Tag: nostalgia (Page 8 of 11)

I Have No Class

July 30, 2009 / DB

My 20 year high school reunion is this weekend.

Those are some of the scariest words in any language.

When I turned 30, I was excited. I felt like I was finally old enough where people would take me seriously. Turning 30 gave me a new sense of confidence, as if I had finally arrived at true adulthood after years of trying to figure out if I was a grown up or still a kid. Now that 40 is right around the corner, I must admit my thinking is more along the lines of, “Wait…I’m going to be how old?!?!”

I’ve been thinking about high school, and the time that has passed since graduation, a lot recently. We are not heading back to Kansas City this weekend for the reunion. For years I said there was no way I would go. While I enjoyed my ten year reunion, I was disappointed that a lot of people I wanted to see and catch-up with did not attend. I guess I figured I still kept in touch with the people I cared about and had an interest in what they were doing, so why bother going back for a cliched night of asking people how they’re doing, reliving dumb things we did in middle school, etc.?

But that changed over the spring and we tentatively decided to head back. When plans changed, I started to get kind of excited about the event. Some of the people who I was in regular contact with 10 years ago have drifted away, and I was eager to reconnect with them. I realized that for every awkward conversation, there would probably be 2-3 good ones. And the night was sure to be full of crazy stories we could talk about afterwards.

A variety of factors made traveling this weekend extremely difficult, though, and we agreed it wasn’t worth it to fly in on Saturday afternoon and then need to be back at the airport first thing Sunday morning. Again my feelings about the reunion are mixed. Based on some of the Facebook connections I’ve made in recent months, there was a group of people I was very interested to catch-up with. And then there were people I was dreading talking to, the people I didn’t know in high school but suddenly wanted to be my Facebook friends. And there’s a part of me that thinks these awkward moments are an important part of growing up and I’ll be missing something by not being there.

The good news (for my Kansas City readers) is that in place of a rushed trip this weekend, we are working to bring the whole family back in October, while the big sisters are on fall break. We’ll keep you all updated as that gets closer, but we hope to have more time to hang out with everyone then, reintroduce you to M. and C., and introduce you to L. for the first time (for most of you).

I may have to dig into my boxes of cassette tapes and play a few fine selections from 1989 this weekend.

Genius Social Experiment

June 29, 2009 / DB

Give a 13-year-old a Walkman for a week and see what happens.

I remember my first Walkman well. It was actually a knock-off, since those early Walkmans were quite expensive. And it was the obvious knock-off: had some crazy decals on it and, worse, a pull-out antenna for the AM/FM tuner. But I loved that thing.

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

Bubblegum Cards

May 13, 2009 / DB

As my generation approaches middle age, we’re going to have to start answering for some of the things we’re responsible for. Example: ruining baseball cards.

It’s not all our fault. The Baby Boomers, as always, deserve some blame. They were the ones who started the nonsense, paying insane amounts for cards from their youth. And they were the ones who opened baseball card shops back in the 80s and enabled those of us who were kids then.

But we were the first generation to, as kids, get stupid about our cards. At some point we lost the youthful joy of opening a pack, searching through it, and then taking our favorites with us everywhere we went. We were the first kids to stick them in plastic sheets and individual holders. We obsessed about each card’s condition, freaking out if we bent a corner or marred the surface. And we tolerated the late 80s explosion in the price of cards.

The result was we turned it into an adult hobby, one that required a steady income rather than a weekly allowance to fund.

What’s the point? This is an interesting little film about the current state of card collecting. I love the guy that owns the shop. And I couldn’t help but think that if John Rocker was still playing, he would cringe at the thought of these people potentially collecting his cards.

The Baseball Card Movie

Times Change

March 26, 2009 / DB

There’s a slew of stories about the 1979 NCAA title game right now. Linked below is the one that appears in today’s Indy Star. My favorite quote is clipped as well, and it’s one that appears in some form in most of the articles, books, and specials about the game. I like it because it reminds us of how much the world and sports has changed in the past 30 years.

“An old teammate at Denver called me,” Heaton recalled. “He couldn’t believe Larry Bird was a white.”

