For The old Farts

[skooter]

Like Me!!!

Doing some email cleaning & ran across this, it's amost scary....


When I was a kid adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up;
what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a Straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But....
Now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.
You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!
I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet, we wanted to know something,we had to go to the damned library and look it up ourselves!
There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter-with a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and f@#* it all up!

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn!
You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the7-11!

Those were your options!
We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting!
If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was it could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't know!!!
You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Play station video games with highresolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked butt!
Your guy was a little square! You had to use your imagination!
And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen
forever! And you could never win, the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died!
Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating!
All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy sat in front of you and you couldn't see you were just screwed!
Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control!
You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on!
You were screwed when it came to channel surfing you had to get off your butt and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network!
You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning... ...D'ya hear what I'm saying!?!
We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards!

We didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove imagine that!
If we wanted popcorn we had to use that stupid jiffy pop and shake it over the stove like an idiot forever.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too
easy. You're spoiled, you guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1970!


Man, How time flies when you're having fun.....

[Trout Machine]

Very Funny I enjoy reading this message.

Yes Skotter but we had lot's more fun play hockey at the local ring or on the street from morning until sun down, fluid comming out of our nose that whe simply wipe with our mitten or leave it till it freeze
We where healthy playing outside all the time, not sitting and watching cartoon or playing those stupid video game.

I have to kick my 10 years and 15 years old out of the house to make sure they take some fresh air, In my day's it was the opposite my parent where looking for me all the time I was never home.

I vote for the good old day's!

[Canadian Bacon]

Wow that was harsh...
But you're right geez there was a time when we had channel 4, 6 and 13....I can still remeber watching my black and white and trying to invent a remote to change the channel while lying there with a broken leg...
Most of the time though as kids we were outside....Street hockey, football ..broke a few windows playin baseball... , tag hind and seek, kick the can, tobbaganing, swimming in the park..man those days were fun. Frankly I think the kids of today are missing out! I tried to stay out of earshot of my mom just so I could stay out a bit longer..this usually resulted in grounding...how do you ground a kid today?
I can also remember in high school taking computers and thinking what a waste of time this is They sure weren't what the are today..no graphics just text! Memories are all good though...I feel like playin street hockey now..

[big-o]

ripe old age of FORTY.......your still a youngster

[slushpuppy]

When I used to program the computer with punch cards (ever drop a stack of those?), a co-worker kept telling me that it was easier than in her day, when you could see the vacuum tubes and had to program it using switches!

Does anyone know where binary code and a bug in your program originated? Raise your hand if you do!

[big-o]

Bacon Wrote:

there was a time when we had channel 4, 6 and 13....I can still remeber watching my black and white

you had three CHANNELS ....you were spoiled....When I was growning up....we watched tv thru our rich niebours window , the Screens were oval...you could hardly see the picture for the poor Quality, equipment they were using back then.....we were only aloud to watch tv a couple of hours a day....if we were good A bottle of Coke was 5 centswe used to wait till they lowered the water in the Rideau river...so we could pick up pop bottles from what used to be the bottom of the river...and we had to clean them...the store would not take back a dirty bottle....we spend days trying to clean the Guck from the bottom of the bottles ...all for 2 cents each ....My Buddy and i used to shovel driveways for a nickle...between the two of us...when we got a allowance...it was 25c every two weeks.....the good old days....to heck with that !!!!!!!!!!!

[muskymuskymusky]

TOO FUNNY

[Canadian Bacon]

Big O I could sit all day and listen to your stories...Next time I hope you can tell the one about when you and Topwater were listening to Babe Ruth hit the winning home run in the world series..or even better the one when you were at the game the last time the Sens won the Stanley cup..

[big-o]

Bacon....it was a great game....the best part was going out with the boys in thier new Model "T"s for a beer after the Game

[Canadian Bacon]

I was also gonna ask you about when the Wright brothers....

[topwater]

Big O I could sit all day and listen to your stories...Next time I hope you can tell the one about when you and Topwater were listening to Babe Ruth hit the winning home run in the world series..or even better the one when you were at the game the last time the Sens won the Stanley cup..

Hey leave me out of this he is my much older brother

[CNs]

Does anyone know where binary code and a bug in your program originated? Raise your hand if you do!

