This post is NOW, sir!

Mel Brooks is one of the absolute geniuses of movie comedy.  For several decades, he was the Weird Al Yankovic of Hollywood, turning out spoof and hilarious spoof of just about every genre that ever wound up on a film reel.  There are some purists who will tell you that nothing can possibly top the classics Brooks created in the 1970′s, and you will get no argument from management at The Nest about the high comedy that was “Blazing Saddles”… but unfortunately, my knowledge of these early Brooks masterpieces is pretty much limited to that one movie.

Excuse me while I whip this out…

One of Mel Brooks’ later films, however, came along at just the right time for me to enjoy it over and over and over again… and it is one of my favorite movies ever.  That would be the 1987 intergalactic spoof “Spaceballs”, starring Bill Pullman, John Candy, and Rick Moranis among many others.  Spaceballs is the subject of this week’s Flashback Friday!

Get your official Spaceballs Flashback Friday merchandise here!!!

If you want a good synopsis of the movie’s plot and the wacky characters involved in it, I highly recommend reading the Wiki page on Spaceballs.  To sum it up briefly, the planet Druidia is being targeted by the evil empire known as the Spaceballs, who are running out of fresh air at their home base Spaceball City and want to steal the planet’s atmosphere.  They want to kidnap Druidia’s Princess Vespa, however she runs away from a forced marriage to Prince Valium, and her father King Roland summons space maverick Lone Starr to find her.  The rest of the movie plays off of the original Star Wars franchise, with the battle of good vs. the evil Spaceballs, headed by President Scroob and Dark Helmet… as well as a mysterious power called The Schwartz.

I see your Schwartz is as big as mine!

The plot is just there to hold the movie together, though.  The best thing about films like this are all the hilarious gags and great lines that are the real sendup to the films and other pop culture references that are being parodied.  So I’m going to run off some of my favorite scenes and skits from Spaceballs for this post… and no, there’s no way I can possibly cover every great, funny moment from this movie.  So feel free to add some more of your favorites in the comments section!  YouTube videos of the scenes are linked to where I could find them….

You Went Over My Helmet!

NO!!! Not THAT!!!

In a parody of the Star Wars scene where Darth Vader used the Force to choke Admiral Motti, Dark Helmet is upset at the beginning of the movie that one of his subordinates has notified President Scroob that the ship is approaching Planet Druidia before he could have the chance to.  Helmet whips out his Schwartz ring and proceeds to fire a crushing beam on the poor man’s jewels.  This becomes a running gag throughout the movie, as the crew of Spaceball One constantly cover up their crotches in fear of this punishment.

Pizza The Hut

What I could do with one million spacebucks!

Spaceballs’ answer to Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt, Pizza the Hut was a gangster who Lone Starr owed a large debt to.  Pizza only appears live once in the movie, a video call where he demands Lone Starr pay him one million spacebucks to cover a 100,000 spacebucks debt by tomorrow.  This is one of the most ingeniously insane characters ever to appear in a movie… a giant blob of pizza turned loan shark.  Things get a bit uncomfortable when Pizza’s sidekick Vinnie starts nibbling off of him and calling him delicious.  Fortunately for Lone Starr, Pizza eats himself to death by the end of the movie, absolving his debt.

Beam Me Up, Snotty!

Why didn’t someone tell me my ass was this big!?!?

When we first meet President Scroob, he needs to go from his office to the command center of Spaceball City.  Commander Zircon offers to save him a walk and have Snotty beam him down, an obvious reference to Scotty from the Star Trek series.  Scroob is reluctant to be beamed, but goes for it anyway, and lands at Central Command with his head on backwards, looking down at his big butt.  Five years before Kris Kross hit it big, Mel Brooks was showing us what it looked like to wear your clothes backwards.  Scroob is beamed back to his office the correct way, refuses to be beamed again, and instead walks to the command room himself… which turns out to be right next door!

