10 Things that used to be Optional/Required

Kudos to my younger and smarter brother for the idea on this one.  I've noticed that there are several things in life that used to be something that you did if the situation warranted it.  Discretion based activities.  For some reason these activities have become mandatory.  Other activities used to be required, but are now optional.  I think you'll get what I mean.

10. Now Required - Shirt and shoes - Well, I guess this is obvious.  Apparently there was no need to wear these items into the store historically because later on, signs stating that these clothing items became required were all the rage in the late 60's 70's.  Hmmm...seems like a lot of crappy stuff happened around then.

9. Now Optional - Dress up at work - Thank goodness.  that whole 'dress for success' thing was such a boondoggle.  just a way to keep suit sellers in business.  I've always said 'People trying to rip you off come in suits'.  Now, if you are keeping most of your body covered and you have a decent sense of hygiene, you're in.  Certain professions still require a suit, but the civilized world has devolved to business casual thanks. Many of those professions include Lawyer (if you are paying THAT much, he'd better at least look nice), Timeshare Sales (see my statement above about who is trying to rip you off), People managed by people that think suits are important but don't really know why.

8. Now Required- Fries - I remember just getting a burger.  no drink, no fries, no nothing else.  Just a burger.  They might ask 'would you like fries with that?'  and I'd say hmmm...yes please.  or the alternative.  Now, the question is 'Would you like that _______ Sized?' Where the blank is King, Super, Biggie, Gargantuan, Behemoth.  Of course the problem is, if you do the math on it, you aren't really saving much money, just calories.  I know they aren't really required, but it just seems like you have to ask to get them taken off the list.

7. Now Optional - Who asks who to a dance.  I've only noticed this because of my boys.  Allow me to put my old man voice on...Back in my day...a boy asked a girl out to the hoe down or the local cotillion.  On special occasions the girl may ask the boy on a dance called sadie hawkins when everything is topsy turvy. It seems that now dances lean in the favor of the boy being asked by the girl.  There are several differences between boys and girls but one of the differences that is not obvious is that given the chance to do nothing, most boys are perfectly willing to do just that.  Back when you had social norms enforcing actual movement on behalf of the boy, things worked out fairly evenly.  Now Guys just hang around perfectly willing to not do anything.  It may be the end of the species.

6. Now Required- Your lack of Privacy - Well this isn't completely true, but thanks to the Internet, events in your life were once optionally publicized.  Now, they are all over the place for everyone to see.  For a while we will try to protect our privacy as best we can, but new generations will not really know what privacy is like because they won't have any unless they go camping with no electronics.  It's strange for me to think of my kids as the last generation that had privacy of any sort.

5. Now Required - All of the points of any given legislation.  Those that know me know I lean right.  I'm afraid that I can't side with a lot of the things my brothers on the right are gunning for these days.  No compromise is a great way to get nothing done.  On the other hand, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.  I've never pictured the government to be good at much more than taking my money and doing things I probably don't approve of with it; if I knew what they were doing.  So in that respect they are no different than teenagers.  It just seems that if you can get 80% of what you want by giving up 20% of what you'd like, that's a good deal.

4. Now Optional - Hats.  Not those goofy knit wierdo hats you see the young jacka$$ crowd sporting.  But a fine fedora.  Time was that all men wore a fedora, even the bums.  They also dressed in suits and pants, not jeans and t-shirts.  I'm quite glad that I didn't find myself in that time.  I might have exploded.  This really is different than the dress up at work mentioned above.  I just realized that dressing up wasn't really just for work, but for every day sit around clothes as well.  Glad that's over.

3. Now Required- Standing Ovation - I'm not sure what happened, but Standing O's were reserved strictly for really really good performances.  Otherwise, you got some applause and off the stage with you.  Now, if you aren't giving up a Standing O(vation), you are likely some kind of ultra-right wing arts hating John Bircher.

 

2. Now Optional - Handshakes - Time was a mans word was his bond.  That bond was sealed by his handshake.  Now it seems that handshakes are really the worlds largest propagator of disease.  How sad is this?  The upcoming London Olympics are trying to abolish the good will handshake all together to prevent the spread of zombie bacteria.  Thank goodness, who needs Olympic Zombies.

