25 nostalgic things you remember from a specific year or decade!

[RCMerchant]

1967- I was running out the backdoor and put my hand threw the glass. I still have a faint scar from it.

It was picture day at school. My Ma had greased back me and my brothers hair. At the bus stop we mussed it all up.

My brother Glenn got kicked in the head by our neighbors horse.

[Allhallowsday]

1967- I was running out the backdoor and put my hand threw the glass. I still have a faint scar from it.
It was picture day at school. My Ma had greased back me and my brothers hair. At the bus stop we mussed it all up.
My brother Glenn got kicked in the head by our neighbors horse.

1967... no kindergarten for me...the year I started school in 1st grade at St. Peter's in Point Pleasant Beach, NJ.  I was 5.   

[RCMerchant]

^ I was in kindergarten at the time.

[RCMerchant]

1969- I was in a foster home with my brother Mike and we watched the BLOB on TV.

At the same place me and Mike played FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN in the backyard. Mike always was the Wolfman.

[Alex]

2001.

1). A girl who was cheating on her boyfriend with me just suddenly vanished from everyone's lives. I did enough work to find out she was still alive but didn't really pursue the matter any further. She'd made my life complicated in many, many ways and being rid of her was a relief. Her boyfriend was a muslim student from Bahrain. I wonder if she converted and moved there with him?

2). I aced my test to join the RAF and could choose any role I wanted. I went with an aircraft electrician.

3). It was a very hot summer that year. During my basic training in the south of England, we'd forego sleeping in sheets and just slept on top of our beds. Every morning we were supposed to make up a bed pack by folding our sheets a certain way into a box. I made this up on the first day, picked up some spare sheets that night and then never unfolded my bed pack again. I passed every morning inspection (except one, but even that one I got a freebie. I'd forgotten to padlock my wardrobe. Normally this meant all your uniforms would be scattered over the floor, however, I'd left a packet of sweets inside my wardrobe for just such an emergency and our drill instructor took them as a bribe to leave my kit alone).

4). When I went for my initial interview to join up, the man interviewing me asked where I was from. When I told him the name of the town I'd grown up in, he asked what criminal convictions I had. When I told him none, he informed me his brother-in-law was from the same place and asked if he could shake my hand as I was the only person he'd ever met from there who hadn't done jail time.

5). A woman stopped me in the street in Glasgow and handed me a note. It said she didn't speak any english but was an illegal refugee looking for someone to marry her so she could remain in the country. She promised to be a good wife. I did not take her up on the offer. Five minutes later a beggar recognised me and said he was from the same town as me. He said would I be willing to give him some money to help out an old Stevenston man. I said I didn't recognise him and walked off. I figured he was one of the guys who used to hang about on the street corner just down from us, selling drugs and I wasn't going to waste my time or money trying to help him now.

6). George W visited Tony Blair at Halton while I was in training. This meant we spent 2 days unable to leave our rooms or do any lessons. We were told that if someone tried to shoot him from the building we were in, aircraft were in the sky 24/7 and would blow up the barracks blocks regardless of us being in there or not. I did not feel this was a worthwhile trade. Whenever you made a phone call for several days prior to and after his visit, it would take longer to connect the normal during this time and you could hear a recording device start-up. We could tell the place was crawling with special forces guys because we didn't see any of them.

7). I went to see Motorhead alone. Most of my friends disapproved of me joining the military. To the best of my knowledge, they are still hanging around in the dead-end town they grew up in, doing menial, minimum-wage jobs. I've made no effort to get back in touch with them over the years. I bumped into people I knew (one of whom I am still in touch with and meet up with on a semi-regular basis) from previous concerts I'd been to though (as I expected I would) and had a really good time. After this I got my hair cut short prior to joining up. I knew I wasn't going to let them cut it for me.

8). Our first weekend of freedom we went to the cinema. Shrek and Tomb Raider were both showing and we picked the wrong one to go see.

9). I had my first trip in a helicopter. It was a Chinook. The pilots took it up into the air and did all the anti-rocket manoeuvres. I loved it. The guy sitting across from me who claimed to be a bare-knuckle fighter (but yet who had perfectly unscarred knuckles), sat with his eyes clenched tightly shut the whole time. He'd panic after being interviewed about witnessing something by the police because the police had side arms and he just wasn't used to that kind of thing. He'd also claim his daughter got leukaemia to get extra time off (but she got cured the same weekend and she was diagnosed, so that was alright then). I got really disgusted when he was allowed to pass basic training despite never having been able to pass the fitness test. He viewed me and him and being enemies, but I didn't rate him highly enough to consider him worthy of that title. He was just someone who existed (Andy Fell).

10). I joined up on July the 4th. Six of us flew down from Glasgow. Military transport was supposed to meet us at the airport but didn't turn up for 6 hours or so. Me and another recruit (Johnny McAleny), being the oldest amongst the group went off to the pub for a last pint of freedom. One turned into six before they finally turned up.

11). I shared a room with 2 other recruits. One was a red-haired guy called Steve Brown who was going for the same trade as me. The other was a guy whose name I can't remember but who we nicknamed Mike (his hair looked like a mic boom). He decided he was the toughest man on the course because his friends had been shot on a drug deal gone wrong or something, quite a feat for a dental nurse really, although I took no real notice of his boasts. He did come from a rough town, but I'd heard the same claims from everyone I'd known who came from there and it didn't interest me.

