Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for October 26, 2013

Dogs are stupid….Why can’t they be smart, like cats?….Sorry, I usually don’t go political……….. especially so early, eh?……………..

Want some excitement? Try biting the tyres.

It is boring for the dog because the man can not get up enough speed for a good tongue and ear flapping they like hanging it out the cart.

Dog: “When are you morons going to invent roll-down windows!?”

Alexikakos, that’s right, I forgot, The western hemisphere was completely unoccupied at that time….Nothing to report pre-industrial there…..

Hey, dogs would have had a lot of fun sniffin’ people’s butts back then, I figure….

why do dogs stick their heads out the window while driving? and, their fascination with squirrels? and, their dislike of vacuums?

“why do dogs stick their heads out the window while driving?”Because your driving stinks.

and when did dogs evolve?

obviously, before we did!

It’s a fact that dogs were very lazy until Henry Ford gave them something to forever chase for no reason.

Don’t encourage that kind of un-PC stuff.

It’s all history and now days it isn’t in to remember history. the only people who care about history are the Baby boomers and we are on the way out…

I’ve done that. Been reading SiFI since age nine, 60+ years now. “What long strange trip it’s been…”

Of course, this is what happens when the dog catches the vehicle. As for typing, slow down, take a deep breath. The keyboard won’t leave without you. I’m 71, it works for me… :-)

There were plenty of European-descended pre-industrial subsistence farmers in the lands that became the USA. The first settlements (Jamestown and Plymouth colonies) were founded about 150 years before the Industrial Revolution began in Europe. British policy was to discourage industrialization in the colonies, but instead to force the colonists to trade farm products, furs, and other raw materials for British-made manufactured goods – and even to force trade between the colonies in agricultural products to go through English ports. So American industrialization did not have a chance to start until 1783, and did not really take off until around 1820.

And then, American industry was concentrated in a few states. It began in New England (which never was a great place to farm), and by the beginning of the Civil War, it was still pretty much concentrated in the seaboard states from Richmond, VA north.

As for Michigan, it reached a population sufficient for statehood in 1837 with hardly any industrial activity except logging – and at that time logging was as much to get rid of the trees so the land could be farmed as for the sale of lumber. Mining became a big thing in the Upper Peninsula a little later. Manufacturing mostly arose towards the end of the 19th Century, and was originally concentrated in wood products – carriages and wagons around Detroit, and furniture around Grand Rapids. (This evolved into automobiles and, uhh, metal furniture.)

But that particular scene is unlikely to be Michigan in any era from two things: the cart would most likely have been pulled by a horse or ox, and thatched roofs were never very common. (Sod houses were once common in treeless areas to the west, but would be an astoundingly bad idea in Michigan’s soggy climate.) Both of these are examples of a crucial economic difference between pre-industrial Europe and the non-slave states: manpower was overabundant in Europe and land and materials were scarce, while it was usually the opposite in the states.

English and other European peasants often had to substitute manpower for horse power because their farm plots were too small (often around 10 acres) to feed a draft animal and the farmer’s family. Michigan farms were huge by comparison (40 acres and up), so production was generally limited by the available manpower rather than the land, and any reasonable way of saving labor was utilized. Farmers did use wheelbarrows (not that thing in the drawing), but mainly for around the farmyard where hitching up the horse and steering a cart around tight spaces was more work than pushing the load yourself.

Thatching is labor-intensive; it was common in England well into the industrial age because the large straight-grained logs required for split-wood shingles were rare and expensive, but in 19th Century Michigan the farmer could find the wood on his own land. Hiring a man to help saw the log into blocks, split it into shingles, and nail the shingles to the roof might be difficult, but nowhere near as difficult as finding the wherewithal to hire a skilled thatcher for several times as many days.

People are sure taking themselves seriously today.

“You don’t have to have a sense of humor to post here, but it helps.”

Stop it guys you are making me think of the basset who owned my house previous to my current dog….all you had to do was roll the back window down enough for him to stick his nose out. Instant concentrated air!