The Heaven's Opened Yet Again
Here's an interesting article I came across... 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About
I have to admit, a few items on the list are things I'm going to miss as they seem destined to fade into history.
There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.
That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …
Audio-Visual Entertainment
1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something. I actually still use my VCR seeing how the hard drive on my HD receiver likes to die on me
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds. Super-8 is unknown to me
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager. Haha, I loved my old mini cassette stereo
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel. TV Ontario use to be channel 2 on the old cable dial…now it’s channel 265
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room. We didn’t have a huge CRT TV, so it wasn’t overwhelming, but I know those massive ones
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control. I know those ones but thankfully I was born into the remote control era…phew!
7. High-speed dubbing. I use to trade songs on cassette with a friend of mine…high speed dubbing was a life saver!
8. 8-track cartridges. I had never seen an 8-track tape until a few years ago when a co-worker of mine showed me the 8-track player in his pick-up truck
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD. I love vinyl!
10. Betamax tapes. I don’t know anyone that had a betamax recorder
11. MiniDisc. Talk about useless
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD. Useless item #2
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.) I remember the years I use to listen to AM radio! But that was for hockey and baseball broadcasts only
14. Shortwave radio. I want one!!
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses. Reminds me of the pair of 3-D glasses I got with Rad Racer for the original Nintendo system
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one. Watching TV shows online nowadays even make the need for Tivo obsolete
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’ Totally…the days of Gilligan’s Island and Polka Dot Door was my world
Computers and Video gaming
18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long. I have way too many wires behind my computer…too many USB devices
19. The scream of a modem connecting. My first modem made me shudder when trying to connect late at night when everyone went to bed
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer. I think my old dot matrix printer is in the basement…somewhere
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage. The first video game I ever played, Miner, was on cassette. Talk about old! Thankfully, it was on a middle school computer. As for 3 ½” floppies, I remember buying boxes and boxes of them (100 per box) because I was download and saving everything I saw on the internet when I first got connected
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs. Thankfully, the only jumpers I ever set were the ones on hard drives. I never got them right and I still can’t figure them out
23. DOS. DOS indeed
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe. Old high school text books still referred to mainframes in them. Weird
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black. Oh yes, I remember the old PET computers
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it. I don’t know about the volume thing, but like I mentioned earlier, my first video game loaded from a cassette deck. That was the one and only place I had ever seen that. And it was located in the machine shop classroom in my middle school. Go figure!
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID. Ok, I don't know what this one is all about
28. Counting in kilobytes. I know about kilobytes, but who counted them?
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade. I still wonder about that! Bloody RAM still isn’t cheap, at $75+ a pop for anything decent
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time. Haha, been there…done that
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load. Funny, I never had problems with my PlayStation
32. Joysticks. Wonders of early gaming
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive. Done that many a time, I say, many a time!
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk. Isn’t that what rescue disks were made for? Doesn’t Windows still offer that option, to create rescue disks?
35. Recording a song in a studio. I think “real” musicians still use studios, don’t they?
The Internet
36. NCSA Mosaic. No clue what that is
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia. I remember how big of a deal it was when my father ordered a set of encyclopedias like it was yesterday. Now, they sit dusty on a shelf. Sad days.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B. Google maps still map out directions for you using pins labeled A and B
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open. Like most kids, banking for me wasn’t a kid thing to do, only because it was boring and required real work. I just wanted my allowance back then. End of story. Once I did start doing my own banking business, everything was available by phone or computer.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday. I can’t remember how long it’s been now since Sunday shopping became legal. Back when it wasn’t legal, all I cared about, on Sundays anyway, was hitting up my friends to go out and play hockey or baseball
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages. I still get phone books and yellow pages dropped on the front porch every year, even though I don’t request it. I can’t remember the last time I actually opened one of them to search for something
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees. Selective harvesting, or something like that…yeah, gotta preserve the wilderness now!
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words. I’ve never looked at obtaining a domain name, but I do like the Go Daddy commercials!
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it. The Ministry of Transportation still make you fill out forms
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment. It was good not knowing what my friends were thinking and doing all the time. It meant you didn’t have to discuss it beyond the “oh cool” stage when they did tell you about it
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind. I always hated hand writing letters. I do more corresponding now, in one month, with emails, than I ever did by hand in my entire life.