1. Now Required- Food Server Tip - I tend to think that the tip was instituted to ensure good service from a service provider.  Now a tip is something that is so non-optional that they include it on the tab if there is a group of you and sometimes if it's just you and the meal is expensive.  Once you start including the tip on the tab, it's time to eliminate tips all together.  Just pay your servers more and increase the bill so when your server sucks we can find another way to show our disdain.


The future is ours, and our future resumes in 15 days.  Thanks for reading!

10 of the worst things to come out of the 70's

We live in wonderful times.  We have availability of technology at our fingertips for an affordable price, we have so much entertainment we literally don't have time to watch or do all of the things that divert us from our work.  All that we are now has come from what once was.  Both the good and the bad.  Well, the 70's were a piece of the past.  I'm not sure what we gained from the 70's but I can sure remember what we left behind!

10.  Disco - We should get this one out of the way right off the bat.  Disco was one of the hallmarks of the 70's  Movies were made about it,  Clothing was designed around it.  It was a whole other way of life.  The problem is that Disco sucked.  It says so on multiple t-shirts and I believe most things I read on t-shirts.

9.    Pet Rocks - In the early west there was such a thing as Snake Oil.  Snake oil was supposed to cure you of myriad ailments.  Later there were other devices created that claimed all kinds of spectacular results from hair growth to muscle physique.  The pet rock on the other hand had no pretense (except that it was a 'pet')  It was the first success of the 70's that proved that the American populous is willing to buy nearly anything and you don't even need a claim!  Ugh.  Now of course there are countless worthless things that we are probably better off without.  Thank goodness most of those things are on the Internet.

8.  Video Games - The Magnavox Oddessy was born in the 70's If you have never heard of it or seen it, it was the first. It was not anywhere like the games we enjoy today, think of the cave paintings being the pre-cursor to Davinci.   The first game system consisted of white blocks on a screen.  How many colors?  1.  Was it fun?  Like disneyland in a box.  Then came PONG also of the 70's.  Sounds too?!?  sweet!  Space invaders?  OOOOHh yeah.  The march goes on and on.  So were I guess they aren't bad at all really, but they are a productivity killer.

7.  Groovy - This term really only meant anything in the 70's.  It was the hip word for COOL.  It was groovy.  If things are good, they are groovy.  Now groovy means something that is kind of retro-cool, or something with a lot of grooves in it.  There was a time when people tried to revive Groovy into popularity.  It really only came back as goofy.  Optimally it's a dumb word only useful for friends with words.

6.  Astrology - No, this really wasn't born in the 70's, but it feels like it was.  The idea that the position of the Sun, the moon and the stars when you are born will determine not only what kind of person you are, but every event of your life was really attractive around this time.  Ever heard the hippy song 'Age of Aquarius'?  Well, it was huge back then.  The obvious question is of course does everyone born on the planet at the same time have the same future?  Pish posh, of COURSE not!  Everyone is born at a different location on the earth so they would have different destinies than other people born at exactly the same time.   Astrology has been around so long it has to be valid right?  So it wasn't born in the 70's, but it was the 70's that spawned the now timeless pickup line 'What's your sign?'

5. Johnny Knoxville - If you don't know who this is, he is the star of a show that was aired on MTV that used fame aspiring men to do stupid stunts designed to at least humiliate the participants if not harm them.  Young Mr. Knoxville was born in 1971 and while I don't bear any personal animus towards the individual, I feel like showing people glamorizing goofy self destructive behavior is just the perfect thing to come out of the 70's

4. Movies - Naturally movies did not originate from the 70's, but the BLOCKBUSTER did.  JAWS was the first movie in my recollection that had such a huge following and hype that followed it all summer.  Hollywood decided what bit of celluloid would be sufficient for the public at large and they would push it in every way possible.  Originally the blockbuster happened during the summer but now we have blockbusters any time of year (pretty much).

3. Keep on Truckin - Another term that lived and died in the 70's.  Usually accompanied by a person shown from the perspective of the ground with a ridiculously large foot stepping out as though they are really happy to get where they are going.  When I was a kid in the 70's I thought it meant keep on driving trucks.  I had no idea that truckin meant...It took till this blog for me to find out.  Keep on truckin was a cartoon strip that was very popular at the time but has since fallen into obscurity.  Robert Crumb was the creator.  It was a visual take on the song 'Truckin my blues away'.  Which I've never heard.

