Things My Kids Won't Know

Instead, I got a stock response that thanked me for my interest in the fan club, directed me to NOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES send song ideas as they will be ignored and destroyed (whoops), and they probably also sent like a sticker or something. It's funny, I don't even remember what being in the fan club entailed, I just remember being really disappointed that Al didn't read my terrible ideas.

A few years prior to that, I joined the fan club to end all fan clubs - the group belonging to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. To sign up for this one, I think you had to cash in "Pizza Points", which were little proofs-of-purchase included on the boxes of all the toys.

When that package came in the mail - forget it. There was a membership card, a poster, even a bandana! The bummer of course was that you couldn't pick the color bandana you got it. Even though I was a staunch Michaelangelo supporter, I was forced to sport Leonardo blue. Didn't matter though. It was the best.

Fan clubs and newsletters were the old hotness. Just by mailing away and pledging your allegiance, you could end up with some cool stickers and swag, or the opportunity to buy limited edition merch.

I joined the Pearl Jam fan club for some reason, even though I was never a huge fan, and I was able to buy this sick wool hat that looked like it was for the old NBA team the Seattle Supersonics. I was the belle of the ball with that hat.

Today of course, getting anything tangible or cool for free (or relatively cheap) is unheard of. Now a "fan club" consists of filling out a page online, and maybe getting an email or a coupon. Like a lot of other things in this day and age, it lacks the romance of having to physically mail a letter and getting a real thing in return.

I wouldn't even know what kids would be fans of these days. Funny enough, the Ninja Turtles are still around and they have <a href="http://www.tmntfanclub.com">one</a>. But other than One Direction, are there any "bands" so big they'd necessitate a fan club?

Maybe that's the challenge for today. Think of something you like, see if it has a fan club, and join it. Then come back here with your results. If a fan club is cool enough, I don't even care who or what it's for. I'll join it.

This isn't to say that hidden tracks hadn't come before it. Weird Al included one in his Off the Deep End album two years prior (which, along with Pearl Jam's Vitalogy was one of the first two albums I ever bought) but since it was only on the CD and I strictly purchased cassettes, I didn't hear it until years later.

A quick look at a Wikipedia list also confirms that hidden tracks were being used by AC/DC and possibly by other bands even before that. I'd tell you for sure, but I stopped reading at "A".

In any case, Green Day's hidden track, "All By Myself", was included on the tape, so it was the first one I heard. And it was great.

I guess I should explain what a hidden track is for those people too young to remember. Basically, after the last song on an album, the CD (or record, I suppose) would continue to play silence for a few minutes. If you weren't paying attention, you'd assume the disc had stopped playing. Suddenly, a song would come on out of nowhere, and it would usually scare you the first time you heard it since you thought the album had finished playing.

Hidden tracks were sometimes random noise, sometimes the beginnings of a song that would appear on later albums, and sometimes complete tunes. "All By Myself" was a mix of the first and the third thing - it sounded like a jokey recording but you could call it a song.

After hearing it, I became obsessed with hidden tracks, hoping that every album I bought had one. And many of them did. I'm not sure what made them so special to me, but something about them felt like you were in on some kind of secret.

Not that it was an impressive secret, or really a secret at all by any stretch of the imagination. Most CD players would display the number of tracks and the length of the album when you put a disc in. When a disc had like 99 tracks, there was a good bet that 15-98 were just ten seconds of silence and 99 was the bonus song.

If the hidden track was a good song, and you didn't want to wait ten minutes or whatever to hear it, you'd have to manually skip ahead after the last listed song was finished. As many thirty-somethings can attest to, this was a fairly common occurrence.

Of course now, with all music being purchased digitally, the hidden track is essentially obsolete. Technically, you could "hide" a song in the last track of an album, but it'd be pretty obvious when the length of the final song is like fifteen minutes. At least with the CD you'd have to buy it and put it in a player before the secret was revealed.

And man, was it tough to hold out. Those tantalizing 900 numbers were everywhere, luring me in with a forbidden fruit I so desperately wanted to taste.

It never really mattered what they were selling. I wanted in. Whether it was Mean Gene’s wrestling hotline, a place for Nintendo tips, or a late-night lady who wanted to talk to ME, they all had something I desired, and ultimately, something I could never have.

As a kid who wanted to believe anything the TV told me, I was fascinated by the commercials. The personalities selling the scam were always colorful and boisterous. You can see the aforementioned Mean Gene ad here. Grandpa Munster wasn't particularly relevant to me but I'll be darned if I didn't want to be a Junior Vampire. I wasn’t old enough to understand how creepy Warrant was being in this commercial so of course I wanted to talk to them. He-Man pumped up his awesome giveaways that any rational six-year-old would want. Even SANTA had a line where you could hear a special message FROM THE MAN HIMSELF.

The most unbelievable part of all this was that you didn't have to enter a credit card to be charged - the fees would just show up on your (or your parents') phone bill! So any kid who was smart enough to pick up a phone and dial the number they memorized from seeing it on TV 6,000 times was capable of bankrupting their unsuspecting family.

