Pop Culture Moments that pass you by

No, you were Luke-y :wink:

Lord of the Rings
Pirates of the Carribean
Spiderman, etc. movies
Harry Potter
Lost
all top 40 music from about 1998 until now (I listen to alternative music and oldies, exclusively)

I could have listed MP3 players, but my husband just gave me his last night. As he handed it to me, I looked at it like a caveman would look at a telephone. I might have even grunted while looking at it. I don’t remember.

Look at it this way, at least you’ve never seen a mullet.

I’m not much for reality TV. Never paid any attention to Survivor or its ilk (Big Brother, Boot Camp, and the rest that were popular in the early 2000s), and paid very little attention to American Idol, though I did see a few of the early shows with the gawdawful singers. Similarly, I’ve never seen current continuing prime-time shows like Lost or 24 (or, in the past, LA Law, Dallas, Melrose Place, etc.). My TV watching consists mainly of sports, news, and documentary-type things like Mythbusters.

I know very little music post-1995 or so. I couldn’t name a Britney Spears or Kanye West song if I tried. I only know these people (and other current artists) from what I see in news sources about their personal antics.

Lord of the Rings? Zero interest. I’ve read The Hobbit once, years ago. I’ve never felt the need to read the books or see the movies.

I’m also not terribly interested in IMing, texting, or any popular mode of instant communication that doesn’t involve human speech. I will say that I do like e-mail; I’ve rediscovered the joys of letter-writing with a few correspondents. But I’ve never sent or received a text message, and I don’t even know if I have any sort of IM software on my computer–I’ve never looked.

Last night, I watched the “War Games” episode of Space: 1999.

For the first time.

That’s pretty much what I call new and exciting programming.

Sometimes I glance at the music charts in Entertainment Weekly. I usually recognize maybe a couple of artists in the top 20. I’m not missing much since we seem to be in a prolonged period of one hit wonders. After a few weeks I’ll never see their names again.

Cell phones are probably the biggest thing that’s passed me by. I’ve never owned one. I’m certainly not oblivious–I work for a cell phone company, writing and testing phone-related software. I just hate the blasted things.

Pretty much all sitcoms of the last 20 years have passed by without leaving any mark on me. I just don’t get the appeal–I find them unfunny at best, and painfully obnoxious at worst. I saw about half of one episode of Seinfeld once at a friend’s house, just enough to make me despise the show and every character in it forever. Full disclosure: I mostly watch SciFi Channel, Discovery (yay, Mythbusters!), and Cartoon Network. I watch plenty of crap, it’s just not sitcoms.

Any trend that’s overpromoted, which anymore seems to mean promoted at all. I hate being dragged onto the bandwagon. It’s always overcrowded, noisy, and sticky.

Well, for me, the big appeal of an MP3 player (mine’s actually a Creative Zen 40 Gb) is that I can copy all my music to it and not have to sort through CD’s or constantly put them into or take them out of the player. It’s like having a pocket-sized CD changer. I can listen to it on portable speakers or plug it into an amplifier if I really want home stereo sound. When I buy a new CD, it goes onto my hard drive, then to my Zen, and I throw the CD on a shelf and never pick it up again. I have about 475 CD’s worth of music stored on my Zen and can quickly call up any music by title, artist or album. And I can load as many albums as I want in a playlist and listen to them sequentially. Not much different from having a CD changer all loaded up and with the benefit of portability.

Oh I can add sports. Though even I got the importance when the Red Sox finally won.

Cell phones, too - I reluctantly own a TracFone, and see the use, but I don’t buy anything for it but minutes.

Myspace.