2. CB Radio -  Breaker Breaker 19.  What's yer handle c'mon? Citizens band had been around longer than the 70's BUT it was immortalized in the 70's with C.W. McAll's Hit song CONVOY.  My whole school bus would go quiet when that song would come on.  Those that knew the lyrics would put on their best non-descript trucker drawl and start talking along.  In my mind, this was the first RAP music I had ever heard.  There was no singing.  It was just CW telling his story about how he and Pig-Pen (the driver of another truck carrying pigs) evaded Smokey (the police) and went coast to coast delivering their payloads.  Trucker fever was alive and well in the 70's.  I don't know wether they were truckin when they did this or not.

1. Peace baby - The peace sign.  I always thought it looked like a birds foot in a circle, sometimes not.  It was made popular by Picasso.  Make love not war.  That was the idea.  The hippys were the long lost fore-fathers of the kids in the occupy movement and the peace sign with the accompanied index and middle finger sticking up in the air was their sign.  I remember seeing the peace symbol everywhere.  it was in graffiti, it was on stickers, it was in cartoons, it was everywhere.  Most kids now figure the peace sign to be something that an anime character will flash so everyone can see how cute they are.

Live in the now man!  See ya in another 15!  Thanks for reading...tell your friends!

10 Games

I have a brother.  My only sibling in fact.  He was the younger making me the eldest.  We grew up in a house of traditional games.  When I say traditional I mean there were certain family games we played and that was pretty much it.  With the advent of computers gaming became more prevalent and yet less personal.  This persists today.  Games on computers and to a lesser extent consoles are a single player experience.  In my own family we have a couple of games that we don't mind playing, but by and large we are not a game playing family.  My brother in contrast has a game collection that would make Milton Bradley green with envy. 

This list is dedicated to him and his family.  These are the games I remember from my youth, it is not by any means all of them.  I will probably make a part 2 to this list because as I write it, I recall the other games we played.  I don't think I've played one of them in over 10 years with the exception of electronic versions.

10 - Sorry - I'll say sorry.  There was nothing to say BUT sorry about this hopped up version of Parcheesi.  Except you got to say 'SORRY' in a very obnoxious ironic voice as you put your opponent's pawns back home.  This game is very similar to Trouble (with pop-o-matic) but not quite as gimmicky.  Get your pawns home.  Funny thing, that's the point of 80% of games made around or before 1970.  Get your pawns home.  Sorry used a deck of cards instead of the standard dice.  That part was clever.  Unfortunately those cards would soon be so well known that everyone knew when you got the 4 spaces back card because it had that one bend in the corner.  4 players, but usually 3.  2 was not really much fun, but it was tried.

9 - Gnip Gnop - This game is a soft spot in my heart because it's what we started calling Egg-Nog.  The game involved a longish clear housing that held 6 ping pong balls and 3 large buttons on each side.  the object was to smack your buttons sending your pingpong balls through hoops in the middle of the game to your opponents side.  When you see the commercial, you'll get the idea.  The problem is, commercials of games like this are like watching Kung Fu movies that make you think fighting is a ballet of sorts.  You think the game is going to be fairly slow paced and well organized, but it just turns into a frenzy of pounding buttons until you break one.  Then the game is over.  You could salvage the pingpong balls at least.  Rats.

8 - Mousetrap - This game was based on the ever famous Rube Goldberg devices.  The idea to 'build a better mousetrap' that sprung up before world war 1.  The phrase itself is credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he never actually wrote it.  He wrote something similar and that was close enough.  I could only hope one of my quotes becomes similarly famous.  This game involved putting together the pieces of a mousetrap that would then be sprung to catch the mice.  This game, unlike the others, was rarely played and was only put together for the gimmick.  Just because you put it together didn't mean it was going to work right.  there were a LOT of moving parts.  Lots of things to lose but really a terrific game to get you building your own mousetraps.

7 - Dark Tower - This game in it's entirety goes for over 100$ on ebay.  It was a marvel that was played on a board with an electronic tower.  The tower would tell you the outcome of your moves based on what you keyed into the bubble pad.  This was one of the more jealous moments I had as a youth as this game was given to my Brother.  Yes I got to play it, but I wanted badly to be it's master.  It was the DARK TOWER.  You can play this game online with all the original noises.  without the electronic features, the game was ok, but with the COMPUTER brain, it was amazing.