Of course, legally, we we were always told to ask for our parents' permission. And the little angels that did (me) were treated to a half hour "discussion" on how if we ever dialed a 900 number we'd be murdered.

And the scam didn't just go after kids, though we were clearly easy targets. There were plenty of adult-themed numbers as well. The 900 numbers followed by 976 were always the scandalous ones. But there were pay lines for tons of other "adult" stuff. Horoscopes, weather, breaking news…in the days before the internet, there was no way to get information or verify rumors until some sort of printed medium came into your possession. For the impatient (or the gullible), these hotlines became massive addictions.

I can’ t remember when exactly 900 numbers went out of fashion, but I guess the internet was why they did. I’d imagine it was sometime in the early 2000s. I just did a quick Google search to see what the most popular 900 numbers were, and the first result was a Yahoo Answers entry from two years ago asking, “Uhh, What are 1-900 numbers?” So it was definitely before then.

Of course a good rub never truly dies. Recently the old hotline scams have been replaced with text message memberships into nonsense clubs. You’ve seen the ads – “text MARRY to 2415 NOW to find out if HE’S right for YOU!” And then on the bottom of the screen there’s sixty lines of legal copy, informing you that once you send that text you enter a lifelong agreement with the company for $12.99 a month and they can send you all kinds of stupid things and there’s nothing you can do about it.

People argue that lots of the commercials from my childhood were "dangerous". Mainly they're referring to the food commercials, and if you know me you know I wholeheartedly disagree with that. But in this case, they're kind of right. Watching these commercials now just feels so unbelievably dirty, even if the companies do claim to donate "a portion of the proceeds" to some ambiguous charity.

Of course, this kinda fun memory is also partially tainted with a stupid one. The other two kids, our cousins, had this game they’d play, where they’d “search” for hidden driveways. When you came across one, whoever yelled out “hidden driveway” first got a point.

Thing was, they knew where all the hidden driveways were, because they lived there, and we never found any, because by definition, a hidden driveway is, well, hidden. So they’d get all the points and we’d just sit there looking like dopes.

In any case, the one shining spot in this otherwise miserable ordeal was the station wagon itself. I don’t know if it was rare or not because I admittedly don’t know much about station wagons, but it was one of those models that had seats in the trunk that faced out the back.

If you’ve ever ridden in one of these, I don’t need to explain how awesome it is. If you haven’t, I won’t be able to do it justice. The closest thing I can compare it to is riding in a school bus, sitting in the last row, and turning around to look at people through the window in the back door.

This was better than that though, because you didn’t even have to turn around. The seats were just facing out the back. And instead of being high up in a bus, you were at direct eye level with the people driving the car behind you.

I can’t quite explain why this phenomenon was so great, but man, was it ever. You’d be stopped at a red light, and you’d start making faces at the people behind you, and there was nothing they could do. They’d have to start trying to avoid eye contact but eventually they’d have to look forward again.

While my idiot cousin would always take it too far and start flipping people off, I was perfectly content sticking my tongue out, or in some cases just waving. What a polite and gentlemanly little fella I was.

Eventually the ride would be over, and I’d be forced to go back to the house and try to survive the situation until my parents retrieved me. There were so many brutal experiences but one really sticks out.

My uncle, let’s call him “Bob” (that’s his name) was one of those guys who had a train collection. This is something I’ll never understand. If you’re above the age of four and you have a train collection and you’re not Gomez Addams, something is definitely off.

So one day we were down in the basement where all the trains were, unsupervised, and my cousin turned them on. I was probably like nine at the time, and I thought anything motorized was cool, so I ran around the track following alongside the train.

For reasons I don’t really recall, the train hopped the track. I caught the first car and tried to catch the rest of them as they tumbled to the floor. Bob heard the commotion and came down into the basement, and he was livid. I got yelled at a lot when I was a kid but this was something else. There was screaming, spit flying, and veins bursting out of his neck.

I was terrified. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be down there, but that’s totally unacceptable. And seriously, they’re trains and I was nine and he was an adult. Like, get a grip. I don’t care if they were expensive. If you have toys, and they are expensive, and a kid plays with them and damages them, you have no right getting mad BECAUSE THEY ARE TOYS. And as someone who has more toys adorning my apartment then I care to admit, I can assure you, I practice what I preach.

The truth is, I forgot that there used to be a time when you could walk right up to a departing plane without having to go through any kind of security worse than a metal detector. Instead of being a final interaction, "saying goodbye" is now the first of many steps taken before actually getting onto a plane.

It’s not that I have a great deal of experience with the situation – my parents didn’t take me on any “real” trips when I was a kid, so I didn’t fly until I was in high school. In fact my first time on a plane was when I traveled to New Orleans with the high school band in 1997. But it was four years before the events of 9/11, and while we didn’t exactly prance on board, security was nothing like it is now.