12). I did 4 weeks of basic training, then had a 2 week summer holiday before returning for the final two weeks of training. After we had our pass-out parade, we headed off from our phase one training camp, to our various phase two training camps. I arrived at mine (Cosford) on the afternoon of September the 10th. We all had hangovers from our pass-out party the night before and attending a full dress parade was not fun.

13). The next day we arrived in our best number 2 uniform to start training. We walked into our crew room where they had a big projection screen TV and as we walked in through the door a jumbo jet smacked into the side of a building on it. My best friend during training, a guy whose real name was Mike would later be really freaked out by this not upsetting me. Our camp immediately had its alert state raised to Amber, where it would stay for the next 3 months in case of copycat attacks.

14). I contacted an old friend who I hadn't heard from for years. It would turn out he was staying where I was doing my training and we'd get together most weekends to go drinking. He introduced me to several of his friends including a girl (Tricia), who was a lesbian. Towards the end of the next year, she'd seduce me and we'd have a fairly epic 6-hour-long sex marathon that still makes me smile this day to think back on.

15). My gran passed away.

16). I finished college in the May of this year, convinced that I had just wasted the previous two years I'd spent studying at it.

17). My ex-best friend had to attend Ayr Sherrif Court to answer charges of possessing child pornography following me discovering it on his PC the previous year. I was asked to give a statement in his defence and refused.

18). I met the single most irritating human being I have ever encountered. He was a South African ex-pat called Bill Gates. I wouldn't see him again after I completed training for another decade. By that time he was leaving the RAF in disgrace having been caught having an affair with his workmate's wife. I cannot imagine the type of woman who would sleep with this guy while having the choice of anyone else. He asked if he could add me on Facebook and I told him sure, although I forgot to mention that my privacy setting were such that you couldn't just find me unless you were a friend of a friend.

19). I really came to hate the automated announcements system at Birmingham New Street Train Station (Birmingham New Street, this is Birmingham New Street. The train now departing...). I always wondered if it was this tannoy that got it chosen for one of the last IRA bomb attacks?

20). I bought myself a 14-inch knife that I really like the look of. This got me the nickname, 'Jockodile Dundee'. Once I got used to the weight, I used to do tricks with it.

21). I fired a rifle for the first time. My shooting skills were not anything special but were good enough to get me through. I would come to hate using guns though, considering them too noisy and dirty. It definitely did not feel like a penis extension for me (which was the reason I'd been told so many people liked guns. Fair enough if you are underendowed in that department I guess, but there are better substitutes out there).

22). One Friday night when he was feeling down, my friend Jamie came up to see me. I'd already had four beers by this point and he asked if we could go to the local bar to chat. He'd been finding his course hard-going and was stressed out. After switching to shots and having a few of them I decided I had the perfect solution to cheering him up and we jumped on the last train to Birmingham where I took him to a lap-dancing place. It was our payday weekend, and we went through a month's wages in one night. I had a pair of women giving me a lap dance at one point that I remember absolutely nothing about, but Jamie told me was the hottest thing he'd ever seen. The night cheered him up enough to get him through the rest of his course. It was my first time ever going into a strip joint. I discovered a friend I'd been introduced to via number 14 above, fiancee worked in this club as a dancer, but decided that it was none of my business and I shouldn't say anything. I didn't go for a dance from her either as I felt this would be awkward for her. A stripper would offer me the chance to snort cocaine off a particular part of her anatomy, which I politely declined due to the random drug testing policy at work, plus my innate distrust of drug dealers and whether or not they will supply you with quality goods or something cut with dog worming tablets or whatever. I've had cocaine once, but it was medical grade stuff (and was administered by a doctor as an anaesthetic).

23). I bought myself my first PC and would play Civilisation 3 on it a lot instead of studying.

24). We had a 5-man room in phase 2 training. One of the guys in our room broke his arm and was supposed to spend the night in hospital. I woke up in the middle of the night and went to the toilet and noticed as I passed that his bed was occupied. After I'd gotten back in my own bed, I heard someone exclaim "Oh f**k" and run out the door.

It turned out one of the guys in our room (Jes), had been woken up by a man demanding he moved over in his bed and let him in. Jes jumped out of bed to ask the guy what the f**k, but the other guy simply jumped in Jes's bed. Since Barry's bed was empty, Jes just got in that one and went to sleep. Presumably the oh f**k I heard, was the guy realising he'd wandered into the wrong room.

25). After having been in the one job for a whole year, I'd start to get itchy feet and wanting to move on to something else. This feeling really wouldn't leave me for the rest of my career.

[ER]

That was a great read, Alex! As I said to Trevor the other day, you've lived an interesting life. 

[ER]

Memories of 2002

1.   American Idol debuted, and fans took to message boards to furiously debate whether Simon delivered his first unscripted insult in episode six, or episode ten.

