HIGH-OCTANE MEMORIES

Ten automotive-connected things that make me feel hopelessly nostalgic:

1. Matchbox cars. The first great indulgence of my obsessive streak. I had hundreds of these things and barely played with anything else. And please–no Hot Wheels. Those were for amped-up sugar junkies who loved to crash things into each other. My Matchbox cars obeyed the speed limit and always used their turn signals. My favorite was a white Ford pickup, ‘73 to ‘77 vintage.
2. Giant 2-door cars. Another 70s excess from which I cannot disassociate myself. I’d love to have a big ol’ 2-door hardtop from my youth. Preferably something avocado green or some other cringe-inducing color, and a vinyl top is not optional. I’ll live with 12 MPG and feeling like I’m driving while sitting in a bathtub. Just give me two doors, a hood the size of a king-size mattress, and eight cylinders driving the rear wheels.
3. The opening of ‘Newhart’. OK, so the car (an early-70s Olds Delta 88) is only peripheral to Newhart’s opening credits. What really matters is that they show this car (ostensibly, Dick Lowden’s) cruising gently along rural Vermont roads on what looks like the most perfect day ever, past a white clapboard church and up a village main street, while the last great TV theme Henry Mancini wrote lolls gently in the background. The opening credits may have had little to do with the inspired craziness which followed, but they were both perfectly unforgettable.
4. The smell of old magazines. It’s summer 1996 and I’m temporarily living in North Dakota. I discover a used-book store on the north side of downtown Fargo, a place that never should’ve passed fire inspection. Stuff was stacked from floor to ceiling, seemingly unsorted, but the owner somehow knew where everything was. I spent a good part of my meager intern’s salary buying up all the back issues of car magazines I could get my hands on. One sunny Saturday morning the owner told me, “You know, I’ve got all kinds of that stuff downstairs in the basement. You catch me on the right day, I might let you dig around and see if there’s anything you want.” I never did ask, though, but I’ve got to wonder: What sort of stuff was in that basement? Talk about a missed opportunity.
5. Hatchbacks. When I was a bite-size car enthusiast, I thought hatchbacks were so cool I could never imagine why anybody bought anything else. Why wouldn’t you want to be able to haul big things around in the back of your car? As it turns out, nobody did, because hatchbacks were cheap, and nobody wanted to be seen driving a Poverty Special. So, car companies stopped selling hatchbacks in America. Remember that next time you’re at the big-box store, trying to fit flat-packed furniture into the trunk of a Taurus.
6. 1979 Toyota Celicas. Some people grew up in Ford families, some in Chevy families; I grew up in a Toyota family. One day in first grade, Dad picked us up from school and drove us the six blocks to the Toyota dealer. He took us into the showroom and asked us which car we thought he should buy. My eyes immediately lit on a bittersweet-orange Celica liftback. I couldn’t wait for us to pull up at school in one of those. Turns out Dad had already signed for a leftover ‘78 Corolla four-door, which served us well over 180,000 miles of driving. But I still wish he would’ve gotten the Celica, even though I know now it only looked sporty.
7. Non-remote keyless entry. Some distant elderly relative of mine had this on a mid-70s Lincoln Mark Something-Or-Other. It was naught more than a keypad mounted above the door handle upon which you entered a secret code, thereby unlocking the door. Nobody would want this now, but back then, it was so James Bond.
8. ‘Euro’ cars. Perhaps the only automotive thing from the mid-1980s worth remembering is the brief fashion for flat-black trim and understated paint colors, qualities usually associated with BMWs and Audis. Such fashion trends eventually found their way onto seriously humble machinery like Ford Escorts, Chevy Celebrities, and Dodge 600s. You may not have been able to afford a yuppie wallet-wagon, but at least you could look like you had similar tastes. Even though the Chevy Celebrity Eurosport was misnamed twice over.
9. Conversion vans. These are still around, so somebody must still be buying them. There’s no better way to travel in bourgeoise style. Great quantities of road are best eaten up with your eyes six feet above the highway and your butt planted on a flocked-velour captain’s chair. Some of the better models even had refrigerators and card tables.
10. Chevettes. I never wanted one of these, but when I was in high school, they frequently contained big-haired girls in college sweatshirts and stirrup pants . . . and maybe we’d just better leave it at that.

HIGH CONCEPT LISTING, AGAIN

Or, if you prefer, “I’m wide awake and hungry but the rest of my family is asleep, so here we go.”