Before we left the high school our band instructors searched our bags for water guns and alcohol hidden in shampoo containers. That was the worst of the things we could’ve brought. Our biggest fear when we arrived at the airport was whether or not the x-ray machine would erase the pictures on our disposable cameras.

Today, we still get our shampoo bottles checked. But our laptops, water bottles, phones, shoes, belts, and underpants are also at the mercy of the TSA. We went from stepping through an unobtrusive metal detector to walking into a big tanning-booth-looking thing that can digitally image our junk.

Now I’m not saying we don’t need any of these measures (or at least some of them) but there’s got to be a way to expedite the process. If screeners are letting me through with open bottles of soda and 6 oz. containers of Axe Body Wash anyway, they could at least find a quicker way to do it.

And while we're on the subject, I know that there have been countless legitimately terrible jokes about arguably terrible airline food, but to be totally honest, I really miss the stuff. My kids won’t ever be able to experience it for themselves, unless they want to pay for the privilege.

I remember flying back from somewhere with my wife, and we were served a dinner that was ambiguously labeled “Beef and Cheddar Sandwich”. I don’t know what exactly qualifies as “beef” but it was delicious. My wife was repulsed as I ate not only mine, but hers too. I found the sandwich to be delightful, but I can’t help but think that I would’ve been pretty underwhelmed if I had to exchange money to eat it.

Personally, I blame Jerry Seinfeld. He thought he was so cute making jokes about the quality of airline fare, and now they’ve taken it away from us. Thanks for nothing, Jerr.

But before I get to that, let me rewind a little bit. I’m sure there are some readers here who do not know what a beeper actually is.

In short, it was a status symbol. To expand further, I’ll have to get into a little bit of history.

A beeper, or "pager" as it was properly known, was a small little square with a single screen that was similar to that of a digital calculator. Before everyone had a cell phone, a beeper was the only way to get in touch with someone who wasn’t home.

It worked like this: each beeper had a phone number synced to it. The beeper couldn’t make calls, but it could receive information, sort of like the earliest version of a text message. If I wanted to “beep” someone, I’d call their beeper number from my house phone. Then, I’d be prompted by a voice recording to enter the number that I wanted to display on the beeper screen.

You know how cell phone voicemail messages say, “To leave a callback number, press five”? I've never done that, and I’m sure no one else on the planet has either, but I’m guessing if someone did, the result would be similar to beeping someone.

Once you entered your number and pressed “pound” (what "#" was called before Twitter) the digits would be whisked away and sent to your friend’s beeper. Their device would literally start beeping, notifying them of an incoming page. When they got it, they’d have to find a phone – either a pay phone or another landline – and they’d call you back.

The whole process was pretty cumbersome by today’s standards, and really the only people who actually needed beepers were businessmen and drug dealers. That could be redundant, depending on how you look at it. But you know what I meant.

Eventually, as with every other piece of new technology, the price came down and us regular folk who were not drug dealers were able to get beepers of our own. While a beeper could prove to be a useful tool if, like my earlier reference stated, someone used one to notify someone else when they needed to be picked up, for the most part beepers were strictly used for nonsense.

You didn't have to send a real phone number to the beeper; you could send any string of numbers that you wanted. Girlfriends paged their boyfriends "143" for "I love you", guys sent other guys "58008" for obvious reasons, and tons of other stupid messages were sent.

Beepers were such a big deal that they became a part of pop culture, and yes, even WWE lore. They did a segment where popular WWE Superstar Stone Cold Steve Austin told pre-moviestar The Rock that if he got a page that said "3:16", it meant that Stone Cold owned The Rock. I would've linked to the video here, but I lost the URL and it took me forever to find so I'm not doing it again.

Back to my original story, I was a die-hard hater of the beeper fad until I actually had one on me. As soon as my girlfriend handed it to me, I could feel its power surging through my veins. On second thought, maybe it was the radiation from the signals it received. Either way, it was awesome.

I clipped it to my belt and walked around like a boss. I felt amazing. I suddenly realized why everyone wanted one. It just made you feel so important. I remember everyone asking me, "Whoa, YOU finally got a beeper?" I lied and said I did, and then felt double-cool by not giving them the number when they asked for it. "I'll let you know when I want you to get in touch with me," I said, in the most obnoxious way you could imagine.

When I eventually picked up my girlfriend and gave the beeper back to her, I felt like I was suffering a great loss. It had only been a few hours, but I had seen the light and couldn't imagine what life would be like without that turquoise terror clipped to my side.

Thankfully, cell phones became widely available shortly after that. And once I started rocking my pre-paid Nokia, there was no longer a need for a beeper. Pagers were the very first casualty of the rise of the cell phone.

Beepers were such a blip on the technology radar, it's most likely that two generations from now, people will never know that they existed in the first place. That kind of makes me wonder if there's other devices from the like the 1940s or 50s that no one knows about. 

Was there some other channel changing device that the remote control made obsolete? (Spoiler alert - there wasn't.)