2.   My friend Mandy took me to a supposed psychic, who said I was under strong spiritual attack. I asked if this was the same as being possessed, and was told, “Think of yourself more as a house that’s being haunted.” Whatever, Mandy was the one paying. That same summer my neighbor had a faith healer from her church over at for a grillout, and somehow I got to talking with him, and my jaw dropped when he said, “I sense you are like a house under siege from malevolent spirits who’d love to move in and haunt it.” Getting told the same thing twice in the same summer? Weird.


3.   Kmart filed for bankruptcy, something that would’ve seemed impossible a decade earlier. Rumor had it high electric bills from all the blue light specials contributed.

4.   The DC snipers, two mediocre marksmen, began their dickish spree. I was in the city during some of those days, and while life went on, it was unnerving to imagine that somewhere distant crosshairs might have been focusing on you.

5.   My future husband had this poem published: The old man with the brown cane/ Sat under the courthouse tree/ On a bench that bore his widow’s name/ And dozed while awake,/ Remembering his youth,/ And being in love with a girl/ With strawberry hair/ And a smile like summer starlight.


6.   George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, a mongrel organization that dealt in paranoia and was much scoffed at by more pureblooded agencies, whose members liked to tell this joke: “How many DHS agents does it take to change a light bulb?” “Why are you asking!????”

7.   Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her golden jubilee; John Gotti went to that big cannoli shop in the sky; and Enron collapsed. Guess they weren’t the smartest guys in the room after all.


8.   I stayed for several recurring non-consecutive weeks with my co-worker friend and his wife in Austin---more on them another time?---and more than once ended up being their designated driver coming back from Sixth Street clubs. I sometimes think I must wear a sign offering that service, visible only to the inebriated. Austin was fun back then. I spent a lot of time in Austin and in 2004 almost moved to the city, but you’d have to pay me to dwell there now.

9.   Bowie’s surreal All Saints CD, featuring Crystal Japan, spent weeks in my stereo.


10.   In one of his last public appearances, Billy Graham came to my city. It hailed on him.

11.   Second movies in a series were a big thing in ’02. There was Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the second Potter film. Appropriate considering we were in ’02.

12.   I went to my five-year high school reunion on behalf of my former best friend, Gina, who was in Honduras volunteering at a free dental clinic. There I saw the creepy/cool genius boy who’d abruptly kissed me in my front yard at Christmastime 1995, when he knew my boyfriend was visiting his sister and mom in Florida. His were the second pair of lips ever to lock with my own, and though he’d been surprisingly good at it, I still stood there startled that he did it at all. Anyway, at the reunion he and I ended up sipping rums and Cokes and talking about old times through much of the event. We promised to stay in touch, but I haven’t heard from him in twenty years and figure by now he’s probably a super-villain with his own secret island somewhere. I went home and looked in the mirror and noticed that the whole time I was at the reunion I’d had dried shampoo foam in my right ear.

13.   Jimmy Carter was awarded a Nobel Prize, making him one of three US Presidents who earned the legendary honor, and one of four who received it.

14.   My dad called me, in agony, so I drove him to the hospital, where the doctor told him he’d passed a kidney stone, and advised he avoid dairy and citrus for a while. On the way back Dad got a large orange freeze from DQ, and I told him it was the sort of self-destructive stubbornness I could relate to. He high-fived me.

15.   The Kurt Cobain Diaries were published, with the best entry being about Kurt’s fling with a retarded girl. No, not the one he married.

16.   One day in London I wore a shirt that said "Strangers Have The Best Candy!” which caught the notice of a particular man who asked me about it, opening a doorway to months of interaction with him, a literal psychopath with connections to bad people. He was later murdered in prison.

17.   Lennox Lewis KO’d Mike Tyson, and Tyson emerged a nicer person. Sometimes an ass-kicking works wonders, huh?

18.   My future husband and I saw a cool play near Ohio State called Power Blesses, about a woman who could live a minute from the life of anyone she ever met, at the cost of two minutes of her own life every time she did so. The concept intrigued me, as I wondered if I would I use that gift (?) if I had it.

19.   I must admit, The Ring was spooky. Like sleeping with the lights on spooky. Like, I’d-never-seen-any-movie-so-spooky, spooky.


20.   I finally felt enough at peace to have sex again for the first time in two and a half years, and it was like what they say about riding a bike. Though…maybe “riding a bike” is not the best analogy here.

21.   The once bullish stock market went full-on grizzly, and we dipped into recession. If you had money, prices were conveniently cheap. If you didn’t, you struggled. Yup, any lingering post-‘90s good times were officially over.

22.   Avril Levigne kept assuring us she was a punk, but most people decided she was at best punk-lite. Her shouted song Complicated was the reigning she-pop ditty of 2002.

23.   The great Williams sisters faced off in the Wimbledon singles final, proving truth is way stranger than fiction.

24.   I met my future in-laws for the first time, and got along smashingly with my someday father in law. As for my eventual MIL, she was polite in an oh-please-don’t-let-her-be-the-one-he-marries way. Funny though, in the future she’d do a 180 and beg me to marry her son, though that was in 2008 when our first child was due.  (She'd have to wait til 2010 for the walking down the aisles part.) Happily these days she and I are as close as scratchy wool and bare skin.