I’m Surrounded By Assholes!

Gunners Mate First Class Philip Asshole reporting for duty, sir!

With Princess Vespa in sight, Spaceball One’s forces try to shoot her ship down to capture her… however, true to typical sci-fi logic, the bad guys never seen to be able to shoot straight.  When Dark Helmet complains, it’s revealed that the gunner is cross-eyed, and he was hired by his cousin, Major Asshole, who is also cross-eyed.  When Dark Helmet rhetorically asks how many Assholes does he have on this ship anyway, all but one of the crew stand up to acknowledge that they too are an Asshole!  No wonder evil never triumphs over good.

Comb the Desert!

We ain’t found shit!!!

The heroes crash on the sandy planet of Vega, and President Scroob orders his henchmen to go there and “comb the desert!”  Dark Helmet orders his troopers to do this… literally, with huge combs.  It’s so corny, but one of the best visual gags of the entire movie, and it’s made even better by the last pair of combers who are using a pick and are black.  Mel Brooks was never afraid to throw out a bit of racial humor (Blazing Saddles was practically built on it), and the pick bit is funny without being demeaning.

Ludicrous Speed!

What do we have on this thing, a Cuisinart!?!?

Probably the best remembered and most often referenced gag from Spaceballs is the memorable scene where the ship goes to “Ludicrous Speed”.  With the good guys getting away due to their hyper drive, Dark Helmet orders Col. Sandurz to go to ludicrous speed, because light speed isn’t fast enough!  This causes their ship to zip past Lone Starr’s Winnebago, leaving behind a trail of plaid colors.  Ultimately, the brakes are applied and Dark Helmet goes smashing head first into the ship’s console due to his refusal to buckle up.

I Didn’t See You Playing With Your Dolls Again!

Knock next time!!!!

Dark Helmet plays with his dollies!  A great throwaway scene in the movie, as well as one of many references made to the movie’s excessive array of licensed merchandise, which pokes fun at how George Lucas built a toy empire off of Star Wars.

Hello My Baby!

Bring this guy some Pepto Bismol!!!

No recap of great scenes from Spaceballs would be complete without the tribute to the movie “Alien” towards the end.  In a scene at a space diner, John Hurt is suddenly overcome by something he ate, and like in “Alien”, he has a rather ugly looking alien spawn emerge from his stomach.  This spawn jumps on the counter, dons a straw hat and cane, and dances down the length of the counter singing “Hello Ma Baby!”  A classic WTF? mix that works out just perfect for comedic effect.

1-2-3-4-5

1,2,3,4,5? That’s amazing! I have the same combination on my luggage!

With Vespa in their clutches, Dark Helmet manages to extort the combination to Druidia’s protective shield from King Roland so that they can suck out all of the planet’s air.  The combination turns out to be 1-2-3-4-5, which Helmet proclaims sounds like the combination an idiot would have on his luggage.  Enter idiot President Scroob!

Thank You For Pressing The Self Destruct Button!

It’s irreversible, just like my raincoat!

Nothing quite beats the climactic scene of the movie, where after a mano y mano battle with Lone Starr, Dark Helmet accidentally hits the self destruct button for Spaceball One.  The panic scene as Scroob, Helmet and Sandurz try to get an escape pod to flee the doomed ship, only to continually lose out to all of the wacky cast of misfits on the ship is full of great gags!  My absolute favorite, though, happens to be Dark Helmet fighting it out with the freak show’s Bearded Lady for one of the pods…

Who are you, one of the FREAKS!?!?

The Bearded Lady bosom bumps Helmet out of the way and grabs the pod.  As he/she takes off, Dark Helmet leaps to the window to shout at her and delivers what is literally one of my favorite lines from any movie, EVER….

Eat your heart out, James Earl Jones.

Here is the full escape pod scene for you to enjoy, complete with the Spaceballs theme that was performed by The Spinners!  Yeah, who knew they were still relevant in the 1980′s?