I'll always have fond memories evoked whenever someone mentions a beeper. Like I've said before, it's one of those things that harkens back to an extremely specific time in your life - not just an age, but a specific day, and maybe even a specific story.

My story is the day I borrowed one.

The day I lived like a king.

Without question, the greatest and funniest thing you can do at a bowling alley is to change the bowler’s name on the digital scoreboard. For example, when your unknowing friend “Joe” stands up to bowl, you log into the scoring system, select “Change Bowler Name”, and alter his title to “ButtSniffr”. We literally used to spend more time changing each other’s names than we did actually bowling.

Bowler City held Moonlight Bowling on Friday and Saturday nights. It got so popular that it became nearly impossible to reserve a lane if you showed up late. For me and my friends, once we had bowling on the brain, it was hard to change course for the evening. When Bowler City was packed, we’d have to go somewhere else.

Parkway Lanes was a little closer to our houses. But there was a reason we always went to Bowler City first. Not only did Parkway not have Moonlight Bowling, they didn’t have electronic scoring.

You heard me correctly. No…electronic…scoring.

Just so we’re all on the same page, this wasn’t in the ‘60s or ‘70s. This was in the late 1990s.

In addition to not being able to change anyone’s name while they were bowling, you had to manually score the game. That’s right. When you got your shoes at the counter, you also got a piece of paper and a pencil, and that was the only way you were going to figure out who won.

Most kids my age had no idea how the scoring actually worked. We just threw the ball down and whatever the screen said we had, we had. We trusted it. The math didn’t make sense at times but we didn’t bother to figure out why.

The time warp of Parkway Lanes forced us to figure it out. We sat around for a good fifteen minutes reading through the rules and trying to understand them. They’re really not that difficult, but when you’re seeing them for the first time, it’s annoying.

The rules wound up not mattering much anyway, because instead of changing people’s names, we had no choice but to change people’s scores. When you flubbed someone’s score in the electronic system, the frame you altered would be highlighted so it was clear you did something. With just a paper and pencil, you could change things far more discretely if you were good at it.

I’m not sure when exactly, but a few years back, Parkway Lanes joined the rest of the free world and finally upgraded to electronic scoring. Usually, this is the part where I say I miss the old way of doing things, but in this case, to hell with that. Manually scoring bowling was awful and unnecessary.

I can’t imagine there are many bowling alleys left in populated areas that force you to keep your own score. I couldn’t believe there was a place like that fifteen years ago, so I’d be really surprised if any of them still exist now.

I first used Windows Media Player. I don’t remember much about it, other than the fact that it played these trippy little designs while your music played. But I do remember thinking that there was a better way to play the songs.

Eventually, word spread of a sweet download that would change our lives forever. It was called Winamp, and it was revolutionizing the way music was heard in dorm rooms across the county.

In addition to storing all of your music and being able to sort it by title, it gave you the opportunity to customize the player with a wide array of custom skins. If iTunes is Facebook, Winamp was its wackier, younger, Myspace sibling.

Apple products didn’t really go mainstream until several years later, so in the meantime, Winamp was king.

The other day I heard someone talking about using Winamp, and I was floored. Why on earth would anyone still be using that? Come on dude – they made iTunes compatible with PCs! There’s no excuse!

And it’s true. iTunes buried Winamp for everyone, except for that one guy, apparently. I’ve stated before that I’m an Apple aficionado, and my days with Winamp were mostly spent on my college roommate’s computer. But there’s a reason iTunes blew up – because it’s great.

Using Winamp in 2012 is the equivalent of using a Zune, ever.

But I digress.

For its time, Winamp was a fun piece of programming, and while it may not mean a lot to many people, for me and other folks my age, it’s a little slice of history. It’s one of those things that becomes so representative of an unbelievably specific time in your life, just hearing the word brings you back to where you were when you were using it.

There’s a bunch of other things from that time period that have the same affect on me. I haven’t written articles about them, because they’re either too “new” to assume they’ll be eradicated in the next few years or they’re something that will be around forever. Things like “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”, Newgrounds.com, Mountain Dew Code Red, and the movie Saving Silverman.

First and foremost were the mysterious boxes of Airheads. For those of you unfamiliar with Airheads, and to be honest, none of you should be, they are a taffy-like candy that comes in a variety of flavors. These boxes were mysterious, however, because despite their intended consistency, for some reason the Airheads at Midtown would shatter if you dropped them.

We originally attributed this to the fact that they were a hundred years old, but that couldn’t have been the case, since no matter how many boxes we went through, they were still like that. I guess it’s possible that Midtown had stockpiled ancient Airheads for some reason but I don’t know. It remains a mystery to this day.

A big part of why we initially assumed the Airheads were from prehistoric times is because of our second favorite candy, which was situated next to them. For just fifty cents a pop you could get your fix of nicotine’s favorite little brother, the candy cigarette.