Earlier this week I linked to the NYT Magazine cover story about a 12-year-old basketball player. If you follow college basketball, chances are you can rattle off the names of a few high school players your favorite team is recruiting. If you’re a serious fan, you probably know a lot more about those recruits than just their names. And when a phenom comes along, we get immediate information overload about the kid.

But 30 years ago, there were people who didn’t know Larry Bird was white until the final regular season game of his senior year. I think that’s kind of awesome.

Expanding on that, when Kentucky’s Jodie Meeks had that crazy scoring run in February, it made me think of when I first started following basketball in the late 70s. Back then it seemed like all the really good teams had one awesome player, and he was all you heard about.* And then there were guys like Meeks, who weren’t on great teams, but poured in points every night. The stars and the scorers all seemed larger than life.

(I lived in southeast Missouri at the time, so Kentucky’s Kyle Macy was the first guy I remember who stood on that pedestal.)

(One of the three over-the-air TV stations in the area was from Paducah, KY, thus the UK coverage.)

Some of that was certainly just being a kid, discovering the game, and having limited access to information. But, a lot of it was also due to the same conditions that hid the fact Larry Bird was white from a significant part of the country. There was one college game on TV each weekend. There was no 24 hour sports news network. There was hardly any live, local TV coverage of college games for that matter. So most likely what your local evening news carried was a list of the local and ranked teams’ scores without any highlights. Same for your paper, which was also unlikely to have pictures attached to the capsules for out-of-town games.

We live in the golden age of sports coverage, where the internet and cable/satellite dishes can let any fan nearly anywhere follow their favorite teams from around the globe. But there’s also less mystery about the games and the players, and through that, perhaps less romanticism and legend involved.

Casey’s Coast to Coast

January 14, 2009 / DB

In which I listen to the music of my youth.

Those of you that follow my Facebook status may have caught that I spent Sunday morning listening to a 25 year old American Top 40 rebroadcast. Our local retro hits station began reairing AT40s from the 80s last fall and, life with a newborn and two preschoolers being what it is, this was my first chance to sit down and actually listen to one of the shows. Forget about forcing the girls to do something other than stare at the Disney Channel on a cold Sunday morning, I was excited to chill out, feed L. a bottle, and listen to my boy Casey Kasim for awhile.

This week’s countdown was from the corresponding week in 1984. I caught tracks 20-1, and since the countdown usually lagged a bit behind actual airplay, that meant I was hearing music that I had been listening to in December 1983. Big month, December 1983. That’s the Christmas I got both an Atari 2600 and a sweet boombox. I spent most of that Christmas vacation sitting in front of my TV, working through my pile of new games (I’m pretty sure most of my time was spent playing Pitfall, Q*Bert, and Pole Position) while listening to my tape collection and the latest hits on Q-104 and ZZ99.

As Casey counted down through Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom,” Pat Benatar’s “Love Is A Battlefield,” Lionel Richie’s double shot of “All Night Long,” and “Running With The Night” at #11 and #10, Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues,” H20’s “Say It Isn’t So,” and Yes’ “Owner Of A Broken Heart,” it was hard not to think of the hours spent playing games while avoiding the bitter cold of that holiday season. I think the only time I left that house that week was to play in a basketball tournament.* Even then, the second I hit the house, I was back in the beanbag, popping in Pitfall, trying to get a high enough score to Polaroid the screen and send it in for the patch or certificate or whatever you got for getting 100,000 points.**

(You think the NFL’s overtime rules are dumb? In the championship game of the tournament, we went to overtime. Still tied after two added minutes, we went to a second overtime, which was sudden freaking death. Sudden death in basketball! I may or may not have missed a shot that would have won the game, the memory is fuzzy, but the other team scored first and we lost. We didn’t lose again until the championship game of our league, in which I played with a broken right hand and couldn’t shoot, pass, dribble.*** So we went 20-2 or something like that, losing only in a tournament title game and our championship game. I was prepared for what KU did in the late 90s, I guess.)

(Pitfall II was a much better game than the original.)

(Some would say I could do none of those basketball skills with a healthy right hand, either.)

