Days 18-21

[bironic]

Sorry, I know I still need to get to a few comments from the last one.

Can you guess today's theme, kids?

18. Middle School

Comments

[musicisbelievng]

Ahhhhhh... what was that game called? I remembered it as soon as you said something about hurdles. It made a chomping sound, too, no? It wasn't part of Reader Rabbit or Playroom, was it?

[bironic]

No, it was upstairs around our Bernoulli disk days.

Yeah, some kind of munching noise -- or did it flick its tongue out and eat the word?

[roga]

I loved Reader Rabbit! So, so much. It was one of my favorite computer games - versions 2 and 3, I think. There was this one part with carrots in a vegetable garden which I could play for hours and hours.

[phinnia]

Tangentially related (on the subject of awesome old computer programs):

My first exposure to the "internet" as such was at a friend's house: she had one of those ancient computers with an actual external modem that had an acoustic coupler ... I think it was 300 baud, and it was just utterly surreal. Anyway, it was running windows 3.1 and they had this great puzzle solving game set in a castle kind of myst-like? And I can't remember what it was called at all, I just played it once. (The computer, sadly, no longer exists - it was crazily held together with duct tape inside, apparently, and had been purchased from A Guy who knew A Guy who I think got it off the back of A Truck somewhere, you know.

[elynittria]

Was the game a text-only one? If so, it might have been Zork or Adventure. (If it featured grues lurking in the dark who would love to eat you, it was Zork; I can't remember anything about Adventure other than its existence.) The Zork games were fantastic; I wish I had a computer that could still play them.

[phinnia]

No, it was definitely graphical.
Related (for you!): Zork Online.

[elynittria]

ZOMG! It's the original Zork! Thank you, thank you, thank you for the link!

[elynittria]

I hated spelling bees. I'm a great speller if I'm able to physically write words out, but I suck at spelling them out loud. My teachers weren't able to comprehend this simple fact and were always pushing me to compete in bees. Luckily, I was able to resist, a lá Bartleby.

I just had to use this icon!

[bironic]

:)

Bartleby, hee. Did they have to move the bee to another location because you politely insisted on staying just where you were and not participating?

Spelling is much easier on paper than in your head. Why can't they let spelling bees be written instead of oral?

[daasgrrl]

As I think I've mentioned before, spelling bees are so not part of Australian culture. I think NSW has one now, but it's only about 10 years old, and just for one state. Random memory: we used to own the famous Speak'n'Spell - which always pissed me off immensely because it insisted on spelling 'neighbour' incorrectly. I understood why, but I was still extremely unimpressed :D

[bironic]

Darn American culture impinging on the rest of the world.

[daasgrrl]

Hee, well I understand there was a British version - we just didn't have that one. I have the feeling it was a gift or hand-me-down brought back from the US. The other US spellings didn't bother me nearly as much - it was more the fact that the panel could only support eight letters, so you couldn't spell it 'correctly' EVEN IF YOU WANTED TO. It's the principle of the thing. You see XD

[thewlisian_afer]

18. Some people can't be wrong...

In fifth grade I was working on a project with my friend K. For some reason, the project called for the use of a clip art picture of a traffic light. When I printed it out, K expressed annoyance that the picture was "wrong." I asked what she meant and she said the picture wasn't right because the red light was on the top and the green light was on the bottom. I thought that was how it was supposed to be but it's my nature to doubt myself so we brought the picture to Daddy and asked him. He confirmed what I thought but there was no convincing K.

One day when we were in eighth grade we were driving somewhere with my parents. Daddy, remembering the debate about traffic lights years earlier, pointed out an actual traffic light to K. Indeed, the red light was on the top and the green light was on the bottom. She insisted we called the government and had the lights in the area changed.

19. Spelling beesThe only spelling bee I've ever been in was one in my second grade class. The prize was a stuffed T

[bironic]

18. Hee.

Once, in college, L. and I had a discussion over the phone about a My Little Pony episode we remembered where the ponies stepped on something and their wishes came true, and there was a drought, etc. I said they were magic coins; he insisted that they were horse shoes. So of course I had to go and look it up, and it turned out the title of the episode was "The Magic Coins."

19. Nooo! Nobody should be cheated of dinosaur toys. And what the heck was "salad" doing in a unit about dinosaurs? Were you being taught that the herbivores ate it?

I had a t-rex pen I used to adore that I think we got from Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut. It was yellow, with a twisty tip to make the pen part come out or retract, and at the top was one of those clear windows with a landscape backdrop and a thin cutout of a t-rex that would float to the top or the bottom depending on how you held the pen. I'd make it go up and then down and then up for minutes at a time

[thewlisian_afer]

You know, as I was typing this, I thought of that. "Why the hell was 'salad' in my dinosaur unit?" It must have been making a comparison. Because otherwise ... wtf?