Candy cigarettes are great, even if their existence is a little confusing. At some point, someone thought it would be a good idea to make several boxes parodying the cigarettes of the time, and to fill them with round white sticks made of sugar.

The boxes that I had varied, but the best kinds of candy cigarettes actually emitted a “puff” if you blew into them. Other ones had the tips dyed red to give the impression that they were “lit”.

Because I was a giant nerd, I took great joy in standing next to the rough and tumble middle schoolers who were smoking their real cigarettes while I pretended to smoke my candy ones. They’d see me with the confection dangling from my lip, and their first reaction would be, “Whoa! Kev’s smoking!” When they realized I wasn’t, they would just roll their eyes and ignore me as per usual.

I don’t know why I found this as funny as I did. I’ll admit that I was listening to a lot of “Weird Al” Yankovic in that time period, so it’s very possible that had something to do with it.

Candy cigarettes were delicious and a source of never-ending hilarity to me. I’m not 100% sure that they’re off the market, but I haven’t seen them in a while. It’s entirely possible that they were off the market 17 years ago when I purchased them at Midtown, and I was only able to secure them because of the store’s lax item restocking policies.

As great as they were, I can’t wrap my head around why anyone would think that they were a good idea. I was 13 at the time and I guess I enjoyed them in an ironic way, but surely there were kids who were “smoking” them to act cool. Those same kids probably grew up to be junkies. I can’t prove it but I mean come on, why wouldn’t they?

Imagine if they sold “candy beer”? It’d be like a can of “Dudweiser” or something, and it would be delicious and awesome and protested to the point of extinction within five seconds of its creation.

I suppose that’s a good thing. I don’t know. I’m kinda torn on this one. We’re probably better off without candy versions of alcohol and drugs. I’m not one to tell people what they can and can’t do, but you have to draw the line somewhere, right?

Ah, maybe you don’t. I’m sure I’d have no problem giving my kids candy crystal meth if it meant I could get them to be quiet for a minute or two.

I didn’t have an ATM card, but I did have a passbook. To make a deposit, I’d have to physically go inside the bank, get a deposit slip, fill it out, wait in line, hand the teller the cash, the slip, and the passbook, wait for the passbook to get stamped, and wait to get a receipt. Brutal.

After a few visits, it dawned on me that I could swipe some slips from the bank and bring them home, so I could cut out a step and use the drive-thru. But it was still extremely annoying.

When I went to college I opened a checking account and got a shiny new debit card. And while that did make withdrawing money easier, depositing a check was still a bother. I was getting a check every week with no direct deposit, and the bank I used was a good 25 miles away from my school. It wasn’t impossible to cash a check, but it was aggravating.

Right after college was finished, I got my first “real” job. And they had direct deposit. Life was good. For about 90% of my financial transactions, I didn’t have to go to a bank. But there was still that 10% that bugged me – the rare times where I’d have to deposit a birthday check, or the rarer times when I had to deposit cash. I still had to fill out a stupid slip and go to the bank.

Shortly after that, I switched to Chase, and my life changed forever. The folks at Chase, the beautiful, wonderful, amazing people they are, revolutionized the world by introducing the “No Slip” deposit ATMs. Finally, the tyranny of going to a bank and filling out that horrible piece of paper were over.

Checks or cash, it didn’t matter. You just put your little ATM card in, pushed a few buttons, inserted your wad of bills or stacks of checks into the machine, and blammo: it counted it, organized it, and deposited it. I was free, free from ever having to step foot near a bank again.

Now, I rarely even have to go to the ATM, let alone a bank. The geniuses at Chase took it a step further and created an app that lets you deposit a check from your phone. I mean, seriously, what kind of crazy, future society are we living in?

I can’t imagine bank tellers being necessary for that much longer. And banks in general will probably drastically change in the next decade. After you open an account, there’s really no reason to ever go to a bank again. And even that – opening an account – will probably be done exclusively online at some point.

Eventually I asked the bus driver what that stupid sticker was all about, and she angrily responded (as bus drivers do) that it wasn’t “stupid” and that it was supporting the World Wildlife Fund.

The World Wildlife Fund?! What kind of nonsense was that? In my mind, there was but one WWF, and the only animals it supported were Jake’s snake, Koko’s parrot and Davey’s bulldog.

As you undoubtedly know, the professional wrestling empire lost a lawsuit against the activists, and the World Wrestling Federation became World Wrestling Entertainment. Despite the fact that their hand was forced, the WWE decided to own the change. They launched a campaign that lovingly told us to get the "F" out. The change was for the better, they’d say, as it represented the company's foray into films, music and other programming by being more inclusive.

It was a sad day, though. It’s kinda like when the store attached to the parking lot you hung out in changed, and for the first month or so everyone was all like “We’re hanging out at the Taco Bell parking lot,” even though it was technically a CVS parking lot. Then in like two months everyone got over it and started referring to it by its proper name.

The WWE change had a similar feel. Some diehards refused to call it by its new name at first, but eventually everyone fell in line and accepted the fact that things were never going back to the way they were.