47. Archie searches. The only Archie I know is the one that hangs out with Jughead, Betty and Veronica
48. Gopher searches. Only gophers I know are the ones digging holes in the back lot at work
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet. I don’t even know what Concatenating and UUdecoding is, but I miss the old Usenet days...Alt5 baby!
50. Privacy. I think this has always been a myth
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them. I’m not a fan of this weird type-speak, but I guess that’s what texting is all based upon
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs. I still get annoyed when I see people use the word “then” instead of “than”, never mind TLAs. Bastards!
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something. Hey, downloading a movie still takes hours! Not that I ever do that or violate piracy laws or anything...
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs. Security vulnerabilities? What’s that? We’re always safe using Microsoft products, aren’t we??
55. The time before PC networks. What exactly was before PC networks anyway?
56. When Spam was just a meat product - or even a Monty Python sketch. I don’t know anyone living that would admit to ever eating spam. I think spam was also a myth!
Gadgets
57. Typewriters. Haha, I remember the first one I ever had! An electric one to boot! Hell, I learned my typing skills on a good ol’ typewriter in my first year of high school
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk? What exactly is APS anyway? 35 mm is still classic. Then again, I’m into photography, so old school stuff fascinate me.
59. Sending that film away to be processed. Sending it away? I remember my father use to drop them off at the drug store’s photo section and he’d have to go back in a day or two to pick up the developed photos. Those were the days.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you. Not always the best thing though. At least you can afford to screw up now with digital cameras and not have it cost you money in terms of wasted prints
61. CB radios. Never had one so I never found them cool anyway
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away. I’ve never used GPS. Those little devices are ridiculous in price, still!
63. Rotary-dial telephones. Those are actually cool, in a retro kinda way. The first one I remember from my childhood was olive green. I guess it could have been worse.
64. Answering machines. Still got one on my cordless phone base set
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wall chart. Lasers just don’t cut it compared to the wooden pointers.
66. Pay phones. Still available everywhere
67. Phones with actual bells in them. Oh God. I’m glad they got rid of those because they were soooooo noisy and they had a habit of scaring the crap out of me when I was a kid
68. Fax machines. All-in-one machines still have Faxes, though they still come in handy…at least in a business environment
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them. They don’t have bags anymore? Where does the crap go? Some sort of nuclear reaction decimates it?
Everything Else
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive. Everyone still has an opinion on the radio station or CD playing, whether it be a long drive or short drive. Some things will never change.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number. I hardly even use my cellphone, so…what phone numbers?
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone. That always bugged me before caller ID was invented.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie. I was never really a big fan of movie rentals anyway, so if they eventually fade away…they fade away
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s. Have you seen some of the toys of today? I think they made way better toys when I was a kid!
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door. Hmm…I guess that was before my first experience with LEGO. I remember more variety than just squares and wheels
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater. My mom use to mark them all off in the TV guide when I was a kid, making it sound like a big deal at the time.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights. I was thrilled when they actually started a new 30 minute sports show after the late evening news, but I always got yelled at for staying up that late to catch any of it. And back then, it was all about the hockey highlights…no one cared about baseball highlights
78. Neat handwriting. I saw some neat handwriting on a note the other day and almost had an orgasm over it. My handwriting looks like someone stuck a pen between my toes and forced me to scribble.
79. The days before the nanny state. That what?
80. Starbuck being a man. Who is Starbuck?
81. Han shoots first. Han Solo?
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise. Star Wars will always remain a classic series
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC. I remember the old Little House on the Prairie episode when Harland Sanders appeared on the show peddling his idea of a fried chicken franchise. Stupid Harriet Oleson turning him down! Then again, he headed for Canada after that, so woo!
84. Trig tables and log tables. Stupid math tables, even though I almost knew them by heart, haha
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”. I’ve seen them, but I don’t understand them
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library. Haha, at least once a month during my public and middle school years were spent in the damn library, with friends, using those card catalogs. Hell, my high school still had and maintained them!
87. Swimming pools with diving boards. What do they have now? No diving boards? Not that I swim. Ever.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers. I never cared about the wrappers. The chocolate was the only thing I was interested in
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger. WTF? That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. Who plays with the wrapper when you have CHOCOLATE?
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain). Never heard of it.
91. Having to manually unlock a car door. My father’s first car, at least first car that I remembered, had those old school locks, where you pulled up the pin to unlock it. Old school indeed.