6 - Battleship - YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP!  Every kid that got battleship would loudly proclaim those words if his battleship was sunk the first time they got to play just so they could do it like the TV commercial.  Seems like war like games were the cool ones to have.  After all, there was the cold war and all the prior world wars and conflicts,  so what better way to play sea wolf than to hide your ships and try to sink those of your opponent?  This one could be duplicated on any kind of graph paper, but the real ships and the little pegs were the only way to play it.  Everyone tries the strategy of putting all your ships together to confuse your opponent.  That's a bad strategy.  Don't do it.  You'll lose.  Really.

5 - Life - The game of life was the first attempt to describe how life might be to a kid.  You start out either going to college or going straight to your career and then you navigate through an interesting field of paths and spaces simulating several of life's maladies.  Each turn was a spin of a brightly colored wheel.  You got kids and a spouse and you drove your car throughout life where you ended up in millionaire acres or the poor house.  There wasn't much strategy here except you could place side bets with your money on the wheel and win extra cash.  If you were falling behind, this was a good way to make sure you fell even further behind.  Are we learning anything yet?

4 - Monopoly - The Depression era grand daddy of them all!  Monopoly.  Or as I called it Monotony (I actually think my parents coined that phrase along with many others).  The object was to become as similar to Donald Trump as humanly possible such that by the end of the game the two of you are indistinguishable.  Buy and sell, go to jail (white collar crimes of course) and free parking.  We played this game a LOT.  Not sure why, I guess it must have been fun, but it was a long drawn out game.  For those of you that don't know it, the properties in monopoly are named after actual streets in Atlantic City.  You can visit them all.  I'm not sure I'd recommend it, Atlantic City is a hole, unless you are staying only in a casino.  Then it's still a hole, but everything is temperature controlled.
 

3 - Chess - We had chess boards.  I liked to look at chess pieces.  There was a special wooden chess set that we used to play with that was hand built.  For a while I liked chess.  Then I found out that it was such an organized event of a game that there were people that had entire strategies beginning to end planned.  My brain was not capable or interested in this kind of memorization.  I had a hard enough time with the 7's times tables.  I played from time to time.  But I lost more often than not.  I'm not a particularly gracious loser.  So I don't bother with this game anymore.  Because I'm really not good at it at all.

2 - Magnavox Odyssey- Wait a minute Mark, why is this thing here.  We excluded video games right?  Yes we did, but this was the Magnavox Odyssey.  This game system tried desperately to merge traditional board games and video displays that would turn your expensive console TV into a piece of furniture with a cabinet that had no real purpose.  You see, that game would burn images into the TV so fast that you could see the little Pong (came MUCH later) dot burned into the phosphors in the screen.  The game wasn't a game so much as it was 2 paddles 3 dots tall and a 'ball' 1 dot.  The 'graphics' were static video overlays that you unrolled and placed onto the screen.  Classic.  The Odyssey game in question was called BRAIN WAVE.  It was a very difficult game to understand but it was a part of a magical Christmas in Arkansas that I still remember fondly to this day.  Most of the game was played on the board with some aspects played on the tv with boxy controllers that looked like miniature toasters.  It was a great game.

1 - Memory - I think as a family we played this game more than any other.  Acquired during the same magical Christmas in Arkansas, simple blue cards that had pairs of pictures were put face down on the table and in turn you open 2 cards to see if you have a match.  If not, then the next player opens two cards and tries for a match.  If you got a match, you get another turn.  Sounds boring, but it was not.  it was a great game. During the many plays of the game we ended up making nick names for all of the cards because they had no captions.  Runaway Girl comes to mind.  Mom was the best at this game.







This post meant a lot to me.  I hope it was entertaining.  Tell your friends!

Top 10 TV Gameshows.

I'm 10 years old. The alarm goes off. Another day at the conformity factory called school. But wait. I feel a tickle in my throat. Not enough to really be a bother, but still. 'MOM!' After a quick check of the old thermometer, mom determines that I must stay home from school. SWEET! an unscheduled day off! I get to watch all the glorious TV that I miss learning things about dangling participles and longish division. Yes I would watch anything and everything, except for those stupid mushy soap operas. Ick. Game shows on the other hand. TV nirvana. The human drama. The highs. The lows. The victorious. The defeated. It was all there in a 1/2 hour block. Watching commercials about geritol was a small price to pay.