Binary code was used to program the original compuers. Switches were set to on or off (1 or 0)a cammand to add might look like 1001010. These switches were mechanomagnetic you could look at them and see if they were on or off.

The term bug came from the original computer (called an Eniac I believe) that the us military used. A moth flew into the one of these switches holding on one position. When the progrma failed, they found the reason why. A "bug" in the system/program.

Okay I'm freakin old. I did start programming using punch cards. But at least i did not fill em by pencil. I used a punch card machine.

Now where's my dam walker. You kids get off my lawn!

[Moosebunk]

Certainly not an old guy here, although like Bacon I can remember a time when it was only the 3 channels and maybe something on UHF. I had an Atari and Nintendo when they first came out, although for every hour at the TV I probably had 2 at the rink, 2 at the soccor field, 3 on the dirt bike, 2 more on my skateboard and countless more in the woods or fields getting chased around by annoyed bulls.

Kids now have tonnes and tonnes of extras, even in comparison to 15 to 20 years ago. In twenty more years they'll have their own little cyberspaces where there minds can simply do all the exploring and educating while they sleep in until dinner time every day.

But I don't think they have it easier. Nor is it any more difficult. It's just different.

Writing a letter with a pen is nothing. Penpals were common for 7 year olds when I was in grade 2. Ask me then, or expect a child to be prepared to email in those days would have been a whole different ball game. Todays child is learning simple mathematics in SK and JK in some cases, back in my day it was 1 and 2. Not to mention Algebra has long filtered it's way into elementary schools.

Because kids have more these days doesn't make life easier. Because kids aren't partaking in the more physical activities that we associate with youth doesn't mean they are lazy.

The further back one goes the simpler life could have been considred for people. Todays youth are faced with options out the ying-yang, working parents (yeah both of them), greater expectations educationally, multifaceted everythings, multiculturalsim and political correctness, peoples overexaggerated "feelings" to consider and collossal egos, brand names and countless social circles and identities to choose from, trans-fats, low carbs, high proteins, cholesterol... damn these kids today can even be ostracized for what lunch they bring to school or what brand name sneaker went out of fashion one week ago.

Today's kids have to put up with parents that went nuts in the seventies, turned freakishly cool in the eighties, or got angry or bored in the nineties. They've got grandparents that lived during that decade called the fifties that never had anything cool happen, or the sixties where way too much cool crap happened and no matter what the era will never happen again and so lets remind our chidren of that forever.

Today's kids could take a walk in the woods or step down the wrong street and be slayed or raped by gang-banging junkies, PETA punks or worse, your neighbour. No more wedgies and nuggies like it was in the past. That long haired hippy dude now a days isn't packing some "wacky tobacco" to get your little precious stoned either. He'll cut Black Tar Heroin for little Johnny if the price is right, and completely flush life away with one little syringe full.

Where was the road rage years ago??? Nowadays even the kids Crossing Guard can tick someone off enough to have a Ford Taurus run up their backside.

I don't think kids are oblivious to the life around them either. When my 3 year old kicked her little buddy bacause she saw the crap on TV and then called her a "Beeyotch" because she heard my Snoop Dogg album I thought, wholy crap... that's gotta stop, and wow she's paying attention.

And so is every other kid and teen out there. Todays society is no walk in the park for our treasures. I'd maybe have to sway my vote and say the past had it good. Get your chores and homework done and go play outside. That was a sweet deal to me.

[wolfe]

I think I grew up on the waning side of the "carefree" years. I remember as a young girl being out with my friends well after sunset playing "round up" (a combo of tag and hide & seek which is killer fun!) and other games. I would go on long bike rides, often alone, to the school playgrounds or on wooded trails, etc. It was really a rather Tom Sawyerish childhood! No one (at least not many) worried about child abductions or pedophiles. I wouldn't let my little kids be off on their own nowadays.

Staring down 40 now, I feel really lucky to have had an idyllic childhood. I will fondly recall Lost In Space, The Flintstones, UFH/VHF, Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, Battletops, Pong, Atari (Space Invaders!), E.L.O., Boston & the Eagles, The Good Humor Man with the tinny recording of "Meet Me In St. Louis" playing as he drove around the neighborhood....aah, the good "old" days!!

W.

[CNs]

Wow did not realize Fish-hawk.net is really a retirement home.


Maybe we can get some sort ofseniors discount at Paddletales baitcasters etc?