92. Writing a check. Hmmm…my cheque book is ancient. I have rarely written a cheque in my life. My cheque books, of which I still have like 5 stack of them, still are dated 19___.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive. Isn’t that what the windows are for? No wonder the newer generations are not geographically inclined.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades. I remember the old roller derby thing show they use to have on TV in the 80’s sometime. I got a kick out of that for all of 10 minutes.
95. Cash. I’ve been going old school lately, trying to use more cash than plastic. I’ve also seen a rise in the amount of change I’ve been collecting. It’s out of control!
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet. I’ve never used the library for the internet. I’d actually be afraid to use a public computer for personal things online.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall. The mall that was the closest to me didn’t have an arcade and I was not allowed to go to the malls that had arcades by myself, so I didn’t blow my money like some kids I knew
98. Omni Magazine. Sounds vaguely familiar
99. A physical dictionary - either for spelling or definitions. You’d be surprised how many times guys at work come to me, asking how to spell words. Or how many times I’ve had to correct them. And spelling was my worst subject in junior and middle school!
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same. Does anyone even use the term “nerd” anymore?
It just finished pouring rain. Yet another wet day this summer. It sure is putting a damper on my plans. The weekend family get together picnic is now officially postponed to late next month, due to uncertain weather this coming weekend. In a way, I'm not disappointed. I've never really had "fun" during those things because, even though I don't really see some of my relatives that often, we never really have stuff to say to each other, plus they still treat you like you're 12 years old. The only questions that are "grown up" related are the "when are you getting married?" or the "oh, you do that type of work? Why don't you go work for so-and-so company?" type ones. Yeah, things that have no real answers are always the greatest conversation subjects.
So, it's not all that bad. In one way, I won't get to see people I haven't seen in a while, but in another way, relatives in small doses is better than meeting the whole army at once.
If the weather does hold up, I think I'm going to turn a long overdue visit to the zoo into a reality on Sunday. If it does rain, I can always go indoors, into one of the pavilions, so it shouldn't be a waste of a day. It'll also be the second road trip of the week.
Earlier this week, I paid a visit to Niagara Falls. That too had been a destination I failed to visit for a number of years. It turned out fun, even though it started to rain while I was down there. Bastard summer weather!
I'll make another entry about that, complete with a few pics, provided I get my lazy ass around to uploading them. And, as always, I have an interesting, almost embarrassing, tale to tell about that adventure! Nothing is ever easy as pie with me.
I have to admit, a few items on the list are things I'm going to miss as they seem destined to fade into history.
There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.
That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …
Audio-Visual Entertainment
1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something. I actually still use my VCR seeing how the hard drive on my HD receiver likes to die on me
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds. Super-8 is unknown to me
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager. Haha, I loved my old mini cassette stereo
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel. TV Ontario use to be channel 2 on the old cable dial…now it’s channel 265
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room. We didn’t have a huge CRT TV, so it wasn’t overwhelming, but I know those massive ones
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control. I know those ones but thankfully I was born into the remote control era…phew!
7. High-speed dubbing. I use to trade songs on cassette with a friend of mine…high speed dubbing was a life saver!
8. 8-track cartridges. I had never seen an 8-track tape until a few years ago when a co-worker of mine showed me the 8-track player in his pick-up truck
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD. I love vinyl!
10. Betamax tapes. I don’t know anyone that had a betamax recorder
11. MiniDisc. Talk about useless
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD. Useless item #2
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.) I remember the years I use to listen to AM radio! But that was for hockey and baseball broadcasts only
14. Shortwave radio. I want one!!
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses. Reminds me of the pair of 3-D glasses I got with Rad Racer for the original Nintendo system
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one. Watching TV shows online nowadays even make the need for Tivo obsolete
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’ Totally…the days of Gilligan’s Island and Polka Dot Door was my world
Computers and Video gaming
18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long. I have way too many wires behind my computer…too many USB devices
19. The scream of a modem connecting. My first modem made me shudder when trying to connect late at night when everyone went to bed
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer. I think my old dot matrix printer is in the basement…somewhere
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage. The first video game I ever played, Miner, was on cassette. Talk about old! Thankfully, it was on a middle school computer. As for 3 ½” floppies, I remember buying boxes and boxes of them (100 per box) because I was download and saving everything I saw on the internet when I first got connected
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs. Thankfully, the only jumpers I ever set were the ones on hard drives. I never got them right and I still can’t figure them out
23. DOS. DOS indeed
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe. Old high school text books still referred to mainframes in them. Weird
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black. Oh yes, I remember the old PET computers
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it. I don’t know about the volume thing, but like I mentioned earlier, my first video game loaded from a cassette deck. That was the one and only place I had ever seen that. And it was located in the machine shop classroom in my middle school. Go figure!