25.   On a sizzling July day, my friend Gina and I did a twenty-mile walk-a-thon for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. An A-list star and his locally-rooted father were on stage at the finish line, and I don’t know if the star was confused about what event he was barnstorming in flyover country or just had a cause nearer to his heart, but when he spoke it was not about pediatric AIDS. He asked how many of us could find Sudan on a map, then didn’t wait to see how many could, just started making fun of red state education. Then he talked about how we were failing Africa’s democracies and asked us to raise our hand if we promised we’d write our representatives on behalf of Sudan. Sure, many hands went up, the guy had been on the cover of People, after all, but when he finished, applause was light. Movie stars are just mere mortals, folks.

So there's 2002....

[Alex]

2016.

1) I spent half the year being in the windiest place in the world, the Falkland Isles.

2) Famous people would not stop dying around this time. Lemmy, being the consummate rule-breaker than he was decided to check out early, dying on the 28th of December the previous year. Bowie and Prince were two of the biggest names to go. For the previous year, I had lost a family member every two months, with the last one dying on the day of the previous one's funeral (which was also the day I had to fly out). This was a tough year to get through. By the time I left the UK, I was feeling punch drunk.

3) The UK decided it was going to do the stupidest thing possible and vote to leave the EU. This was widely expected to be the most idiotic thing people could vote for.

4) The US however said, "Hold my beer" and played its trump card.

5) I went on the longest holiday I have ever been on. A whole two months and got paid for it. I spent most of that time visiting Kristi's family in the US, most of whom I really like, one I tolerate, and one the local police gave me permission to punch out with the promise that if they were called out, they would just laugh at him. This isn't the first time that a police force has asked me if I could just sort out a problem for them with my fists.

6) I swam in 2 oceans and 2 seas this year (Atlantic and Pacific oceans, North and Baltic seas). I doubt I will ever beat this record.

7) I came to the conclusion that Falkland Islanders hate Argentinians even more than Israelis hate Germans.

8) People started to panic that Betty White might not survive the year. When she did, people then started wondering what kind of world they were going to leave behind for her when they died.

9) Sausage Party came out in the cinema. I found it amusing, but forgettable.

10) The games shop where I had bought my first ever proper roleplaying game closed down. I miss Tom and the Dragon & George to this day.

11) A song which every time I heard it put me mentally right back in the hospital room where Lilly-Beth was born. Every time I heard it, I couldn't help thinking of how I felt that night and how I thought I was going to lose Kristi too when she had a bad reaction to the medication they gave her. To this day I have an unreasoning hatred towards that song and its singer.

12) My brother took a job working on aircraft in the middle east for a short-term contract of a few months. His family were to remain in the UK. He is still out there, and they are still back here.

13) At one point of the year, having cheese on toast seemed like the most decadent luxary imaginable.

14) I made a fair bit of money by moving all my savings into dollars just before the Brexit vote. When the £ then crashed my savings remained high.

15) The Zika virus was all over the news, causing babies to be born with deformed heads. I had to have a chat with a doctor as I was travelling to South America since we were trying for a baby. I was told to avoid stagnant water. I am not sure anyone ever deliberately wants to seek that out to be fair.

16) I was in a raid in World of Warcraft, when our tank (an Italian), found he was in the middle of an earthquake. He dived beneath his kitchen table, pulled his laptop down and kept playing. 299 other people were less lucky.

17) An investigation concludes that Malaysian Flight 17 was shot down by Russian forces. By this time I had made a mental promise never to fly Malaysian airlines due to a number of incidents.

18) 5 children die in Pakistan after eating deliberately poisoned sweets. 33 people would die in total. The reason behind it was the owner had an argument with his brother (and co-owner of the shop).

19) I continually forget to check which way the water would run down a plughole while in the southern hemisphere.

20) Ozzy Osbourne failed to get a slice of my pizza. He can stick to bat and dove heads.

21) My roommate down the Falklands managed to puke and p**s in his bed while drunk. To the best of my knowledge, he didn't s**t in it, which I guess is a small mercy.

22) My favourite Star Wars film came out, Rogue One. We went to see this in the cinema three times (Moana twice and the first Fantastic Beasts and Sing movies once each) I eagerly await the release of the sequel said to be called 'A New Hope'.

23) I started thinking about running an online D&D game.

24) I took 6 months off Badmovies.org mostly because of the terrible internet connection I was stuck with.

25) I spent a very troubled night alone battling some kind of inner demon. To this day I have no idea what was behind what happened that night, but I am very glad I emerged victorious. Part of me was very aware the next day that I should have talked to someone about it, but I also felt that since I had dealt with it successfully, that I did not now need anyones help.

[ER]

Memories of 2003

1.   The Return of the King wrapped up the greatest film trilogy of all time.

2.   The space shuttle Columbia was lost. The shuttle program resulted in one deadly incident per every sixty-seven launches, making it by far the world’s most unsafe vehicle.


3.   The Iraq War began, largely as a result of President Bush’s disregard for his intelligence agencies telling him what he did not want to hear, with Bush preferring to put his trust in a sense of instinct he termed “Mr. Gut.” As a result 300,000 people died.

4.   The nationwide Do Not Call list went into effect. A side effect was that telemarketing jobs were lost, creating hardship among the working poor.