The number one song? For the sixth straight week, Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson with “Say Say Say.” Two things about that song. First, Paul got over on Michael there. It was on his Pipes Of Peace album, while Michael got “The Girl Is Mine” for Thriller. Say-cubed is a exponentially better song. Second, was that the last time McCartney was culturally significant for his most recent work, rather than as a relic of the greatest band ever? Sure, he did the theme for “Spies Like Us,” but it’s not like that was a mega hit like Say3. That’s what he gets for hanging with a pedophile, I guess.

Also in the top 10 was Olivia Newton-John’s “Twist Of Fate.” I had totally forgotten about it, although I recognized it when I heard it. Turns out it was the theme from the desperately-cast Two Of A Kind, which brought together O N-J and John Travolta in a lame attempt to recapture the magic of Grease. It got horrible reviews bombed at the box office. “Twist Of Fate” ended up being Olivia’s final top 10 hit after having 13 previous ones. So the same top 10 saw the final hits of two giants of the 70s and early 80s. Wacky wild stuff.

If you think you might hear more about some old AT40s if I listen to them, you are correct.

Best Year Ever

December 31, 2008 / DB

2008 was up there. 1971 was good, at least for me. 1980 was great, with the Miracle on Ice, George Brett chasing .400, and my family’s move to Kansas City. 1992 was fine. 2003 excellent. And 2004 and 2006 important years for extending the B. brand, which we of course did again this year.

2008 also had Aqib Talib and Barack Obama coming up big on January 3.
February brought a family trip to Colorado and news that a third child would be joining the house in October.
In March I saw Barack up close and in person.
April brought Sherron’s steal and three and The Shot, followed by the greatest overtime in the history of overtimes.
In May the ultrasound said girl #3.
In June I hit KC and gained 25 lbs. in three days.
In July the girls and I played outside a lot.
In August it was hot.
September brought preschool and a few hours of peace on Mondays.
October arrived and baby L. did soon thereafter.
In November Hope won and I started writing about basketball each week.
And in December we enjoyed our first holiday season with three.

Pretty freaking good.

I hope yours was fine as well.

Be safe if you’re heading out tonight.

Repeat Plays

September 25, 2008 / DB

Another great list from the Onion AV Club. Naturally, it begs the question, what movies are on my list?

In no particular order:

1) Star Wars. I probably watched this 50 times between 1977 and 1984. I’ve seen it once all the way through since then.

2) Chevy’s Classics. I’ll bundle the classic work of Chevy Chase together, since watching one often meant watching another immediately after. Includes Caddyshack, Vacation, Fletch, Fletch Lives, Spies Like Us, and Three Amigos.*

3) Christmas Vacation. Separate from Chevy’s other work because I still watch it.

4) A Christmas Story. I’ll guess I’ve watched it at least twice a year for the past 20 years.

5) Swingers. The only movie not from my pre-college days that makes the list. I watched it over-and-over for the humor, how it spoke to what I – and my generation – was going through, and of course to try to absorb some of Vince Vaughn’s coolness. And we used to pop a Digiorno’s in the oven, crack open another beer, and pop this in at 2:30 after the bars closed on weekend nights when we were all still single.

Did Chevy have the biggest drop-off in Hollywood history? We think of his work between 1980 and 1989 as brilliant, and everything since as being putrid. Check his filmography, though. There were a number of shitty movies sprinkled in with the classics. It does confirm, however, that he hasn’t done anything remotely interesting since Christmas Vacation.

Kiss It Goodbye

September 23, 2008 / DB

If you didn’t flip by ESPN at any point on Sunday, you may not know that the final baseball game has been played at Yankee Stadium. ESPN devoted approximately 800 hours of programming to this historic event. The Yankees are missing the playoffs this year, so they had to fill their Yanks quota somehow.

Anyway, lots of people shared their memories of Yankees Stadium over the past few days. I’ve never been there, but I have watched a game or two that has been played there. That’s reason enough to share my memories.

As you might expect, these are heavily tinged by the Royals-Yankees rivalry that raged in the late 70s and early 80s. So, in roughly chronological order, here goes.