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID. Ok, I don't know what this one is all about
28. Counting in kilobytes. I know about kilobytes, but who counted them?
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade. I still wonder about that! Bloody RAM still isn’t cheap, at $75+ a pop for anything decent
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time. Haha, been there…done that
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load. Funny, I never had problems with my PlayStation
32. Joysticks. Wonders of early gaming
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive. Done that many a time, I say, many a time!
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk. Isn’t that what rescue disks were made for? Doesn’t Windows still offer that option, to create rescue disks?
35. Recording a song in a studio. I think “real” musicians still use studios, don’t they?
The Internet
36. NCSA Mosaic. No clue what that is
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia. I remember how big of a deal it was when my father ordered a set of encyclopedias like it was yesterday. Now, they sit dusty on a shelf. Sad days.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B. Google maps still map out directions for you using pins labeled A and B
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open. Like most kids, banking for me wasn’t a kid thing to do, only because it was boring and required real work. I just wanted my allowance back then. End of story. Once I did start doing my own banking business, everything was available by phone or computer.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday. I can’t remember how long it’s been now since Sunday shopping became legal. Back when it wasn’t legal, all I cared about, on Sundays anyway, was hitting up my friends to go out and play hockey or baseball
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages. I still get phone books and yellow pages dropped on the front porch every year, even though I don’t request it. I can’t remember the last time I actually opened one of them to search for something
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees. Selective harvesting, or something like that…yeah, gotta preserve the wilderness now!
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words. I’ve never looked at obtaining a domain name, but I do like the Go Daddy commercials!
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it. The Ministry of Transportation still make you fill out forms
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment. It was good not knowing what my friends were thinking and doing all the time. It meant you didn’t have to discuss it beyond the “oh cool” stage when they did tell you about it
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind. I always hated hand writing letters. I do more corresponding now, in one month, with emails, than I ever did by hand in my entire life.
47. Archie searches. The only Archie I know is the one that hangs out with Jughead, Betty and Veronica
48. Gopher searches. Only gophers I know are the ones digging holes in the back lot at work
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet. I don’t even know what Concatenating and UUdecoding is, but I miss the old Usenet days...Alt5 baby!
50. Privacy. I think this has always been a myth
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them. I’m not a fan of this weird type-speak, but I guess that’s what texting is all based upon
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs. I still get annoyed when I see people use the word “then” instead of “than”, never mind TLAs. Bastards!
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something. Hey, downloading a movie still takes hours! Not that I ever do that or violate piracy laws or anything...
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs. Security vulnerabilities? What’s that? We’re always safe using Microsoft products, aren’t we??
55. The time before PC networks. What exactly was before PC networks anyway?
56. When Spam was just a meat product - or even a Monty Python sketch. I don’t know anyone living that would admit to ever eating spam. I think spam was also a myth!
Gadgets
57. Typewriters. Haha, I remember the first one I ever had! An electric one to boot! Hell, I learned my typing skills on a good ol’ typewriter in my first year of high school
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk? What exactly is APS anyway? 35 mm is still classic. Then again, I’m into photography, so old school stuff fascinate me.
59. Sending that film away to be processed. Sending it away? I remember my father use to drop them off at the drug store’s photo section and he’d have to go back in a day or two to pick up the developed photos. Those were the days.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you. Not always the best thing though. At least you can afford to screw up now with digital cameras and not have it cost you money in terms of wasted prints
61. CB radios. Never had one so I never found them cool anyway
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away. I’ve never used GPS. Those little devices are ridiculous in price, still!
63. Rotary-dial telephones. Those are actually cool, in a retro kinda way. The first one I remember from my childhood was olive green. I guess it could have been worse.
64. Answering machines. Still got one on my cordless phone base set
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wall chart. Lasers just don’t cut it compared to the wooden pointers.
66. Pay phones. Still available everywhere
67. Phones with actual bells in them. Oh God. I’m glad they got rid of those because they were soooooo noisy and they had a habit of scaring the crap out of me when I was a kid
68. Fax machines. All-in-one machines still have Faxes, though they still come in handy…at least in a business environment
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them. They don’t have bags anymore? Where does the crap go? Some sort of nuclear reaction decimates it?