Like I said, there are so many more great scenes and lines from the movie I didn’t have room to include unless I wanted to make this post the length of a NaNoWriMo novel.  I hope you enjoyed the flashbacks I did select to one of the coolest movies of the 80′s, and as always, may the Schwartz be with you!

It looks like this blog’s been jammed!

Grimace, my friend! You’re looking more and more like a giant buttplug every day!

There once was a glorious day when nobody thought it was irresponsible for a fast food company to promote its artery clogging delicacies to children, and no funny looking restaurant with a drive thru handled this better than McDonald’s did.  For this week’s Flashback Friday, let’s take a look back at the wonderfully creepy world that was McDonaldland and all of its lobotomized inhabitants!

Let’s get you in the proper mood for this post with a classic mid 80′s ad featuring four of McDonaldland’s best known goofballs…

How in the heck did we find this so amusing as kids?

This is either a normal day in McDonaldland, or the start of a very bad porn flick…

Ronald and his gang of misfits were completely ubiquitous during the 80′s, not only all over the commercials we used to watch as kids, but throughout McDonalds restaurants as well.  You know how Mickey Dee’s has been trying to look all upscale and classy the last decade or so, even making their employees wear ties?  That so didn’t used to be the atmosphere at McDonalds.  Not only were they generally dumps where all the weird people hung out all day, but they used to have one of the most fucked up playgrounds in your town…

Much respect to any playground that has its own jail.

Here, you could bounce up and down on a Fry Guy, run through the guts of Grimace, make out with the Ronald McDonald statue on the bench, or lock yourself up in the Big Mac jail… wait a minute, what was up with that jail anyway?  It’s become the iconic attraction from the old McDonalds PlayPlaces of our youth, but there was no cop character in McDonaldland, was there?

And if there was… why was this petty thug always on the loose?

Come to think of it, who is this Mayor McCheese I always hear about?  I don’t remember him, yet his meat and cheese head always seems to come up whenever McDonaldland is mentioned!  Well, that’s because the McDonaldland we remember in the 80′s was much different than the McDonaldland your parents remember from the 70′s.  Not only were there a lot of characters we 80′s kids never got a chance to know, but even the ones who survived into our lifetimes were barely recognizable.  Check out this picture of Ronald’s old gang…

This is how you appeal to small children!

Holy fucking McNuggets!  And to think Burger King gets slammed for their creepy king mascot these days… McDonalds built an entire popular kids franchise on a recipe of creep!  There’s Mayor McCheese up there in the upper left corner, and there’s the cop, by golly, on the right!!  I’m not sure what Cap’n Crunch and Jerry Garcia are doing in the picture, though… but at least we have Grimace and Hamburg…. holy crap, what the fuck is up with Hamburglar!?!?  Geez, we always thought Grimace looked disturbing… Hamburglar was an absolute mess back in the day!  If you think this is starting to look like it was inspired by a bad LSD trip, well, there’s a good reason for that!  Here is what the entire McDonaldland concept was inspired by…

I’d be crying too if I were in the middle of that picture.

If you aren’t old enough to remember the classic McDonaldland characters, then you also aren’t old enough to remember the popular Sid and Marty Kroft kids show H.R. Pufnstuf.  Heck, I’ve never seen it myself, but it is legendary in 70′s nostalgia, and probably one of the most memorable things to come out of the drug culture of the hippie generation after Woodstock.  So inspired by H.R. Pufnstuf were the creators of McDonaldland, that the Krofts actually sued McDonalds for not giving them credit and wound up being awarded one million items off of the Dollar Menu.