5.   I reconnected with a retired nun who’d been my teacher, and started taking her out to lunch and the park and the symphony, once to a ball game, and to her amusement kept up our old grade school nickname: “Sssster.” She took my hand one day and “out of love” told me the way I was living my life was going to send me to Hell. I respected her saying that, because it can be hard to tell someone something unwelcome, especially when that person’s buying lunch.

6.   Pete Townsend had legal troubles after a police sting connected him to child pornography. Also Michael Jackson was charged with child molestation, though he would be acquitted. Was he guilty? I hope not.


7.   Dawson’s Creek concluded by flashing forward to a death in 2008, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s finale left us cheering. FOX’s Joe Millionaire, meanwhile, showed how easy it was to turn ordinary ladies into would-be gold diggers. It was not womankind’s finest televised moment.

8.   My cousin Alison spent a year in a treatment facility in North Carolina. Yes, she needed help because she was an emotionally fragile addict and abuse survivor, but the main reason she was sent away was so her incredibly evil father could gain custody and sue me, trying to overturn our grandpa’s will, that to my shock had left his house and property to me. Allie’s father, already a rich man, part owner of a lobbying firm, wanted to subdivide our land and sell it to builders, getting posthumous revenge on my grandpa, who’d once punched him out for beating up my aunt. After a multi-year legal battle the will was upheld and our beautiful woods remain preserved as my grandpa wanted. I never held my cousin responsible for what her father did.

9.   The foggiest morning since 1977 overtook my city, reducing visibility to forty feet, and being outside that magical, almost silent sunrise was like walking in the clouds.

10.   A fire at a Great White concert marked the first time since 9-11 that so many people cringed in collective horror. However, Elizabeth Smart’s safe return from her abductors was a happy ending few dared to think possible.

11.   I became mentor to a high school girl named Sharon. Alas, her dumbass dad got the stupid idea I was into him, and when she found out her mom told me not to come near Sharon anymore. At eighteen Sharon got in touch with me and we know each other to this day.

12.   A co-worker and friend of mine who was involved on the ground in Iraq, called me and asked if I could guess where he was, then said he was in Najaf, in one of Saddam’s mansions. We only talked a minute but how cool was getting a call like that? He made it home fine, by the way.


13.   Country music fans seemed ready to drive their cars over the Dixie Chicks, after the group’s singer was critical of President Bush. I never understood the outrage.

14.   Gina, for many years my best friend, a girl who looked like Snow White and who believed true love was out there, celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday a virgin. I felt like someone owed her a trophy or parade, but got her a Blockbuster gift card instead.

15.   A serial rapist assaulted women in one local community on the same night, three years in a row. DNA tests in 2003 linked the rapes to the fire chief in the town where my future husband grew up.


16.   I knew a colorful woman who believed her son died on the Titanic in a past life, because even before he could talk he hummed “Nearer My God To Thee.” I met her while watching my cousin Dana’s son Tyler, who played with her daughter Melissabeth, and she clued me in to the fact that because I spent so much time with Tyler, many people thought I’d secretly had a baby away in college, and Dana was raising him.
 
17.   Mars was closer to Earth than it had been in 60,000 years, and was like a beautifully bright amber jewel in the night skies. I remember just staring at it….


18.   A friendship with a married co-worker, while platonic, had by 2003 become incredibly intimate, since we each dealt with professional stress of a sort that most people couldn’t have related to. His wife had known about us since 2000 and said she “wasn’t threatened,” but when their marriage fell apart, she promised to make use of our relationship in court, knowing it would probably cost us our careers. As a result he had to let her take him to the cleaners over what was almost blackmail. Funny, she hired a lawyer who was also one of the rabbis at her family’s temple in Connecticut, a vicious fellow for a man of G-d. I also found out in one of her rages she tried to hire someone to throw acid in my face. Fun girl!

19.   About the same time Martha Stewart was indicted for securities fraud and obstruction of justice, magician Roy Horn was almost fatally injured when one of his white tigers dragged him offstage.

20.   Though he was only three, that summer I taught Tyler how to swim. I also had him speaking French until his mom said that was going to confuse his language development. Being with Tyler kept me grounded during tough times. No, he wasn’t my son, but I couldn’t have loved him any more if he were.


21.   Mother Theresa was beatified in near-record time, leading cynics to say the Vatican needed good press after a report showed six times as many Catholic priests had contracted AIDS as had males in secular life, with most of the deaths covered up as cancer. If you think about it, Rome’s requirement that priests somehow be 100% straight, and yet want nothing to do with women, wasn’t the best formula.

22.   Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, died, yet news of John Ritter’s sudden demise overshadowed the passing of this American legend.


23.   A local radio station ran a contest that let the winner push the plunger for the implosion of the baseball stadium downtown. My grandpa took my cousin Jared and me to a World Series in the old stadium, and I was sad they blew it up.

24.   Apple launched iTunes; MySpace became a thing; Android was founded; and One Night in Paris briefly became the most downloaded file on the net.

