scene that is actually on and around Bay Street in Toronto.
duxup 4y ago
> LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life. Farming is hard, the boom and bust cycle is harsh. Most early farms were too small in scale to survive. Not to criticize LHOP here, but generally there is a sort of romantic idea of a family farm that for large chunks of time wasn’t sustainable financially no matter how hard they worked.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Before the mechanization of agriculture, the family farm was subsistence level only. This meant a bad harvest resulted in starvation.
  - stew-j 4y ago
    Right, but LHOTP showed the importance of community--and the power of cooperation. [1] This was a strong theme in the first season. I grew up in Kansas in the late '70s to mid '80s, and the "theme" back then was the accretion of family farms by bank repossession into large agribusinesses--but there were still small to medium sized farmers at the co-ops. Having your means of support repo-ed is another way to starve. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative#Unite...
thegeekpirate 4y ago
> My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD again currently. FWIW the Blu-ray version is great, although they didn't remaster the audio to remove pops/hisses.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ksaj 4y ago
> My wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books Only up to a certain point. For example, everything about Albert. And Colonel Sanders didn't visit the town when they were starting up the chicken restaurant. The later the series ran, the farther they strayed from the books.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by stew-j 4y ago

stormdennis 4y ago

We planted our own trees 15 years ago and now, we cut, split and dry our own firewood, it's a lot of work, though it is an extra pleasure to sit in front of such a fire I can see why people stopped doing it.

SantalBlush 4y ago
And even with today's tools, cutting and splitting firewood is still very dangerous.
- stormdennis 4y ago
  Correct and hard on your back! I do get a kick out of it though. Makes me feel like a real man in a way my sedentary day job does not.
- stew-j 4y ago
  My father taught me how to chop wood in the early seventies at the age of 8 in the remote territory of suburban Connecticut. More dangerous was the wasps whose nest I disturbed near the wood-pile, and my face swelled up like a balloon. We didn't call an apiary to humanely remove them back then, my dad used kerosene to burn the nest.
stew-j 4y ago
Although some of their time was freed up by not having to diagnose issues with CI pipelines on the cloud, or writing meta-manager code to tame Slurm :)

paulcole 4y ago

> She is getting tired of hearing me joke, "Doesn't that part of Minnesota look strangely like Southern California?" Do you do this for every show/film that is set somewhere outside of SoCal but obviously filmed there?

theflyingelvis 4y ago
I do
morelisp 4y ago
And every alien planet which seems to resemble Canadian prairie.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- noSyncCloud 4y ago
  They didn't even film Alien on location, smh
  - slillibri 4y ago
    At least Kubrick had the good sense to film the moon landing on location.
    - stew-j 4y ago
      A Kubrick-directed LHOTP would have been a different series, too, I imagine. I don't think NBC had a Kubrick level budget either. On a side note, there was a rumor that the Capricorn One movie was filmed on location too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One
- ksaj 4y ago
  And every NY or Chicago scene that is actually on and around Bay Street in Toronto.

duxup 4y ago

> LHOTP does make me wonder why the world was in such a hurry to modernize, despite the hardships of pioneer life. Farming is hard, the boom and bust cycle is harsh. Most early farms were too small in scale to survive. Not to criticize LHOP here, but generally there is a sort of romantic idea of a family farm that for large chunks of time wasn’t sustainable financially no matter how hard they worked.

WalterBright 4y ago
Before the mechanization of agriculture, the family farm was subsistence level only. This meant a bad harvest resulted in starvation.
- stew-j 4y ago
  Right, but LHOTP showed the importance of community--and the power of cooperation. [1] This was a strong theme in the first season. I grew up in Kansas in the late '70s to mid '80s, and the "theme" back then was the accretion of family farms by bank repossession into large agribusinesses--but there were still small to medium sized farmers at the co-ops. Having your means of support repo-ed is another way to starve. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_cooperative#Unite...

thegeekpirate 4y ago

> My wife and I are watching the "Little House" TV series on DVD again currently. FWIW the Blu-ray version is great, although they didn't remaster the audio to remove pops/hisses.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ksaj 4y ago

> My wife says the show is fairly faithful to the books Only up to a certain point. For example, everything about Albert. And Colonel Sanders didn't visit the town when they were starting up the chicken restaurant. The later the series ran, the farther they strayed from the books.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]