Day: January 12, 2017

Remember…?

Tulipmania struck the civilized world in the sixteen hundreds. Do you remember that?

Do you remember when sock hops were really big in America?

Remember, “Longer, lower, wider?” That was often a new American car’s greatest advertising claim. One of the cars that bucked against that trend was the American Motors Rambler. Surely you recall it. You must remember the Corvair, right?

Do you remember drive-in theaters, or movies that cost fifty cents to see? Do you know what it means to drop a dime and why we say that?

How ’bout Pacman and Ms. Pacman? Do those games set off any memory chimes?

Do you remember ‘big hair’ and Members Only jackets? What about eight-track cassette decks?

I know you must remember 45s and LPs. What of Child’s Place and Children’s Palace do you remember?

Did you have a Walkman?  Do you now, or did you ever, own a Beta Max, or a VHS player? Do you now, or did you ever, own a Polaroid Land Camera, an eight millimeter projector, or an Instamatic Camera?

Do you remember erector sets and Lincoln logs? Are you familiar with Silly Putty, Super Balls and pet rocks? Perhaps, instead, you knew Hula Hoops.

Do you remember the Teapot Dome scandal, or the Keating Five, and Enron?

Perhaps you’re familiar with ESSO.

Do you remember G.C. Murphy? Man, we loved going to the mall and shopping at that five and dime, where we could buy sub sandwiches for a dollar.

What about S.S. Kreske’s? Remember when they became K-Mart, and remember when Sears bought K-Mart?

Remember when Craftsman Tools was part of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and their mail order catalogs? Sears, Roebuck and Company became Sears, and Sears is selling Craftsman Tools to Black and Decker.

And remember the U.S.S.R., and the Berlin Wall?

I’m just curious about what you remember, and what will be remembered in this age of selfies, Walmart, iPhones, Costco, Sam’s Club, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Remember Netscape Navigator, or Mosaic?

Do you remember Yahoo? Because Yahoo will be Altaba once Verizon completes its purchase of Yahoo. Speaking of which, do you remember MCI?

I wonder, how long will we remember Altaba?

8

The Beer Group

The beer group met last night, and I attended. Naturally, conversations rotated around weather, movies, literature, science, Trump and murder.

The murder is the worse topic of the moment. A twelve-year-old boy, Zeke, stabbed his fifty-two-year-old Mother to death and injured his older sister. We were asking why this happened. Three of the beerites personally know the family. Zeke was a loner, without many friends. The family seemed well off, living in a 4,000 square foot home in a good location. They’d just moved in in 2015.

The father was away. He flew home to this situation yesterday afternoon, his wife in the morgue, killed by his son, his son in a juvenile lock-up, and his daughter in the hospital, injured by his son.

Returning to more comfortable topics, several members told of bad weather experiences, sliding off roads, breaking axles, encountering abandoned vehicles, having chains snap. Then it was to the movies, where nobody save me has seen anything recently except ‘Rogue One’. 

That was astonishing; ‘Fences’ was a play here last year and several went to see it. It was mildly surprising to learn they didn’t see the movie. I’d seen the movie and was eager to discuss and the rest. A few were talking about going to see ‘La La Land’ because of the Golden Globe Awards won. None had seen ‘Manchester by the Sea’, ‘Loving’, ‘Moonlight’, ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’. Two others had seen ‘Arrival’. Most surprising was that none had seen ‘Hidden Figures’. Several of them were engineers in the space program in 1962 and were working on the problems highlighted in the movie. I’d think they’d want to see how the era was portrayed, if nothing else.

But no; they waxed on about different problems and the creative solutions found for them, and the challenges of new math, or of coping with the complexities of shifting variables very quickly and things never experienced before.

TRump, of course, was villified. Not all were Hillary supporters, but none present can stand TRump. With head-shaking and angry voices, we talked about his press conference, the urine leaks, the Conway interview with Seth Meyers, the recall of the ambassadors, and his plan to turn his finances over to family members.

Ed, celebrating his eighty-fourth year, bought the beer and pizza. The rest of us donated twenty dollars to the cause of supporting STEM in school and after-school activities in local poor and under-privileged areas.

The establishment was still offering that porter that we all detest, and will continue offering it until the keg is gone. Fortunately, we endured with some local Ashland Amber and Ninkasi’s Total Domination IPA. It was a good evening in the warmth of friendship, and a pleasant way to whittle off a few hours of life.

3

Today’s Theme Music

I don’t think times were ever simpler in my lifetime. They were complicated and busy, and got more complicated and busy. But I nostalgically remember a time when I was younger and matters were simpler for me. They were most likely because I was young and not burdened with a life of personal history and adult choices. That doesn’t matter; I still enjoy remembering them.

That brings out the young Billy Joel for me. He seemed to come out of nowhere in 1973, and was definitely not the sort of music I usually listened to, which was dominated by Pink Floyd, the Who, Frank Zappa, the Stones, ZZ Top…you get it. But a zeitgeist of folk rock seemed to sweep pop-culture in that, my high school junior year, and Billy Joel became entrenched on the airwaves.

Here is ‘Piano Man’. 

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