25.   Magda, the only cousin on my mom’s side older than me (I’m youngest on my dad’s side) moved to Brixton, in London, the sole white person for blocks. Within weeks she picked up the accent, sounding like a Jamaican version of Bert in Mary Poppins, and she’d also take on the local disdain for the United States, yet say she couldn’t wait to come back over. She got mugged twice in Brixton and her flat got robbed, but would stay there the rest of her life. I miss her.

[retrorussell]

2010:
1. Bought my first (and current) house!  I was the first of my siblings to purchase my own.  Got a ridiculous steal for an Oregon house (property value is b.s. high) and it is now worth 3 times that, with all I've done for it (new pipes, new toilets, new bathtub, new fenceboards, new windows, new lawn, new deck, lava rocks, hot tub).  Pretty good location, easy access to bus/trains but not as much coming home from work.  Came close to buying a couple other houses; glad I went with this one instead.
2. Working the "POPS" unit (post surgery) at work at this time; man-- some of the nurses here are utterly stupid, lazy and entitled.  The "give them an inch.." type.  A few years later I'd work the Dialysis/Chemo run where I'm at now.  Always staying super busy.
3. One of the deadliest earthquakes ever hits Haiti, killing several hundreds of thousands.
4. The last CRT television set was released.  I was still hanging on to one for a couple more years.
5. The Winter Olympics are held in Vancouver/Whistler, Canada.  Host Canada would break the record for most Winter Olympics gold medals in one year.
6. IPad debuts.
7. The President of Poland Lech Kaczynski dies in a plane crash.
8. Not to be outdone by the Exxon-Valdez crisis decades ago, the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, killing a dozen workers and spilling oil into the waters.
9. Stock markets and the Euro value plummet.
10. The Chicago Blackhawks win their first Stanley Cup in almost 40 years!
11. Instagram debuts.
12. Wikileaks releases info on civilian casualties in the Iraq War.
13. North Korea fires upon South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island, prompting military response.
14. Comet Hale-Bopp is visible again.
15. The Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, is erected in Dubai, UAE.
16. A ridiculous 8.8 earthquake hits Chile, fortunately only 500-some die.
17. Steve Harvey becomes the new host of FAMILY FEUD.
18. Conan O'Brien ends his run as The Tonight Show host, after a bitter feud with NBC.
19. The New Orleans Saints, one of the NFL teams mired in mediocrity (or worse) for much of their franchise's existence, wins the Super Bowl over Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts.  I remember watching this at my brother's (then) apartment.  I was happy for QB Drew Brees.  I remember my brother made some great pulled pork sandwiches that day.  My dad was there too.
20. Roger Ebert is interviewed for the first time since thyroid cancer robbed him of his ability to speak.
21. The long-running animated series ADVENTURE TIME debuts!
22. South Park's episode featuring a depiction of the Islamic prophet Muhammad receives major backlash from Muslims who threaten creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
23. Barack Obama is the first sitting US President to appear on a daytime talk show (The View).
24. As The World Turns airs its final episode.
25. The baseball Giants (New York/San Francisco) win their first World Series in 56 years.

[ER]

I didn't know Hale-Bopp was visible then. Was it in only part of the world, or not seeable with the naked eye? I loved that comet in '97. It looked like a glowing willow broom.

That's a very good list and it taught me some things. 

[retrorussell]

I didn't know Hale-Bopp was visible then. Was it in only part of the world, or not seeable with the naked eye? I loved that comet in '97. It looked like a glowing willow broom.

That's a very good list and it taught me some things. 

I'm not sure how powerful a telescope you'd have needed to see it.  It came within 30.7 astronomical units from the sun.  We're all making some great time capsule lists!

[The Burgomaster]

Memories of the 1970s:

1. Drive-in theaters. We had 2 within about 5 miles of my house and probably 10 within a 30 minute drive. Now I need to drive about 45 minutes to get to the closest one and there are only 3 left in my area that I know of.

2. Small cinemas. The cinema in my town had only 2 screens. It was a big event checking the listings in the newspaper or calling the cinema to see if the movies had changed from the previous week. A big treat was going several towns away to a 4 or 6 screen cinema.

3. Cap guns. I had a cap pistol and a cap rifle. I loved the smell of the caps when you fired them. Sometimes all the neighborhood kids would buy rolls of caps and smash them with rocks rather than using cap guns to fire them off.

4. Junky candy. Wax lips, tiny wax bottles full of sugary syrup, pixie sticks full of flavored sugar.

5. Collectible card sets in bubble gum packages. I had cards from the Kung Fu TV series and probably other shows.

6. Buying comic books at the local newspaper store.

7. Building model kits. I had all the Aurora monster models and other things like planes and tanks.

8. Mail order. Sending away for things from comic books, catalogues, brochures or TV commercials. You'd mail a check and then wait 4 - 8 weeks for delivery with no way to track it. Once I even sent cash through the mail for paperback books.

9. McDonald's before they had drive-throughs.

10. Saturday morning cartoons and Sid & Marty Krofft shows.

11. ABC, NBC and CBS prime-time movies.

12. Having a very limited number of TV channels to watch . . . and getting excited when you could get a clear picture on the UHF channels.

13. Watching concerts on PBS that were simulcast in stereo (you needed to turn down the volume on the TV and tune into a specific radio station).