Items on Hometown Favorites.com’s “Boy, They Were Good, But . . .” list of discontinued grocery products whose non-production somehow impoverishes my life:

• Banana Beichs
• Brach’s Watermelon Sparkles
• Chex Morning Mix (I used to keep this in my desk, for those mornings when skipping breakfast seemed like a good idea at home, but lost its luster by the time I got to work)
• Chocolite Candy Bar (I’m pretty bitter about this one, too)
• General Mills Buck Wheats Cereal
• Hi-C Peach (yes, I’m still bitter)
• Hostess Chocobliss (grrr . . .)
• Hostess Pudding Pies
• Kelloggs Apple Raisin Crisp (only my favorite breakfast cereal ever)
• Kraft Bacon & Tomato Dressing
• Lifesavers - Tangerine
• Lipton Noodles ‘n Sauce Romanoff (in college, when I felt too flush for ramen noodles, this is what I ate)
• Marathon Bar
• Nice Mice Candy
• Original New York Seltzer
• Pasta Roni Romanoff (I sense an anti-Romanoff conspiracy . . . the Communists have taken over our noodle-makers, it would appear)
• Pepsin Gum
• Regal Crown Sours (especially the cherry ones . . . man, I’m getting angry)
• Seven-Up Gold Soda (like most of the items on this list, I guess I was the only person that liked it)
• Slice Lemon/Lime Soda (note to Pepsi: I may never forgive you for this)
• Willy Wonka Skrunch Bar (IT’S AN OUTRAGE!!!!)

I LOVE THE 90S, BUT . . .

Dean Esmay loved the 90s, and he’s happy to tell you why:

The ’90s were the first decade when all the music and fashion (except for Lenny Kravitz, who by the way was also mondo cool) wasn’t imitative of the ’60s. When suddenly popular music didn’t have to be overproduced and slick. When it was okay to be nasty again. When rap music went from cheap to mainstream. When the Martini made a comeback. When Squirrel Nut Zipper and Brian Setzer reminded us why the big bands were cool after all. When computers went from something spastic geeks loved to something that everyone wanted. When “nigga” went from a epithet to a term of endearment. When women discovered that it was okay to be powerful and self-assured and yet still be feminine and still like guys to be guys. When that the whole “gender difference” thing was something fun rather than something to be railed against. When the Internet became something that everyone wanted to be a part of. When investing in the stock market stopped being something for greedy slick-haired weasels and became (through 401ks) something that everyone could be a part of. When the President was a regular guy everyone could relate to–hell even if you hated him you still related to him.

Sgt. Stryker says the 90s were good to him, but the decade as a whole was pretty reprehensible:

When I think of the 90’s, the impression that immediately comes to mind is: Bitchfest. The decade seemed like one long whine. The first few notes from Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit were the birth cry of that decade, but little did we know that the anger-infused sound of ‘91 would give way to the pussies of Staind and Limp Bizkit at the end of the decade.

And Michele just throws the whole decade under the bus.

I say any decade which brought me my first requited love and my first taste of good bourbon can’t be all bad, but yes, there were some things about the 90s that I just couldn’t stand. Here they are, in the form of a ten-point list, which is one of the things many people can’t stand about this decade.
–> read more

JUST FOR THE HECK OF IT

• Haysi Fantayzee
• Fido Dido
• Original New York Seltzer
• The Activision Decathlon
• Rude Dog
• Like Cola
• “St. Elsewhere”
• Dr. J and Larry Bird One On One
• Choose Your Own Adventure
• Swatch Live

–> read more

I’VE GOT A LITTLE LIST

11 Reasons Not To Be So Nostalgic About Your 1970s Childhood:

1. Tennis shoes were advertised as being able to make “skateboard-style turns” . . . and you believed it.
2. The only Disney movies of note were Robin Hood and The Rescuers . . . and they both stunk to high heaven.
3. Nobody believes your argument about how Atari was superior to the PS2, especially the part about how new-style video games just aren’t violent enough and fail to teach children that the universe is a hostile place.
4. You cried at the end of Bridge to Terabithia, didn’t you?
5. For every good Saturday morning cartoon in the 70s, there were three shows like Devlin, These Are The Days, and The 3 Robonic Stooges.
6. You were there for the first cynical attempt to force soccer down America’s throat.
7. Likewise, you remember when “reality TV” meant stuff like “Real People” and “Battle of the Network Stars”–yet, somehow, you maintain an attitude of smug superiority whenever “Survivor” or “The Real World” is mentioned.
8. You remember what it’s like to get a friction burn from the T-strap of an SST car. And what it feels like to get Bactine splashed on it.
9. While punk and new wave were happening, you were stuck listening to Peter Frampton and the Bay City Rollers.
10. Sometimes, when you close your eyes, you can remember the clingy/itchy feeling you got from all those synthetic fabrics, and how they offered no insulation or pretection from the wind, and the massive, atmosphere-igniting static electricity shocks you got from walking across a shag carpet in your DuPont finest, and the sick, creepy memory of it all causes you to wonder why anybody would ever bring the styles and culture of that hideous decade back, then you realize that this ill-placed nostalgia is not being driven by our own generation but the one after us, and you also wonder if the baby boomers feel this way about what we Gen Xers did to the 60s, then you remember that they didn’t care, because they’d figured out how to make money off our naivete, and doggone if the slippery creeps aren’t doing it again, this time to their own children, which they were too busy to have back in the 70s because you couldn’t bring your kids to the est seminar. Thus, you brace yourself for the inevitable wave of 80s nostalgia, which should be starting any day now, for which you are perfectly positioned, since you still have all your old “Bloom County” books on the bookshelf.
11. Erm . . . no, you traded all those in at the used book store for the first three “Far Side” books sometime around ‘93. Crud.