I was gonna pay the Krofts, but I got high…

This wound up being the major transition point between the old school creepyass McDonaldland, and the more colorful and slightly less creepy McDonaldland we all grew up to know and love.  After the lawsuit in the late 70′s, McDonalds phased out the mayor, the cop, the pirate, and the professor… which is why we never saw them in any 80′s advertising.  They kept Hamburglar and Grimace, but made each clean up their act first.  Hamburglar had to get plastic surgery and dye his hair, while Grimace had to lose his second set of arms (Seriously, he used to have four arms!).  They also had to quit thieving everything in sight.  We figured from his name that Hamburglar was a skilled ground beef thief, but you probably didn’t know that Grimace (nee, the Evil Grimace) use to take milkshakes from little kids.  Yeah, back before he was put through fast food mascot rehab, Grimace would bitchslap innocent children and take their milkshakes!

That’s actually more acceptable than his current role as a child eater.

And sure enough, despite getting rid of both the Mayor and the cop, crime in McDonaldland dropped like a rock in the 80′s… meaning McDonaldland was obviously one of the most corrupt places on the planet.  Grimace became a loveable big buffoon, and the Hamburglar became some goofy kid in a Zorro costume who could only say “Robble Robble!”  Ronald carried on as the clown who tied everything together, and the Fry Guys were… well, they kept being whatever the hell they were supposed to be.

I can’t tell if that orange one is Clyde or Sue.

To help promote their menu items that McDonalds considered to be some loose form of breakfast food, Birdie the Early Bird was brought on in the 80′s and became one of the major characters.  She was clumsy and kinda stupid, a lot like the other inhabitants of McDonaldland.  I wonder if they ever had the set tested for lead paint?

Hurry up! It’s almost 10:30AM, and I’ll turn into a pumpkin!

While the old regulars were out in the PlayPlace rusting in the rain, the new gang was adorning our Happy Meals for much of the 80′s and 90′s.  Sadly, McDonalds pulled the plug on the crew about 10 years ago, focusing instead on more adult advertising.  Ronald McDonald lives on… it is kinda hard to kill off the icon most associated with your franchise.  But sadly, Grimace, Hamburglar, Birdie, the talking McNuggets, and all the rest of the remnants of bad acid flashbacks have been banished to rot for all eternity in a decommissioned Big Mac jail.

Don’t let Grimace drop the soap, kiddies…

Kids gotta eat unhealthy too, so The Nest offers up a big, greasy salute to McDonalds for helping kids steer their parents to the Golden Arches through the use of some of the most ingeniously designed culinary villains of all time turned special education rejects.  It doesn’t matter that we don’t know what Grimace was supposed to be or that the Fry Guys looked like walking hairy testicles, we just knew it translated into the desire for Happy Meals and cheap plastic toys.  Thank you Mickey Dee’s for all of the memories and nightmares your gang of ragtag McPimps brought into our lives, and don’t worry about what those evil Health Nazis may think… you can Super Size us any day!

OMG! This…. is…. awesome!!!

Cough! Hack! Er, pardon the dust… and don’t forget to blow in the cartridges.

The Nintendo Entertainment System was the greatest video gaming console ever made.  Sure, that might technically be an opinion of mine, but in reality it’s a fact.  Keep your Playstations, your XBoxes, and whatever the hell else they spit out these days with titles that look nothing like video games are supposed to look.  They wouldn’t even be around to cause Black Friday stampedes were it not for the fact that the NES made home gaming a viable industry back in the late 80′s.

But the NES was not my first love in the home console market.  There were predecessors to the NES that created a mini home gaming boom in the early 80′s… most notably the Atari 2600 which seemingly every cool kid from the 80′s had except for me…

Or maybe I just wasn’t as cool as I thought I was…

No, the gaming console my family had was actually the Cadillac of the original home gaming era… and by Cadillac, I don’t just mean the top of the line, but the console itself was fucking HUGE and weighed about half a ton.  Check it out up there in my intro picture… that’s none other than the one and only ColecoVision!  Let’s talk about this forgotten player in the video gaming industry for today’s Flashback Friday.

Play video games, and make a call… all from the same controller!