14. TV channels that ended their broadcasting day around 2:00 a.m. - then you needed to wait until about 6:00 a.m. the next day before they resumed broadcasting.

15. Watching movies on TV that had nudity, profanity or violence edited out - - when the movie started there would be a caption on the bottom of the screen: "Edited for Television."

16. Family parties where most of the adults were drinking and smoking. Then before people went home they had "one for the road," which meant a final drink before driving home. Sometimes they even took the drink with them in the car.

17. Riding my bicycle (with a banana seat and high handle bars) around the neighborhood.

18. The smell of charcoal and lighter fluid during barbecue season (before gas grills became popular).

19. Going to amusement parks and smelling fried clams from the food stands while "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies played over the loudspeakers.

20. Spending summers with my cousin in Cape Cod.

21. "Dinner time" at home when the entire family ate together at the kitchen or dining room table.

22. Seeing a lot of Corvette Stingrays driving around.

23. Viewmasters

24. Christmas variety specials on TV. Andy Williams, Perry Como, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, The King Family, Bing Crosby . . . I have a lot of these on DVD now.

25. Staying up all night with my cousins watching the Jerry Lewis telethon.

[ER]

Memories of 1993

1.   Reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time was an unprecedented escape into another world, but it did raise the question as to why none of Aragorn’s ancestors had claimed the throne of Gondor over the preceding thousand years.

2.   Brandon Lee’s ghastly death on the set of The Crow had people talking about a family curse.

3.   Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd US President, and my uber-Democratic family was universally glad. I think history will show he was a good President, but probably a bad person.

4.   I was awed when I went to see Jurassic Park with my cousin Dana, who proclaimed it the greatest movie ever. (Since I’ve mentioned her so often, let me say she’s been more like my big sister in a lot of ways; being 4 ½ years older, sometimes she’s bullied me, true, but she’s always been there for me.) Coming home she and I got caught in a storm that blew her car all over the expressway, pounded us with hail, and sent dangling black finger-clouds toward the horizon, like sky-fjords. Even Dana the Fearless was scared and we dashed adrenaline-jangled into my basement, completely soaked in our run between car and house. When we came up again the wind had blown things all over, but the first thing Dana asked was, “Wanna go see Jurassic Park again?”


5.   Eighty people died in events surrounding the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, which partially motivated uber-dick Timothy McVeigh’s mass murders in 1995.  Being p**sed off at the government didn’t give you leave to kill children, Tim.

6.   I graduated from middle school and got to invite people over for a graduation pool party. My upstreet neighbor, Rachel, owner of an infamous greyhound called Mercury, held it against me for having the party on Saturday, when, being Jewish, she couldn’t come. She was so petty she not only invited almost every girl on the street but me to her next birthday party, but later made a point of showing me camcorder video of the event, to rub it in.

7.   The Brady Bill became law. Did it save lives?

8.   Hoping to tumble the buildings across half of lower Manhattan, terrorists set off a bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six. I remember thinking that if the twin towers could survive that, they could survive anything.

9.   In tennis, Monica Seles was stabbed on the court, never to return to top form. Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg were supposed to play downtown, but canceled. As for me, I had a twenty-seven match winning streak going and was offered a chance to try out for a spot at the Bollettieri Tennis Academy, but instead stayed in school. I’m glad I did. I guess.

10.   In addition to seeing Jurassic Park four times, in’93 I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Age of Innocence, Schindler’s List, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, In the Name of the Father, Tombstone, Dazed and Confused, and Hocus Pocus, but ever-annoying Rachel made fun of me for not knowing what Indecent Proposal was about. (I should’ve asked if she knew what calculus was about.)


11.   We did an end of school year day-trip to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, and visited the grave of the famous writer and monk Thomas Merton. It was the sort of “fun” they lined up for you in Catholic school.

12.   While he was in college in Michigan, I started calling the boy I knew the year before when he was a senior and I was in seventh grade, and talked to him for hours and hours over months and months. That summer we went eclectic places together like uptown coffee shops and poetry readings, and flea markets and book and record stores, and all over downtown, places fourteen-year-old me figured must be cool or the college crowd wouldn’t congregate there. I’d never so much as kissed anyone, but the emotion of him leaving that August built up til we had an unplanned, heart slamming in your chest moment on the last day that almost tipped too far. It didn’t, though it easily could have, I wouldn’t have stopped things, but, like almost always, he had better judgment. Still, he seemed shocked at himself and asked in this truly puzzled way, “What IS it about you?” Back home I walked into my house weak like I was coming down off a drug high, and wondered if from the look on my face my parents would know what I’d done. Then I thought of how awful if my grandma, who called me Dollbaby, found out. He and I wouldn’t hang out again til the next year, and for the first time in my life, I felt depressed, which eventually led to ever-wise Dana telling me it’s all right to lose your heart over a guy, but never lose your mind. I started high school that week but was too focused on my own melancholy to care about that legendary life event, and went through most of the first week like a high-functioning robot. When still waters flood, they really flood.

13.   Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell was the best deal President Clinton could get for gays in the military in a year when most Americans were still afraid of AIDS, and in fact one in six gay men (and one in three gay black men) in the US was indeed HIV positive. I was worried for my dad’s intern, Jonathan, who was both gay and black, but he hugged me and said, “Don’t worry about it, sweet thing, I have a charmed life.” Thankfully he never got sick.

