DIY - Do It Yourself. This had to start after the advent of television. Before that, we did things ourselves. We made things like clothes, furniture, canned food, and anything that could be done without paying money. There wasn't surplus money for things. In fact, there was rationing after the war in many countries. So people did without many things.
But the boom of the 50s and 60s saw the advent of consumerism where DIY gave status to the common person. When I was young we sewed our clothes, canned food, made basic furniture. Those were things that people who didn't have enough money did. If we had enough money, we went out and bought most of those things. the self-worth and creativity of a person was demonstrated through their DIY . Basic DIYs were taught to children in school. They were called home-making and shop skills.
There was no DIY phrase in home-economics when I was a child in the 1950s. We passed or failed making aprons, skirts, dresses, and cooking mint peas and blanc mange.
My sense is that while DIY began in the U.S. in the 1950s, it was the 1960s counterculture with the "back to the land" movement that made it very popular in the media. It was that Whole Earth Catalog in late 1968 that cemented the self-sufficiency ethic as a prestigious movement.
The media got a hold of how to present home economics and shop as a DIY activity on steroids. I think ofThis Old House and Martha Stewart. None of us would do what Bob Villa did - all those massive renovations. But it was fun to watch Bob explain them all. Where did it go? It evolved into blogs and websites and everyday Hacks by the common man.
What insights do our DIY jokes bring? Not many, and mostly mediocre, but here are a few:
I wanted to buy some literature on DIY shelving. Sounds easy, but try going into a book store and asking if they have "any books on shelves."
I tried to build a DIY Stair Master...The instructions were only a few steps, but they went on forever.
I bought a few pieces for my DIY orchestra today - some ensemble required.
A man was doing some DIY work on his gas stove, when it all of a sudden blew up and sent him flying through his roof and up into the sky. On his way up he passed a man falling down from the sky and asked him: “Hey, you know anything about gas stoves?” The guy falling responded, “Nope, you know anything about parachutes?”
These are canna leaves. This is the time of year to find them and get abstract prints like these.
It seems interesting that luck is both good luck and bad luck. Yesterday's luckiest man had both bad luck and in the last instalment of his story had good luck in winning the lottery. I might bet he has more instalments of luck on the way.
Amongst the luckiest people from yesterday's search is one person who is called a tetrachromat. She's Concetta Antico and she sees 100 times more colours than the rest of us. Her story was included with the lucky people. Here's the story.
"The human eye is stacked with millions of cone-shaped cells that help us recognise colours. For the normal kind like us, there are three types of cones which allow vision for about one million distinctive colours. Birds, insects, fishes and reptiles have a fourth type of cone cell that extends their colour perception, making them see the UV range as well. Although evolution has mostly scrubbed that fourth cone from the mammalian lineage, there is evidence that a small group of humans may have a genetic variant that allows for tetrachromacy.
A tetrachromat will be able to see, roughly 100 times more colours than an average human being.
Concetta Antico is a tetrachromat. “It’s shocking how little colour people see in their lives.” Says Antico. The fact that she’s the only one (one of the handful) in the entire world who sees the world a lot more vividly than the others, makes her a really lucky person. When she looks at a leaf, she sees much more than just green. “Around the edge I’ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green, but I’ll see violet, turquoise, blue,” she said. “It’s like a mosaic of color.”
Deciding to show how she sees the world, Concetta became a painter. She conjures masterpieces in one sitting. All her paintings are insanely colorful, and feature shades you wouldn't generally expect to see."
