the tree of woe

I blame my poor eating habits on the lessons I learned from Hungry Hungry Hippos as a child.

I spent a lot of time playing Connect Four in my youth. I found the following video on the Internets.

Notice how at the beginning of this commercial, the young boy wins easily. The girl obviously has no idea how to play. Ray Charles, blindfolded and in a dense fog could have seen that coming a mile away.

Yet in the second game, she outwits him easily. The boy declares, “Pretty sneaky, sis.” It’s something he’ll say again later in life when he finds out he was written out of their parent’s will, thanks to his Machiavelli of a sister.

From what I understand, gummi bears “the candy” came about in the fifties, and gummi bears “the TV show” started in ‘89 or somewhere thereabouts. I guess someone was just sitting around one day, trying the think of an idea for a new show, just eating some gummi bears, and…

“You know, these gummi bears are kinda cute. I could see them being dashing. Daring, even. Perhaps even courageous and caring. Faithful. Friendly. I wonder if they have any stories to share…”

Then he proceeded to crank out approximately  150 scripts where the gummi bears saved the day by bouncing around, as if that ever solved anything.

Edit: This may jog some memories.

I don’t have a very good long term memory. I remember only about 3 things about my life before the age of 14. Fortunately, one of those three things is slap bracelets. If you are the correct age, you remember the slap bracelets. Actually, you don’t just remember them. You remember the overwhelming obsession with them.

See, kids, slap bracelets were one of the last fads in the era known as “the era of lame fads.” This was when the only kid on the planet with a cell phone was Zach Morris, and nobody had heard of the Internet yet. As you can imagine, we had a lot of free time. One of the things we apparently chose to do with that free time was to take a razor sharp piece of metal, cover it with a very thin piece of cloth, and repeatedly strike ourselves with it, preferably on the underside of our fragile, tender wrists. For some unknown reason, this was deemed as “unsafe,” and our constitutional right to assult ourselves with small, neon colored implements was denied. I remember the outcry, but what could we do? The schools banned them, the parents quickly followed suit. I’m pretty sure Super Nintendo came out a few weeks later, so that distracted us fairly well. Slap bracelets faded into oblivion as quickly as they arose, never to be seen again.

Or did they?

I found a website that actually sells slap bracelets. Imagine my shock. To quote the website,

Slap bracelets are the coolest thing! They’re fashionable, fun and can make a great addition to your custom goody bags!

That’s right! Slap bracelets are the perfect fashion accessory to go with your Hammer pants! Just be careful not to spill your Crystal Pepsi when you slap on the fun! Slap Bracelets: The official shiny object of Double Dare! All joking aside, I will admit that recently, my custom goody bags have been lacking a certain something.

There were several ways that the social hierarchy was established when I was a kid. In the summer, one method was through the usage and ownership of Super Soakers. The ranking, from bottom to top, was as follows.

• No Super Soaker: You were ridiculed, and not to be included in epic water battles. Many people had more than one super soaker, and it wasn’t uncommon to be able to borrow a SS50, thereby saving face.
• SS50: This was the lowest grade of super soaker, but was still undeniably a super soaker, and you were granted access into “the club.” You were cool, but barely.
• SS100: A high grade super soaker. If you owned this, you were among the elite. This super soaker was desirable due to the interesting design and, having a larger bulk, was also more useful to use as a blunt object if necessary.
• SS200 and up: To alter a quote, “There’s nothing so like a General on a battlefield as a twelve year old with two gallons of water strapped to his back.” This was the ultimate Super Soaker, but it did have drawbacks. Chiefly, they rendered you immobile, as it’s hard to run, or even walk with a tank of water hanging from your shoulders. Kids with these guns tended to stay put near the middle of the battlefield, whirling around in place.

I was lucky enough to own a SS100. The importance of these water guns to the social standing of a child in the nineties cannot be overstated. Like a peacock’s feathers, or Apple products in Berkeley, Super Soakers publicly demonstrated your dominance over the rest of the herd.