14.   Sixteen years after his death on a throne, the King of Rock and Roll appeared on a US postage stamp. Bet he was thrilled.

15.   After an almost totally storm-free spring, June erupted with twenty severe weather days, including the one I’ve already mentioned. One afternoon a microburst with 120 MPH winds destroyed almost every tree in a beautiful urban forest I’d visited all my life, where some of the trees had been 200 years old. To this day their weathered trunks lie there, returning to the ground, reminding me every time I see them of that tempestuous month.

16.   Late Night With Conan O’ Brien, The X-Files, Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and The Late Show with David Letterman, all debuted on TV in ’93, as did the infamous Chevy Chase Show. Still what really made headlines was NYPD Blue, with its shamelessly bare butts.

17.   My mom’s youngest sister, three years my elder, visited from Ireland, and we had THEE most awesome summer together. Our unusually bad weather scared her though, so I told her Viking descendants scoffed in the face of Thor’s death threats from on high, which made her laugh. Being beautiful and blonde with an Irish lilt, Aunt Sarah turned heads everywhere we went, and even ultra-cool Dana was jealous of her fey charm. In 2009 she and her two children would move in with us, and I’d develop some suspicions about her, but that’s maybe a story for another time.

18.   Trying to be sufficiently well-read to impress college students, I pored over books by modern-day writers like Jay McInerney and Jeffrey Eugenides and Brett Easton Ellis, and finally Joyce Carol Oates, whose short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, dazzled the dark places inside me. My thirteen-year-old daughter read it the other day and said, “I don’t see why it’s a big deal.” How did I raise such an earthbound kid?

19.   Two tears before they’d inform me the world is a vampire, Smashing Pumpkin’s second-best album, Siamese Dream, stayed in my stereo for months til it gave way to Nirvana’s In Utero, then I suddenly started listening to nothing but classical, til I discovered The Cure. I think ’93 was the year the teenage “get obsessed with music” gene activated in me.

20.   After three years of reading almost every Stephen King book, I thought that fall’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes was such a dud I cooled off on him, and because I’d just gotten my own TV/VCR combo, curtailed my reading in order to explore movies. I really liked Drugstore Cowboy, felt a frisson watching My Own Private Idaho later in the year, and was deeply smitten with two Winona Ryder films Heathers, and Mermaids, viewing them a lot.

21.   I really loved my elderly neighbor, Mrs. Glenn, who was country and kind and told excellent stories about life in long-ago Appalachia, but who had two flaws: her dramatic obesity, and the fact she was such a fundamentalist she’d tell me all Catholics were damned, so wouldn’t I please accept true Christianity before it was too late? Still, we developed a ritual in 1993 of watching Doctor Quinn together, and during commercials I’d brush her waist-length hair, which she had never cut in her life. (At the tips were tiny little baby-curls.) When she passed away in 2011 I went to her funeral in this miniscule church in rural West Virginia. During the service people there literally rolled on the floor and shouted things across her open casket like, “No, Devil, you cain’t have our sleeping sister!” I was pregnant and wore a little silver crucifix, and people there got almost hostile when they saw a Papist symbol in their sanctuary. I refused to take it off, but then again I did get out of town before sunset.

22.   The Black Hawk Down incident took place in Somalia, and in response the CIA was tasked with overseeing reprisal assassinations of roughly ninety individuals around Mogadishu over the next seven months, mostly by setting bounties. It marked one of the last times the CIA was assigned the role of taking out military targets on that scale, now mostly done with drones. Hollywood likes to pretend the CIA is this mass killing machine, but the fact is, dead people can’t give you ongoing information, so sources of intelligence are better left alive, even protected.

23.   I had my first Snapple and was told before I opened it that I had to hold it down in front of me and vigorously shake it up, which was called “Snapple Swirling” so I did and the boys who told me to do that promptly cracked up laughing. Sigh, low-hanging fruit, guys. Anyway, Snapple was so hip, so ‘90s, so mandatory.

24.   In October, when Depeche Mode canceled its concert in my city an hour before it was supposed to start, already-assembled fans rushed the stage and trashed a dressing area and a trailer used by roadies. I wasn’t there but Dana was, and she came back with a Union Jack around her shoulders, telling me, “You like it? Keep it.” Thus did I come to have what was just possibly David Gahan’s stolen flag.

25.   River Phoenix died on the same Halloween that marked the last time my bestie Gina and I trick or treated. It was an abysmal night that spat snow and the wind roared, and we came in half-frozen and heard River had OD’d at Johnny Depp’s LA club, The Viper Room. Until Kurt Cobain’s suicide the next spring made us forget all about River Phoenix, Gina and I were even more morbidly fascinated by him than we’d been by Brandon Lee that spring, seeing his movies over and over and daring one another to peek at the picture of him in his casket a tabloid published. I guess for a bit of 1993 he was to our generation what James Dean had been to his long before.

That was the year that was 1993.

[RCMerchant]

from Burgo-


"6. Buying comic books at the local newspaper store."

They used to be every where. Long gone.