I visited my friend from high school the week before Christmas. Last year I had given him two strings of green LED Christmas lights last year to compliment the multicolored lights that he had put up. He’s not much into Christmas displays and he needed the help.
Looking at the lights this year I found them to be unbalanced. He needed more green lights. So we went off to the local big box store that starts with a W. It was the 20th of December and they were very picked over. Just a few white lights and they were mostly old style incandescents. So we went to the drug store. They were cleaned out except for some white lights. On to the big box hardware store. It had pallets of white incandescent mini Christmas lights and some white LED mini lights. On to the next big box hardware store. They had more forklift pallets fulls of white incandescent mini lights (they were cheap) and a couple of strings of blue LED mini lights. He found one string of green incandescent lights so my friend bought them. We really needed two strings of green LED lights.
He put the lights up and plugged them in. They were dim compared to the LED lights. What a disappointment. Driving around I did not see any houses with green LED mini light hanging off them. Putting green lights on a green tree is not the best color choice.
If people are using LED lights and passing up the incandescent lights, that is good for the environment. ON top of that the LED lights are much brighter than the incandescent lights.
What does this have to do with Steampunk? It shows that people will buy something new over the traditional device even if the purchase price for the new device is more than the old device. As I have mentioned the automobile replaced the horse very quickly, even though the horse had been a part of human culture for thousands of years. You don’t have to feed a car every day whether you use it or not. Cars don’t get sick or refuse to work on a whim. Nor do they step on your foot.
Unabashed plug for my book The Daemon Boat. It’s a Steampunk spy story. https://www.amazon.com/Daemon-Boat-Education-Steampunk-Spy-ebook/dp/B01I63CH08/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Daemon+Boat&qid=1577328155&sr=8-1
Try a good Fruit Cake and you’ll never go back to the old brick. I got the recipe from John Carter’s wife.
Best White Fruit Cake
5 large eggs
1 cup butter (2 sticks or 1/2 lb. butter)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
3/4 lb. glazed cherries, 1/2 red-1/2 green
1 lb. glazed pineapple
4 cups shelled pecans
1/2 oz. bottle vanilla (1 Tablespoon)
1/2 oz. bottle lemon (1 Tablespoon)
- Cream butter, add sugar gradually, creaming well until fluffy. Add eggs, which have been beaten well, and blend.
- Mix chopped fruits and nuts; and mix with part of flour.
- Sift remaining flour and baking powder together into creamed mix.
- Add flavorings and mix well; then fold in nuts and fruits. Pour
into greased, paper lined tube pan. Place into cold oven and bake at 250 degrees for 3 hours.
Stay strong, write on, and the cake is really good. It has to be, the recipe is from Mars.