10. The Price is Right. - Yes, the Grandaddy. This show has been on for roughly EVER. Bob Barker was fresh off of his stint as the singer of the Miss America Theme song as well as the quick witted host of Truth or Consequences and decided to make his mark on the world at this harvest gold and green setted marvel. If you have been living under a rock, TPIR was a show based on estimating a price of common or semi-common household items. 4 contestants start out bidding on an item and the person that comes the closest (without going over!) to the RETAIL price of that item would get to go up on stage and participate in another pricing game. At this point if you told the 4 contestants that the first one to shiv a fellow contestant in the back would get to go up on stage, there would be no time elapsed before someone was fitted for a chalk outline. Many and varied are the pricing games at the stage level where the prizes range in value from 2000 to 25000$. Once in a great while some uber prize would show itself, but not very often. From there the winning contestants of each 1/2 hour would spin the BIG wheel (twice the height of a man, from what I understand it's as impressive as it looks on TV) and the contestant that wins the spin off, will bid on the final showcase. The final showcase will range in value from the low teens to the upper 60's in value. This show was a staple of my child hood and when I stay home from work, I STILL watch it. Now the host is comedian Drew Carey. I like his addition to the show a lot, I think he was a great replacement and I hope he continues in the position for a long time.

9. Family Feud - 100 people were asked the following question: Name a fruit that goes bad quickly. This is a show that has lasted a lot longer than anybody would have thought. The show ended the career of Richard Dawson. It is rumored that Richard Dawson didn't have a dry day on that show (and no, Depends would not have helped). This game show featured families or groups of 5 people that would each in turn individually answer the questions posed by the the very lip friendly Dawson. The truth is Richard Dawson was probably the best host of the show and I believe that this show got him the spot on the Arnold Schwartzenegger movie THE RUNNING MAN. Nobody won a lot of money on that show, but it seemed like people enjoyed the group dynamic of the program and trying to guess what 100 people think.

8. JOKERS WILD - This was one that I loved in my youth. Probably due to my life long infatuation with gambling. What a great show. Trivia joins together with Slot machines in this unforgettable combination of fun. From 1972 to 1991 contestants would pull the slots and get combinations on the 3 reels. Depending on what would show up, they would ask for the subject for an amount of money that equaled the matching windows on the slot. of course JOKERS are wild and there were plenty of em! To this day I can hear in my minds ear...JOKER...JOKER...Worlds of science. This slot was very similar to Vegas slot machines in that they teased you with 2 Jokers and then gave you a crappy subject in the last window. it was awesome. The slot machine was simulated with 3 carousel style slide projectors that was randomly loaded with jokers and subjects in a pre determined distribution. The projectors spun and landed where they would so it was a fairly random, fairly ingenious method of playing the game. At the end of the show in the Bonus level, the winning player would spin against the DEVIL. Each spin you would take would have money amounts or the Devil. You kept going until you racked up 1000$ or the Devil wiped you out. If we didn't like the contestant on the show, me and my brother would yell out 'devil devil DEVIL!' in hopes that our long distance desires would somehow affect this pre-taped show. This show was the other show I would not miss in my infirmed state if I did, then I should have been taken to a doctor because I was really sick.

7. Jeopardy - This show had a lot of following in it's first incarnation and when it returned, it became a staple of the serious trivia buff. The people that got on this show were phd's and other Illuminati. They would answer questions in various categories and look smarter or dumber based on the correctness of their answers. This game was particularly mean to the stupid because if you missed your question, instead of adding to your score, the value of your question was taken away. Mean Mean Mean. Art Fleming started this show but Alex Trebek hosted the more current incarnation. I was never a big fan of this show. Primarily because I just wasn't smart enough to rank. But more because Alex Trebek always gave you the answers in such a condescending tone that it drove me nuts. We already know that Canadians think they are smarter than anyone else, why do we need Trebek to emphasize it. His Quebeqois pronunciation of all things French drove me nuts. He didn't bother pronouncing anything else correctly, just his French. I get the feeling that Trebek was kicked out of Canada for the same attitude. It was as if he knew the answer to all of the questions and was so disappointed that you didn't know such a simple answer. Don't even get me started on Mr. Big Trivia/No Life. This is what I tell myself about someone I don't know because I am so Jealous. Not of his trivial knowledge, but of his million plus dollars from appearing on MULTIPLE game shows. Stupid Ken Jennings...grrrr.