What you may not know, however, is that the WWE took it one step further. Though WWE initially stood for “World Wrestling Entertainment”, as of about a year ago, it now stands for nothing. Yup, the WWE became a phraseless acronym, just like KFC did for a while.

Unlike the previous name change, the removal of the actual words behind the initials was handled in a relatively low-key fashion. Most fans had no idea that the change had even occurred.

The professional wrestling business has evolved a lot in the last twenty years. It’s not just the names, but the whole culture. There used to be a time when good guy wrestlers would have rocks thrown at them for riding in a car with bad guy wrestlers. Sure, we're a little "smarter" now, but even beyond that, the internet has made sure every “secret” of the business is exposed. Virtually nothing is a surprise anymore.

It takes a little bit of the magic and mystery out of the show, but what are ya gonna do. To really appreciate the twists and turns, you just have to make a conscious effort to avoid the spoilers, kind of like how you would for a good movie.

I’ve gotten used to the WWE name by now, but I’ll always miss the World Wrestling Federation. There was something about those words that just made the whole thing seem so official and important.

This is a controversial topic for a lot of reasons, and I’m sure many of you will be annoyed by the mere premise of what I’m suggesting. But there are several different pieces that compose the point I’m trying to make, and I’m sure you’ll agree with some of, if not all of them.

First, I’m not saying that mainstream music is the only good music. I know a lot of incredible bands that still play 200 seat theaters because they remain largely unknown. But that’s my point. There’s a reason they’re unknown, and it has nothing to do with whether they’re good or not. Sure, we have access to an unlimited amount of music these days, but you really need to make an effort to dig out the good stuff and find what you like.

Maybe this is shallow to say, but I loved having an outlet where good music was handed to me. I didn’t get into everything that I heard on the radio, but it was way easier to start digging deeper into the stuff that I did enjoy.

There are bands that are popular now, but they don’t have anywhere near the kind of following that bands from as recent as a decade ago had. If I asked someone to name me the best five rock bands of the past five years, there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t have heard of any of them.

I hate the fact that it’s impossible to be a casual music fan today. I don’t want to devote my spare time to weeding through tons of junk to find music I like.

It’s so strange how I grew up hating “the system” and the process it took to get a band heard, but now I’m wishing it was back so I could actually hear some new stuff in my day to day life.

We’re a country with no rock stars. It was fun to live in a time where our musicians could get away with anything because they were so insanely famous. They weren’t just touring around, they were staying in five-star hotels, riding in lavish tour buses, and making sickening amounts of money that afforded them the opportunity to do stupid things. They offered us a chance to daydream and live vicariously through them. It seems like the best we can do these days is Kanye West. He’s the last of a dying breed.

My feelings about music have done a complete 180. I used to hate when a band I liked got popular. It felt like it was my special thing and it was ruined when everyone else started to like it.

Now I wish more bands were popular. Kids think a band “blows up” when they play one major show. 95% of the country could have no idea who a particular band is, but if they’re at Coachella they’re too mainstream. “Popular” sure doesn’t mean what it used to.

And to be honest, I kind of miss the stadium shows. I’ve seen bands I like both ways, in an intimate setting and in a giant arena, and they each are fun in a different way. While it’s great to have that close and personal encounter, it’s also incredible to be standing with 18,000 people or even more, and to all share an experience of something you love.

There’s a strange spinoff to this as well. Gone are the “one hit wonders” of rock and roll. Back in the mid-90s, there were a ton of bands like For Squirrels, Sponge, Four Non Blondes and countless others that contributed one tremendous song to the genre before disappearing forever. Today, we hardly get “hits” at all. That’s depressing.

I don’t have conversations about music anymore because there’s nothing for me to say. I want to get swept up in a wave of good music and download albums and go to new concerts and talk about obscure cuts with my friends. Unfortunately you need to take a part time job in “looking for music” to make it happen.

Hosted by David Ruprecht, the Sweep combined two of children’s favorite things: answering questions and running through a supermarket, unsupervised. While the show featured adults and I guess was technically for adults, there was no way that kids weren’t going to watch this show and bask in its glory.

According to the franchise’s Wikipedia page, the 90s version of Supermarket Sweep was actually a remake of a show which had aired in the 60s. I’ve never seen that version and a quick YouTube search yielded no results, so I can’t speak to its awesomeness. I can, however, say that I used both Wikipedia and YouTube as references in the same paragraph. I’m so internetty.

The 90s version of the show was great. It basically went like this: you and a teammate would play against two other teams. In the first few rounds you’d play a bunch of different games. The games ranged from guessing blurred out brand names to the kind of pricing games you’d see on The Price is Right. Each correct answer earned you “time”, usually ten seconds, which teams would accumulate until it was time for the big run-through.

The run-through consisted of motoring through a realistically-sized supermarket. Using the time you earned in the games, you’d get to run through the aisles, filling your cart with as much crap as you could before returning for a fresh one. After each team did their run-through, the price of the groceries was added up and whoever accumulated the most stuff won.

