Oooh. I expect great things to come from your kid and his cube.
He may open The portal, that one.
Yep, yep. Keep your eyes open.
I did two sides once. It was purely an accident.
Similar to Wacky Packages I collected The Odd Rods Stickers.
Want to look like a Rubik’s Cube expert without actually being one? Easy. Just grab the cube, start twisting and turning it like you’re defusing a bomb—furious, dramatic, no logic whatsoever—for about 1 minute. Then, stop… slowly raise it up like you’ve just found the Ark of the Covenant, and turn it slowly so everyone can see all sides of the chaotic mess you’ve created. Then say, with complete confidence: “See that pattern? That… is exactly what I was going for—it’s called the Quantum Entanglement Configuration. Most people can’t even see it, but if you do—congratulations!”
I used to be able to solve 'em in about 30 seconds. We just threw out a couple of 4x4x4 variants. That one I never touched as it’s exponentially harder!
My son was into POGS when they came out, after his aunt gave him a set that included holographic discs and a heavy slammer disc. Hmm, I thought to myself, this is just an updated game of marbles.
So this wasn’t me, but I got curious why they were called POGS. They were the lids from bottles of papaya, orange, and guava juice sold in Hawaii. Then I remembered that ten years earlier we were in Maui, and got a bottle of juice out of the vending machine. It was super delicious, what with the combination of … papaya, orange, and guava. “What a wonderful mixture!”, I thought at the time. So yes, I enjoyed POGS, albeit in liquid form, before the fad started.
The Rubik Cube
My dad, genius, engineer in multiple fields, fighter pilot, Entrepeneur, self-made millionaire, inventor and patent holder of many sophisticated devices developed a fixation with the stupid toy. Read books about the tricks to solve it, would mess around with it all the time. I thought to myself, “What the fuck happened to Dad?”
Later on, he got some fixation with the video game Wolfstein (or whatever it was. Shooting Nazis in long hallways)
During the mid 80s or so, I grew a rattail, because, well, everyone else was doing so. My parents were tolerant of it, and I got sick of it after less than a year, because the longer hair irritated my neck especially since when I was playing soccer (I was on a team until junior high).
I had a few garbage pail kid cards, hand-me-downs from friends who were avid collectors, and I enjoyed being grossed out by them but not enough to buy any on my own.
Had a Trapper Keeper, and they were good organizers for the time.
Mall bangs, baby!
Actually paired mine with a mullet at times. This style looks a lot like what I had in my senior yearbook picture.
I had what we’d today call a mullet. Us Catholic boys were held to short hair standards because Jesus so I couldn’t let it get too long. I definitely remember being ‘spoken to,’ basically ordered to get a haircut by teachers in high school.
We 4 kids got Rubik’s Cubes in our Christmas stockings one year. None of us had much success figuring them out. The next day, a cousin came to visit picked one up and solved it in about 20 seconds. Then he proceeded to do tricks with it! It was embarrassing!
At my private boarding high school, our stoner clique felt we were giving a big punk rock middle finger to the preppies by cutting off the sleeves of Izod and other polo shirts. We would buy them from second hand stores. One guy would cut out the alligator and draw one with a marker on his exposed chest.
When the fad was new, we bought a Rubik’s cube for my wife’s seven year old brother. He toyed with it for about 15 minutes, then disappeared into the next room and came back with it “solved”. He had peeled off the stickers and rearranged them. He was always an impatient incurious sort.
Said what?
I used to collect those when I was a kid. My mom once bought me a whole box of the packages, which was nearly unheard of back then. I still have some of the stickers.
Fun fact: one of the artists for the early Wacky Packages was the same guy who drew the graphic novel “Maus” (about the Holocost) - Art Spiegelman.
I remember, and I loved them!
I saw someone mention the jelly shoes, yup, I had them. I also had a lot of leg warmers.
Talk about rising through the ranks. He may have written the best graphic novel ever made.
I remember Garbage Pail Kids and found them absolutely disgusting.
A guy I knew was fooling around with a Rubik’s Cube before the wrasslin’ matches; legendary bad guy Ox Baker got it and solved it in about a minute.
A bit of a nitpick. I never understood why Izod Lacost shirts were called alligator shirts, Jean Rene Lacoste’s nickname was the crocodile, not the alligator. It isn’t like one can tell which it is on the shirt.
That was Op-Yop.