6. Wheel Of Fortune - This was the polar opposite of Jeopardy. This game needed only a modicum of intelligence in order to play and could be won by nearly anyone. People spun the 'wheel' and guessed letters in hangman like phrases until someone solved the puzzle. Hosted by Pat Sajak and Vanna White this show was on for a very long time, but I really loved it's early incarnation. Instead of getting the money you earned on the show you had to 'shop' with the money in their showroom floor of prizes. everything had a pricetag and it was very much like watching a kid at an arcade try to decide what prize to get with all of his game tickets. The consistent fixture in the prize pool was a porcelan dalmation that sat in the corner. I don't believe anyone ever bought the prize and after a few seasons they just gave the contestants money to save time and face with their lame shopping.

5. Card Sharks! - Personal favorite. Once again, my interest in gambling takes over as I watch 2 contestants with 2 decks of cards play Acey Deucy for cash and prizes. Actually it was less than Acey Deucy, maybe just Deucy. A card was given to you and you had to guess whether the next card would be higher or lower. If you could do it 5 times then you won the round and could go on to do the same thing in a bonus round. One of the more interesting aspects of this game was that it was questions they would ask. They all took the form of '100 people were surveyed and asked the following question: Have you ever cheated on your taxes?' The first contestant would then give their guess as to the answer and the second contestant would then guess weather the answer was higher or lower than the first contestants answer. Pretty interesting. I remember this game show mostly because the set was so cheap you could see the whole thing shaking like an earthquake every time someone was jumping up and down with a win.

4. Password/20,000$ Pyramid - I was never a huge fan of this game in my youth, but when I got older I became more interested in it. Both games are about the same. A Celebrity guest and a contestant team up and try to win bucks. They will take turns giving or receiving clues and try to guess the word or phrase of the clue giver. Lots and Lots and Lots of home versions of this game have been made and played. It usually ends in a phrase along the lines of 'awwwww I knew THAT, why didn't you say _____' . Dick Clark hosted the Pyramid. It was made a little more interesting by the funny word categories. The phrases for the categories always misled you into what the category was. 'I'd like 'What's that sonny? you'll have to speak up' Dick Clark: These are words that old folks know nothing about' Password didn't really have anything like that, but Password is making a comeback this year and you can play MILLION dollar password.




3. Hollywood Squares - 2 contestants play tic-tac-toe but in order to score your X or O, you had to decide whether or not the answer the celebrity is giving is correct or wrong. The questions would of course allow the celebrity to make a clever quip about the question before giving the actual answer. The Stars in the squares were usually either promoting something they were involved with, or they were just out of work and were cashing in on their star status. Paul Lynde was in the center square the longest I could remember. This game show was hosted by Peter Marshal who always reminded me of Batman.








2. Who wants to be a Millionaire? - Me Me ME! I do! Multiple choice? 3 life lines? How much easier are they gonna make this? Wait a minute, they are asking questions that they would reject on Jeopardy at the top end? They should have called the show 'Who wants to win 32000$' because that's where most people stopped. as you answer questions the values roughly double. This follows the OLD gameshow format of the 64000 dollar question. same idea. Every time you answer a question, the reward for answering the next question doubles. So what makes Millionaire different? It was the FIRST American gameshow to promise 1 MILLION dollars. This is the mental finish line for the average person for living for a lifetime without having to work. This show was originally Brittish and we took it, but that happens a LOT in entertainment. Regis Philbin originally hosted this show, he was funny and personable. it is now hosted by Merideth Rivera equally personable and fun to watch. Now of coure lots of gameshows promise lots o cash to get people to watch but Millionaire was the first.