More often that not, the team that had the most amount of time in the supermarket sweep would win. But that wasn’t always the case. Savvy “shoppers” knew getting big-ticket items was the key to success. Even though you were only allowed five of each item max, if you played your cards right, things could add up in a hurry.

It is through this show that I learned that frozen turkeys and freshly ground coffee were expensive. Also diapers. People always went for diapers.

When a winner was determined, that team had a chance to play in a special bonus round, which was a supermarket scavenger hunt. I think you had like thirty seconds to find three items based on clues. The clue would be something like, “You might call it ‘Slime Time’ when using this to quench your thirst.” And then the team would have to run off and find Ecto-Cooler.

It was fun to watch but also extremely frustrating when the winning team couldn’t figure out the clue. Even if you didn’t know it, they’d show the answer at home, and you’d be screaming at the TV, “WHY ARE YOU IN THE TOILET PAPER AISLE IT’S CLEARLY CEREAL THAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR”.

Later on, the once-a-cartoon-now-a-game-show program Video Power used the same run-through idea, except instead of a supermarket and a shopping cart it was walls filled with Nintendo games which you would stick on to your body via a velcro suit. To this day, there has been nothing greater in the history of the world than being a winning contestant on that program.

Even with all of the social media I engage in, there is still a lot of it that I ignore. My friends, for the most part, are in the same bucket. In contrast, kids today are wrapped up in all of it. They’re the first to sign on to new technologies, and they are literally plastering their entire lives online.

After ten to fifteen years, there will be a library’s worth of their photos, journals, random thoughts, etc., all available with an easy internet search. And it will be so intertwined with their day-to-day lives, it’ll be tough to erase.

That’s a crazy thing to think about. There is virtually no information about my parents online. They barely use the internet and the only real thing for them to turn up on is a generic database of names and numbers.

I’m somewhere in the middle. There’s certainly a great deal of my “history” found online, but it doesn’t start until I’m in my mid-twenties, which is when social media and all that first blew up.

But the next generation will be completely online from the moment they’re old enough to use a computer. Their kids will be able to relive the entire lifetime of their parents, just by doing a little digging.

Think about how much that changes the dynamic of growing up. How many parents lied to their kids about drinking, or smoking, or whatever? If you say something now, you better believe that your kids are going to be looking online for proof that you are lying.

All of our bad decisions and risky behaviors are documented and available for the world to peruse. Even if you’ve enabled your privacy settings, chances are that someone you’re friends with didn’t, which means all of your exploits are alive and well in someone else’s social circle. It’s not that difficult to find it if you’re really looking.

When I first saw the Pam Anderson sex tape, the first thing (well, the second thing) I thought of was, “Oh man, her kids are gonna see her naked one day.” Now there will be hundreds if not thousands of kids who accidentally stumble across nude pictures their parents sent to boyfriends or girlfriends.

Before email attachments and USB ports were chic, floppy disks were the only way to transfer information from one computer to another. In elementary school, the floppy disks were literally floppy. They were big and if you shook them, they flapped around and made this cool sound. Beyond that, they were the necessary tool needed to play Cross Country U.S.A. and Oregon Trail on our computer lab’s Apple IIe machines.

Over the next fifteen years, floppy disks got a lot less floppy. They got smaller, harder, and more colorful. They held more information as compared to their predecessors but they were still pretty bad.

For example, awesome games like the one pictured above had to be installed in four parts. It was incredibly tedious and annoying.

But in the same way finding a bunch of blank VHS tapes was great, it was amazing to find a box full of unmarked floppys sitting in your drawer. With the VHS tapes you knew there was going be some kind of show hidden within. With the floppys, there could be a few different kinds of content lurking inside.

You could find anything from pirated games that a friend gave you, Word documents with old school reports, or saved chat conversations with friends. Those were always an awesome find.

When I bought my first Mac laptop back in 2001, my dad was all concerned that I was making a mistake because the computer didn’t have a disk drive. I tried to explain to him that CD-Rs were the way of the future, but he thought I was lying to him so I could justify getting the new toy I wanted.

To this day, he still thinks that I do that when I’m trying to sell him on something. I guess some things never change.

The funny thing is the biggest problem in those days wasn’t the lack of a disk drive, it was the fact that Macs weren't compatible with about 50% of PC products. I can't recall how many times I was shut out of a sweet screensaver or download, but it was a lot. "I can't, I'm on a Mac," was a sentence I was used to.

Now, of course, the computer landscape has completely changed, and not only does everything work on a Mac, it works so much easier and faster than it does on a PC. A friend once told me about some networking thing that PCs did better, and that might be true, but by the time I need to utilize that technology I'm sure Apple will have released a better version of it.

But yeah, floppy disks. I can't say I miss them. I recently threw out a big stack of them, because the files that were on them couldn't even be read by today's programs. And all the good games from the past can be downloaded now as apps or through emulators.

