Crap, I graduated college the year these kids were born! Waaaahhhh!!!
So, in other words, I was right…
(d&r)
Oxy, I don’t think you read those lyrics closely enough. It’s about a poor farm girl whose secret boyfriend / close friend has just committed suicide and the indifference her family shows to the event. As for what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, I know exactly what it was. It was a McGuffin.
BS. I was born on '82 and the origional is one of my favorite songs. Madonna sucks.
And I have relatives that still use rotary phones with real ringers.
A few months ago, my husband was in Half-Price Books, comes across some old LP’s he’d had back in the 70’s and scarfs them up. (I remember one was Xanadu, but I don’t recall the others.)
Wishing to share 70’s culture (no comment about oxymorons here, 'k?) with his children, he brings them home and proceeds to unearth his old turntable from whatever pile it was hiding in the garage. Said turntable has an opaque cover with sort of a slot in the front, btw, which was designed to be closed while playing.
The next morning, I wander in to find the youngest trying very earnestly to listen to the music again…by sticking what he called the ‘big CD’ into the slot in the front of the turntable cover.
Talk about feeling every incipient grey hair right about then…
Updating this slightly, students just now entering college this fall are in fact class of 2005, and born in 1983.
And for the record, I’m class of 2004, born 1982, and the only ones I spotted that were not true for me are:
and
A few days after I was born, I got severe jaundice, but didn’t receive a transfusion because my doctor was afraid I could get AIDS that way.
And of course I can’t imagine life without calculators or personal computers. I’ve had discussions about that with my brother, and the idea just seems ludicrous. How could you get through school?
Feel just a bit older now? 
I did my first two years at college using a slide rule. Calculators that did anything beyond MDAS were just too damned expensive until the HP-25 came out my junior year.
I was an altar boy when the altar faced AWAY from the congregation, there was a rail in the way, and I had to memorize the Mass in Latin.
Heck, I’m downright Medieval…
Music videos? Had to get our rock and roll fix from Shindig and Hullabaloo, or the one weekly musical spot on Ed Sullivan. What about go-go girls in cages with white patent-leather knee-length boots.
Digital sound? We listened to a lot of 45 records on Hi-Fi.
Speaking of movies, I drove past a drive-in movie theatre, (the only one left, that I know of), with the yard monsters.
One says “mommy, what’s that for?”
Some of my best memories of high school took place at the Velda Rose drive-in. There is a trailer park there now. sigh
I also remember fondly cruising Main. From Berge Ford to Midas mufflers. And sitting on the downtown benches when you didn’t have gas money for the Barracuda, talking to people cruising by.
“Those were the days, my friend.
We thought they’d never end.
We’d sing and dance, forever,
and a day”
Not only am I dating myself, I’ve forgotten the rest of the song.
<<41. Lawn darts have always been illegal. >>
Well, if everyone will excuse this impudent youngin’ from posting, I must ask…What exactly is a “Lawn Dart”? I’ve heard references to them before, but I’ve never known what they were.
Much thanks, in advance,
Ranchoth
“Lawn Darts” was a horshoes-like game in which you pitched foot-log, rather heavy dart with metal tips and plastic fletching about 20-30 feet into a plastic ring about 1.5 feet in diameter. Each eam (ed and lue) got three darts and took turns pitcing. You scored points if you got the dart into the ring.
“Lawn Darts” was the “generic” name, like 'In-line skating" was the generic name for the sport popularized by the “Rollerblade” people. The “Rollerblade” “lawn darts” was Jarts.
The issue was that you were tossing heavy and pointy things around during familoy celebrations (Jarts was a big thing at barbecues), so there was a possibility of hitting and impaling kids and pets. Looked at objectively, Jarts was probably about as dangerous as the game of Horseshoes it resembled (you wouldn’t want a flung horseshoe to hit a kid or a dog), but people started to get very concerned. I don’t recall any particlar cases of injuries, but no doubt there were some. Lawn darts were pulled from the market. As another thread here suggests, I don’t think they were outlawed, but nobody was going to take a chance on manufacturing the.
First off, here in Canada, the incoming class (including myself) was born in 1982, and is graduating in 2005.
Anyway, who was this list compiled with in mind? Some stupid 18/19 year old kids who’ve lived locked in their parent’s basement all their lives?
But only for the kids that liked his music.
I can’t think of any kid that thinks of this event as a tragedy (but perhaps this is because I’m Canadian).