1. Whammy - On the other end of the game show spectrum was WHAMMY or as it was really named, Press Your Luck. A game that had a magical board with random flashing lights that contestants would stop and the board would award the contestant prizes, cash or a dreaded WHAMMY. The chant to this game was of course 'no wammy, no wammy no wammy (SLAM)' and eventually someone would catch the wammy. When you would get the Whammy, a little devil shaped cartoon character would come and destroy your money in any of several interesting ways. they would blow it up, they would eat it, they would run it over in a whammy car. All very entertaining. But not to one individual. One guy figured out the random whammy board and realized that it wasn't so random after all. He had beaten the system. The makers of Press your Luck decided to let him keep the 100+ thousand dollars he had racked up because they decided that figuring out the flaw was not cheating. Had it been Vegas, they WOULD have considered it cheating and would have beat the crap out of him.

Yes, I know there were a lot of shows I didn't include. So many that once again, I could go into another top 10. And perhaps I will. I can ALWAYS use new material.

As always, thanks for reading and tell your friends!

top 10 Breakfast Cereals

Yum breakfast. Who doesn't like the sound of crackling bacon and eggs. The pop of toast out of the toaster, the fresh squeezed OJ, a short stack of flapjacks or french toast. Yeah, right. You get this breakfast on very few occasions. Most breakfasts are based on the good old American breakfast cereal. Whole grain presweetened goodness. Over the course of my lifetime I've had several favorite breakfast cereals. They have all been good and they have all had a spot on my pantry shelf. This top ten like my others only counts to ten because then I know where to stop not because I am ranking them by any preferential means. There are so many in fact that i'm thinking of making this a 2 part-er because the other cereals I'm leaving out are really just as important. We'll see how this one takes.

10. King Vitamin - King vitamin makes the list for me because I sent away for a King vitamin magic kit. It looked like it would be really cool. That 4-6 weeks that you need for anything to be sent to you is really more of a guideline than anything else. If you don't know King Vitamin, he's a clever guy at first he was a real actor in a white and purple furry mantle and crown. Then he changed into a goofy cartoon character. His cereal tastes like every other golden grain cereal out there, which tastes like Captain Crunch.











9. Coco Roos - coco for coco-puffs? The devil you say. The fine people at Malt-O-Meal got it right. Sell twice as much cereal in large bags with goofy nondescript mascots and a LOT cheaper than the Post/GeneralMills/Kellogg/Quaker folks and you'll have yourself a winner. Coco Roos was one of these winners. Lots more chocolaty goodness and sugar than it's card board clad counterpart, Coco Roos had many repeat appearances in my breakfast bowl before I moved on. It was good and cheap and good (yes I did mention good twice). The milk at the end was every bit as chocolaty as the milk at the resolution of the coco-puffs, but I didn't have to pay for that miserable sonny and his coo coo antics. Runners up in this department would be Count Chocula as well as Chocolate Donutz








8. CrunchBerry Crunch - All crunchberrys. I remember getting a box or two of Captain Crunch with crunchberry and once it was opened it was more like having a bowl of regular Captain Crunch. Because someone (me or my brother) started picking all of those luscious crunch berries out of the cereal. ARRRRR! So to alleviate the sibling desire to eat all the crunchberries Quaker came out with a crunch berry only cereal to RAVE reviews (at least mine anyway). It was an answer to our epicurean prayers. All Crunch Berries All the time...YUM! Before I leave the Cap'n, let me bow to his other flavors. Peanut butter crunch, Lafoote Cinnamon crunch among others. There are an amazing amount of variants in the crunch world.








7. Frosted Flakes - My first sugared cereal. And sugared it WAS! But this cereal had a few tricks up it's sleeves. Once you sloshed the milk on this first of firsts, you really only had about 2 minutes to eat the cereal or the flakes would become wallpaper paste. If you left a few errant flakes to dry on the edge of the cereal bowl when you were done, it would take a blasting crew to remove that organic super glue. But it was great because not only was it a great cereal, but it has one of the most memorable mascots in cereal history. Tony the Tiger. 'They're GREAT' he would say and rightly so. People ate them so much that the boxes for them started getting bigger and bigger until finally you would often mistake them for the box of Borax bleach it was standing next to (20 mule team). There were many knock offs of Frosted Flakes. My own favorite was the strawberry flavored Pink Panther flakes. Just the same as the frosted flakes, but made of pink frosting. I remember a vicious rumor that circulated around that the red in pink panther flakes would make lab rats blind. I still loved the pink panther flakes, but they only lasted a year. Ahh, pink panther...we hardly knew ye.