Toys ‘R’ Us, or TRU as my buddy Matt often refers to it, was the place to be when it came to video games. There were other stores like Babbages and Funcoland, but none of them touched TRU in its prime. A toy store was an incredible place in general, but when you went to the video game section in TRU, you knew you were in for something special.

The aisles seemed to go on forever, and practically any game you could think of was represented. I use the word “represented” because the actual games weren’t there, but unlike today, neither were the boxes.

Instead, you had a picture of the box art, and underneath it was a packet of slips. The slip had the name of the game, its price, and a barcode on it. If the packet was empty, as it sometimes was, that meant the game was sold out. It was a not a good feeling.

If a slip was there, you were in. You’d bring the slip up to the cashier who would scan it and take your money. But the transaction didn’t end there. Cashiers obviously couldn’t keep all of the games at their registers, so you had to take another step.

Beyond the registers was this walled-off room. It looked like a place that you would buy burgers and fries from at the beach, but bigger. There was only one window, which was there so the employee could talk to customers. You couldn’t really see inside until you were up close, but if you were tall enough to see over the counter, you’d get a peek of the greatest sight imaginable – a room filled with wall-to-wall Nintendo games.

You could see the room as soon as you walked into the store, so if it was one of those days when you weren’t buying a video game, the room would taunt you the whole time you were there.

If you were buying one though, oh man. You’d take that little slip up to the counter and hand it over to the employee, who (at the time) seemed like the most powerful person in the universe. They would retire into the deep recesses of that room for what felt like forever, before they finally emerged with the game you had chosen. It was magic.

I imagine that if things were still like this today, I’d be furious about having to take that extra step, and I’d be complaining about it for sure. But for some reason that process impressed the heck out of me when I was little. I guess after working in a video store a room full of video games doesn’t seem all that spectacular. I wish it did.

It was probably all the anticipation that made it so amazing. Service Merchandise made even the lamest purchases seem completely awesome because everything you bought came down a conveyor belt to get to you.

As someone makes almost all of his decisions in life based on convenience, I’m definitely glad that things are easier now. Some stuff is better off being polished by selective memory and staying in the past.

And isn’t that truly great? We can make even awful things into good memories. There’s no such thing as bad nostalgia.

When I saw the “Special Edition” movies in the theater, I enjoyed them because I had no frame of reference. The same thing goes for the Indiana Jones franchise. Allow me to sidebar for a moment to explain.

The first time I saw any of the Indiana Jones movies the whole way through was in the three days leading up to The Crystal Skull. Almost everyone I know, including my wife who is a huge Harrison Ford/Indy fan, grew up loving and adoring those films.

So when they all saw Crystal Skull and hated it, I didn’t really get why. Sure, there were some silly parts, and trust me, I dislike Shia LaBeouf as much as the next guy, but when watching all four of those films in a row without having seen any of them prior, Crystal Skull didn’t feel too far off from what the tone of the rest of the series was.

The same thing happened with Star Wars. When my friends found out that I had never seen the original trilogy, they rushed me to their homes to screen their old VHS copies. And while I could see why those movies were better, it's not like if I had never seen them, I would've ended up hating Star Wars.

George Lucas has said that he’ll never release the original movies on DVD or Blu-Ray because they are not representative of his vision. I’m paraphrasing here but his point was that he wanted to make the DVD perfect (in his eyes) because after all those VHS tapes are gone, the DVD version will be the only thing that’s left. It’ll be the only way people in the future will ever be able to see those movies, and he will have effectively erased the history of the originals.

It’s kind of a weird thing for me to reconcile because I’ve been on both sides of the equation. When news came out that Michael Bay was changing the backstory of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to make them aliens, I was appalled. But truth be told, other than upsetting me, I can’t see what kind of long-term damage it could do to the franchise. If all the other important aspects hold up, will new fans really ever know the difference?

The awesome animated movie Turtles Forever included three generations of Turtles meeting each other. They were all very different, and though some would view the 80s group of TMNT as sacrilegious when compared to the comic, at the end of the day they all attracted an audience and ushered in new generations of fans.

With Star Wars, I feel like it’s kind of the same thing. Little kids love Anakin Skywalker from Episode I because he looks like them and flies a spaceship and gets to blow things up. I don’t like little Anakin, and I don’t have to. But you know what? Eventually those kids who do like him will grow up and realize that the other movies in the series are good, too.

I understand the frustration with the Special Edition remakes, and while I won’t be so bold as to say “get over it”, I will say “get along with it”. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but honestly, it’s not about us. We had our time to enjoy it. We can still enjoy it now, but it’s more important (to me, anyway) that kids get to experience the same cool things that we did. Even though I didn’t get into Star Wars until later on in life, and even though the movies may not be the same, thirty years from now five-year-old kids will still be talking about how Yoda is their favorite Jedi.

I think that's pretty cool. They won't care about remakes, reboots, or cartoons. They'll just know that they love Star Wars.