1) Coming home from school and hearing that George Brett hit three home runs in game three of the 1978 ALCS, but the Royals still managed to lose.

2) Watching the 1978 World Series, the first one I remember.

3) The Thurman Munson game.

4) We moved to Kansas City in July 1980, just in time for a Royals series in New York. Back then, it was rare for an entire series to be on TV, but the trip to the Bronx warranted extra coverage. From July 18 to July 20, the teams played a crazy three-game series that began with a massive George Brett home run into the upper deck. I spent the rest of the summer recreating that home run in our new living room. Check out some of the box scores. Willie Wilson did not suck that weekend.

5) Three months later, Brett hits another upper deck blast that quieted Yankees fans as the Royals finally beat the Yankees in the ALCS.

6) The Pine Tar game. I was visiting my grandparents and watching the game with my grandfather, who hated the Yankees more than he loved the Royals (that’s where I get it from, I guess). We both went ballistic when George Brett cranked a ninth-inning home run off of Goose Gossage, only to see it overturned because of a dumb rule. After calming down, my grandfather took his usual afternoon nap on the couch. When he woke, he looked at me, shook his head, and said, “God damn Billy Martin.”

7) The Jeffrey Maier game. By 1996, I had given up on the Royals and adopted the Baltimore Orioles as my team. This was what I got for picking the O’s to follow for a decade.

8 ) The entire 2001 World Series. Looking back, you can see how we were being manipulated by events around, but not on, the diamond. But the games still stand up as some of the best played. The night of game four, I was suffering from the flu, trying to keep my eyes open so I could watch the game. When Derek Jeter’s winning blast sailed into the stands, I’ll admit I started crying. Unlike others, though, who were crying because of what was going on in the world or because of the greatness of the game, I couldn’t believe I battled the flu until late in the night to watch Derek Freaking Jeter win the game.

9) The Aaron Freaking Boone game. A phenomenal series came down to a monumental managerial blunder and an unforgettable ending. Still hating the Yankees, I couldn’t sleep for hours after this game ended I was so pissed. And it locked me in as a big Red Sox fan for the ’04 season.

10) Game seven of the 2004 ALCS. Games four and five at Fenway are the classics that will stand up over time. But for a Yankee hater, game seven was pure bliss.

First Album Update

September 16, 2008 / DB

Going back to the first album I purchased with my own money for a moment, I’ll admit thinking about Def Leppard’s <em>Pyromania</em> made me a little nostalgic. So I fired up the iTunes Music Store. No <em>Pyromania</em> available there. Jump over to the Amazon MP3 Store. Not there either. So one of the biggest selling albums of the 80s – one of the top 100 selling albums of all-time for that matter – still isn’t available on either of the two biggest, legal, online music stores.

Dumb. I was prepared to drop at last $3 to pick up my three favorite songs off the album

In a mildly related story, I took our Volkswagen in for some maintenance last week. As the guy was writing it up, he noted that the radio was blasting The Scorpions’ “Rock You Like A Hurricane.”

“Nothing like listening to some German rock while you work on a German car,” he said.

I said it was weird, because that was the second time that week I had heard that song.

He struck a lead guitarist pose, working both sets of fingers on an air guitar as if he was Eddie Van Halen. “It’s on one of those Guitar Hero games,” he said as he continued to work the imaginary fret board. “I think it’s had a little resurgence in popularity because of that.”

Interesting news but I appreciated his air guitar example.

Shall We Play A Game?

August 10, 2008 / DB

The Olympics kind of snuck up on me. All kinds of blog-worthy material there, so look for lots of that stuff over the next couple weeks.

For now, I found this on Wired’s website and thought it required sharing. Even if you’re not a Geek, I bet you have a fond place in your heart for WarGames. It’s one of my favorite 80s movies and could have been a turning point in my life. I’m pretty sure I wanted to be Matthew Broderick for a significant portion of 1983. If I had just got that Apple //e I was begging my mom for, I might be coding somewhere on the West Coast right now.

But I didn’t, so I’m not and instead I can share fun things like this with you. Especially interesting is the John Lennon angle.