6. Quisp - No, the cereal wasn't really that great, it tasted like bowl shaped Captain crunch, or king vitamin or any number of golden spun honey flavored cereals. It was great because of it's mascot! What a great guy! that little quisp dude was my first exposure to aliens and I found that I liked them. Quisp also had some great prizes that were all UFO themed. Mostly little mini frisbees that I believe were later converted to Pringles can lids, but still it was other worldly. In fact, I'm not all together convinced that quisp wasn't aliens trying to gauge a response to their presence...hmmm.



5 Frosted Mini Wheats - What a weird cereal. Shredded wheat had been around for ever as one of the first breakfast cereals. These large pillows of shredded wheat that you would break up in milk and chow down on. Lots of crunch and nearly no flavor, so it MUST be good for you. So how do we get the kids to eat this stuff? Force em? nah, Like Mary Poppins said, Just a spoon full of sugar, or in this case, a bowlful of sugar helps the shredded wheat go down. This cereal had several different frosting options in it's heyday. Regular, cinnamon, or strawberry. Regular or strawberry was really my favorites.









4. Lucky Charms - This is the ONLY cereal that I know of that continually got upgraded with new marshmallow shapes as the cereal matured. Pink Hearts, yellow moons, orange stars and green clovers! it went on like this for over 10 years but in 1975 the interloper blue diamonds were introduced to lucky's irresistible temptation to the masses. Once they saw the bump in sales, they would buy a new extrusion die for the cereals every few years (between 10 and 4) consisting of purple horseshoes, red balloons, rainbows, pots o gold, leprechaun hats, shooting stars and hour glasses. I LOVED the little marshmallows but hated the actual cereal. I would pick out the marshmallows on a more frequent basis than I did the crunch berries. Mom stopped buying this one because we would end up with a 1/4 box of sweetened cat food. That's right, Cat food. Look at it, without those little tasty bits of puff sugar, the regular cereal part consisted of what looked like sugared kibble. It tasted like sugar glazed Cheereo's. Cheereo's will not make my list. I can't stand Cheereo's, it tastes fair initially, but those burpeeo's that you get about 1/2 hour later are VILE.

3. The horror cereals - These all get a nod because they were all kind of fun in their own way. It was the first time that a series of cereals would be basically the same but capitalize on different characters. Count Chocula, Franken Berry (my favorite), Boo Berry, Fruit Brute which was the ostensibly gay were wolf, and the yummy mummy, also fruit flavored but covered in ace bandages. Pick your favorite monster, they all had the now signature General Mills marshmallows in them and they were all fun in their own way. If you were to close your eyes, and eat them. the fruity ones and lucky charms were virtually indistinguishable. The specific fruit ones of course had their own flavor and Count Chocula was the coolest of the characters with the Boo berry ghost running a close second unless you really like Peter Lorrie in which case he was first. The characters were so popular that they spawned all kinds of other kinck knacks that you could buy. They even went disco, but then again, who didn't?

2. Cookie Crisp! - This was an altogether forgettable cereal except in one department. This was the first time that cereal manufacturers dropped all pretense that cereal was at all good for you and nothing more than a morning sugar rush. I mean really... selling you little cookies that you put in milk? They were making fun of themselves at best. Of course since then there are many other cereals that drop all pretense of being healthy Golden Grahms, Cinimon Toast Crunch, French Toast crunch among others. I'm sure Golden Grahms are supposed to be healthy or something, but still, if you're just eating grahm crackers is that really that good for you? I have no idea.



1. Life Cereal - This cereal was first just little cereal squares. Nothing special. But the commercial was one of those cultural moments that doesn't quit. Possibly the most successful cereal commercial to date. Later on we got Cinnamon Life and it was good, Raisin Life was for raisin lovers and then we got the best flavor of all, Maple and Brown sugar life. I liked the vanilla yogurt life too. But all of these are really Life cereal dressed up. The original still deserves the kudos.





I'm still pretty sure that If I were a bachelor, I would probably spend most meals eating cereal and soy milk. Yeah, you heard me, soy milk. Vanilla to be exact. It is AWESOME with cereal. Before you yak, give it a try. It's worth the experiment.

See ya in a fortnight! Thanks for stopping by!