Some of us actually still do listen to records.
Actually, punk rock is garbage.
Not true, especially about China.
Nope.
Most certainly not; my parents, born in 1954, both grew up listening to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc.
I remember leaded gasoline.
I assure you that every person born in 1982 has had some contact with a rotary telephone.
Even with all of the great games out now, some of us still like to play pool in bars.
Studi
Ahem.
This is my favorite “how times have changed” anecdote, as originally told by Ralph Gleason in the *San Francisco Chronicle *: He reported seeing one “teenybop” call to another from the cutout bins at a music store, holding up a Beatles album. “Hey, look! McCartney was in a group before Wings!”
Worst of all, he reported this in 1972.
AAARGH! The damn anecdote is nearly thirty years old.
Think I’ll just stumble off to the couch for a nice nap.
Oh, yes, and it just keeps getting worse. My 10 year old, browsing with me at the used bookstore, spots a collection of laserdiscs and call me over. Offers to spend his allowance to buy me one of the ‘records’ just as soon as I pick one out. I had to laugh, but boy, oh boy. If he hadn’t looked so sincere, I’d have thought it was a put-on. After explaining the difference, his comment? “Oh, okay. So that’s what you had to use till they came up with something good.” Knife through the heart, I’m telling ya.
Add to the above mentioned items:
Wouldn’t believe there was ever an alternative VCR using BETA format.
Ditto on 8-track tapes.
BTW, junkyardangel those lyrics:
“We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose,
Those were the days,
Oh, yes, those were the days”
Ah, BETA. I remember when I purchased my first VCR, a quasar, it weighed 45 LBS and cost $900.00. One of the big decisions for the buyer was what format BETA or VHS. The blank tapes were incredibly expensive $25.00 a piece (really) so BETA could record about 4 HRS VHS 6, so I figured VHS the better buy. BTW the first movie I recorded was the original Airport on a TDK tape purchased on sale for $21.99 back in 1981, we edited out the commercials with a pause control on a long cord that plugged into the back of the VCR, the movie is still in good condition 20 years later.
Hey now! I object!
Around-the-clock covereage of congress, public affairs, and weather reports have always been available on cable.
Music videos have always been available for 15 minutes a day, interspersed with lengthy commercial breaks.
But i’m not that young! I can still remember when rock videos weren’t all performed by teenage R&B artists.
" We’d live the life we’d choose
We’d fight, and never loose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days"
Are the rest of the words, don’t ask me who sang the song.
In 1982 they stopped giving out smallpox vaccines.
Anyone who saw “Sixty Minutes” last night may want to think about what this means now that germ warfare is now much more likely than nuculear warfare.
What always gets me is that '80s music is positioned to us thirty-somethings as '60s music is positioned to Baby Boomers. In other words, it’s nostalgia.
I’m not old enough for nostalgia.
Robin
How about these?
Anyone remember the movie ‘Sixteen Candles’ and the part where the winner of a bet got a box of floppy disks…and Anthony Michael Hall goes on and on about how expensive that is to Molly Ringwald?
I had forgotten, myself, but it rained here yesterday afternoon. The elder stepchild was amusing himself watching that movie. He could not, for the life of him, figure out why a box of floppy disks was THAT big of a deal, expense-wise. I, on the other hand, well remember just how my dad lectured me about how much they cost and the need for me to be careful with the disks when he bought that box of blank ones for my brand-spanking-new Commodore 64. It was a box of blank 5 1/4 inch floppies that he bought me, I might add.
To add insult to injury, my husband and I decided to head out to Gameworks last night and kill some money on air hockey and alien shooting. Among hundreds of different games, I happen to notice Galaga, the one I used to play incessantly as a teen. It was stuck back in a corner with a Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger and a few others with a sign calling them ‘old classics’, I believe (or something equally age-inspiring).
And now I find out that they’ve stopped manufacturing Jarts? Geezlycrow. No wonder the younger generation’s turning out the way they are. Nothing like chucking a lawn dart at an annoying cousin during a family reunion…
[sub]forget incipient grey hairs, I think I just felt five or six stand up to be counted. [/sub]
BTW, junkyardangel those lyrics:
“We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose,
Those were the days,
Oh, yes, those were the days” **
[/QUOTE]
I told you. 
Senility sets in. (wipes drool off her face and heads back to the home)