Everything Else
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive. Everyone still has an opinion on the radio station or CD playing, whether it be a long drive or short drive. Some things will never change.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number. I hardly even use my cellphone, so…what phone numbers?
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone. That always bugged me before caller ID was invented.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie. I was never really a big fan of movie rentals anyway, so if they eventually fade away…they fade away
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s. Have you seen some of the toys of today? I think they made way better toys when I was a kid!
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door. Hmm…I guess that was before my first experience with LEGO. I remember more variety than just squares and wheels
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater. My mom use to mark them all off in the TV guide when I was a kid, making it sound like a big deal at the time.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights. I was thrilled when they actually started a new 30 minute sports show after the late evening news, but I always got yelled at for staying up that late to catch any of it. And back then, it was all about the hockey highlights…no one cared about baseball highlights
78. Neat handwriting. I saw some neat handwriting on a note the other day and almost had an orgasm over it. My handwriting looks like someone stuck a pen between my toes and forced me to scribble.
79. The days before the nanny state. That what?
80. Starbuck being a man. Who is Starbuck?
81. Han shoots first. Han Solo?
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise. Star Wars will always remain a classic series
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC. I remember the old Little House on the Prairie episode when Harland Sanders appeared on the show peddling his idea of a fried chicken franchise. Stupid Harriet Oleson turning him down! Then again, he headed for Canada after that, so woo!
84. Trig tables and log tables. Stupid math tables, even though I almost knew them by heart, haha
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”. I’ve seen them, but I don’t understand them
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library. Haha, at least once a month during my public and middle school years were spent in the damn library, with friends, using those card catalogs. Hell, my high school still had and maintained them!
87. Swimming pools with diving boards. What do they have now? No diving boards? Not that I swim. Ever.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers. I never cared about the wrappers. The chocolate was the only thing I was interested in
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger. WTF? That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard. Who plays with the wrapper when you have CHOCOLATE?
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain). Never heard of it.
91. Having to manually unlock a car door. My father’s first car, at least first car that I remembered, had those old school locks, where you pulled up the pin to unlock it. Old school indeed.
92. Writing a check. Hmmm…my cheque book is ancient. I have rarely written a cheque in my life. My cheque books, of which I still have like 5 stack of them, still are dated 19___.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive. Isn’t that what the windows are for? No wonder the newer generations are not geographically inclined.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades. I remember the old roller derby thing show they use to have on TV in the 80’s sometime. I got a kick out of that for all of 10 minutes.
95. Cash. I’ve been going old school lately, trying to use more cash than plastic. I’ve also seen a rise in the amount of change I’ve been collecting. It’s out of control!
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet. I’ve never used the library for the internet. I’d actually be afraid to use a public computer for personal things online.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall. The mall that was the closest to me didn’t have an arcade and I was not allowed to go to the malls that had arcades by myself, so I didn’t blow my money like some kids I knew
98. Omni Magazine. Sounds vaguely familiar
99. A physical dictionary - either for spelling or definitions. You’d be surprised how many times guys at work come to me, asking how to spell words. Or how many times I’ve had to correct them. And spelling was my worst subject in junior and middle school!
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same. Does anyone even use the term “nerd” anymore?
It just finished pouring rain. Yet another wet day this summer. It sure is putting a damper on my plans. The weekend family get together picnic is now officially postponed to late next month, due to uncertain weather this coming weekend. In a way, I'm not disappointed. I've never really had "fun" during those things because, even though I don't really see some of my relatives that often, we never really have stuff to say to each other, plus they still treat you like you're 12 years old. The only questions that are "grown up" related are the "when are you getting married?" or the "oh, you do that type of work? Why don't you go work for so-and-so company?" type ones. Yeah, things that have no real answers are always the greatest conversation subjects.
So, it's not all that bad. In one way, I won't get to see people I haven't seen in a while, but in another way, relatives in small doses is better than meeting the whole army at once.
If the weather does hold up, I think I'm going to turn a long overdue visit to the zoo into a reality on Sunday. If it does rain, I can always go indoors, into one of the pavilions, so it shouldn't be a waste of a day. It'll also be the second road trip of the week.
Earlier this week, I paid a visit to Niagara Falls. That too had been a destination I failed to visit for a number of years. It turned out fun, even though it started to rain while I was down there. Bastard summer weather!
I'll make another entry about that, complete with a few pics, provided I get my lazy ass around to uploading them. And, as always, I have an interesting, almost embarrassing, tale to tell about that adventure! Nothing is ever easy as pie with me.