As you can see from the box the console was contained in, the ColecoVision was marketed as “The Arcade Quality Video Gaming System” when it was released in 1982.  The Atari 2600 had already swept the nation since its debut in 1977, offering people a chance to play their favorite arcade games from the comfort of their living room without having to fork out a roll full of quarters.  However, comparing the Atari graphics to the graphics of a stand up arcade video game was like comparing my artwork to paintings by the Renaissance masters… the results were barely passable, and ultimately looked like shit.

I think I have just been insulted…

See for yourself the difference between what playing Donkey Kong, the classic game included along with every ColoecoVision ever sold, looked like on the Atari 2600 vs. the ColecoVision:

Left: Mario fights the Gingerbread Man on the Atari.
Right: This looks much better on Coleco, but Pauline seems to have swallowed her hat.

The ColecoVision graphics were much more detailed, fluid, and faithful to the original… even if you could destroy barrels with the hammer while your back was turned away from them.. something that would have resulted in this had you been playing the arcade version:

Luigi stands to inherit a fortune now!

While the graphics may have been state of the art for the time period, the controllers for the Coleco were unnecessarily unwieldy compared to the more simplistic Atari joystick…

We couldn’t decide if we wanted to make a video game controller, or a cell phone prototype.

That numerical keypad that made the Coleco controller about 3 times as large as it needed to be must have been put there for some cool reason, right?  Well, hold on to your Pac Man T-shirts, folks, because this thrilling intro screen was your one and only opportunity each game to have any reason to even touch the number pad:

Press 9 to talk to a real, live psychic.

That was it… the whole reason the numerical keypad even existed on that controller was so you could select the number of players and difficulty level.  Weren’t cursors invented before 1982?  Could I have not just moved a little icon up and down the menu with the joystick and pushed the button?  Just more proof that in the early days of the electronic gaming industry, it was more about how complicated advanced you could make things rather than applying the KISS principle.  No wonder the home video game market fell in the toilet by 1984…

Mommy, do I hafta press the # key to flush?

So what cool games did me and my sisters have for our ColecoVision back in the day?  Well, besides the already included Donkey Kong, we had it’s sequel Donkey Kong, Jr.!

Who knew Mario was into whips and chains?

Then there was Subroc,  a battle game where you could fight strange, repetitive alien craft in the water or in the sea just by moving a little crosshairs up and down.  Or if you were smart, you could just keep moving to the right or left and never have to shoot at anything until the final boss…

The final boss…. a giant flying Franklin Stove…

I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain to any of you how to play the game Frogger.  All you had to do was get your frogs into the little cubbyholes at the end of the obstacle course, and not get flattened by cars, bitten by snakes, eaten by otters, or drowned by dickhead diving turtles who knew you were controlling the only five frogs in the world who had no idea how to swim.

Also not shown, the razor sharp barbed wire just off the right edge of the screen that kept your frogs from copying Pac Man.

Popeye was another arcade classic from the 80′s based on the well loved animated series.  As stupid as Bluto/Brutus was in the cartoons, with his brain replaced by dumbass video game AI, he seems to aimlessly wander around hoping to run into Popeye and send the sailor to his death with just a single touch.

Hey Wimpy… could you get off your fat hamburger eating ass and give me a hand here?

Q*Bert was just a really cruel game, especially when that green haired motherfucker with the shades would drop down and undo all the squares you had just changed.  This was even worse in the later levels when how the squares changed colors began to get complicated enough to need a class on differential equations to even figure out how to beat a screen.  If there was a more frustrating, piece of shit video game than Q*Bert ever invented, I have never played it.

Just go ahead and jump off the pyramid, Q*Bert…. your life isn’t worth living anyway…

Carnival was a shooting gallery game that was decent fun to play, until the first time you took too long to beat a screen and an endless parade of ducks would start generating on the screen, making you waste all your bullets.

Whew! No squirrels!

Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle was the most mind-numbing video game I ever owned on any console.  Hell, I had Anticipation for the NES which was a fucking board game you played on your Nintendo, and it wasn’t as lame and ignorant as this game was.  You had to keep rescuing Smurfette from Gargamel’s clutches over and over and over and over again… going over the same crummy screens that were designed by a three year old over and over and over again.  Once you figured out how to do a double jump, you had completely mastered this game, and could only lose if you were either completely stoned or the cat knocked your 20 pound cell phone controller out of your hand while a spider was crawling towards you…

Oh shit… here comes another set of blue balls.

The last game we had was Squish ‘Em Sam….. FINALLY!  This game was awesome!  You climbed to the top of the building, stomping on an ever increasing menagerie of odd shaped pixellated things, while avoiding all kinds of objects being tossed down on you from above probably by an evil squirrel.  The sound effects in this game are totally awesome and corny!  Check out this YouTube video of someone playing Squish Em Sam and getting to Level 10…

Despite ColecoVision’s advanced design and ability to be used as a sandbag, it enjoyed only a brief moment in the sun due to the impending crash of the home gaming market around 1984… and would be long buried under the rubble of Betamaxes and Greatest American Hero posters in the closet by the time Nintendo revived the market in 1986.  But we here at The Nest would like to salute this one of a kind gaming system that practically brought the arcade into our living rooms, and gave us a chance to rescue fair maidens, giant apes, skinny beanpoles, unlucky frogs, and Smurfettes whenever we felt up to the challenge.  Thank you Coleco for all of the fun games, memories, and useless controller parts.  It’s almost enough to forgive you for introducing these dreaded things around the same time…

The picture that accompanies “ass ugly” in the dictionary.

Welcome to Miami

The United States has had its fair share of world police actions it’s taken since the end of World War II, and no, I’m not even about to go into the political nature of these.  That’s for another blog and another group of rabid people to discuss… serious political talk is verboten here at The Nest.  Instead, for this week’s Flashback Friday, I want to merely look back at one of the more interesting third world country invasions the US pulled off in my lifetime, as well as the man at the center of it all.  In case you have forgotten him, the charming chap’s name in the above mug shot is Manuel Noriega, who for much of the 80′s was the most powerful man in Panama.

Drugs, sir? Why, we have no drugs here in Panama!

24 years ago today on December 20, 1989, Noriega’s former boss President George H.W. Bush launched an invasion of Panama intent on removing Noriega from power there and hauling him back to the United States to stand trial for drug trafficking charges.  Noriega had also done some other bad things we weren’t fond of… like rigging presidential elections  to keep his puppet man in power (a practice we certainly frown upon here in the US), making threats against US troops in the Panama Canal Zone, and for just looking like he had an ass for a face.  And maybe the CIA wanted to take back those service awards they had given him for being on their payroll for about 25 years prior to becoming Panama’s de facto ruler.

Boy, what else do I have to accomplish to win one of these?

Noriega wasn’t about to give himself up quietly, and he fought bravely against the American invaders…. for four whole days.  By Christmas Day, he had holed himself up in the Holy See’s embassy in Panama City, a place the American troops were forbidden to invade (as if that makes sense).  The most enduring gag of the entire Noriega saga occurred during this weeklong standoff, as the US troops devised an absolutely ingenious way to smoke out the dictator and have him begging to surrender….

They bombarded the compound with loud rock music.

No doubt they just blasted Van Halen’s “Panama” on an endless loop.

Yes, we made the Panamanian strongman crack by forcing him to listen to heavy metal for days on end!  Nevermind that we could have sent in Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris to drag him out by his potholed head, instead we sent in Metallica and Anthrax to get the bad guy where it really hurts, the eardrums.  If the government were smart, they’d make a mix tape of some of the most annoying music ever created and just blast it on eleven into the countries whose leaders we do not approve of.  We could then establish our place as leader of the free world without a single drop of blood being spilled…

Well, almost no blood being spilled…

When the final guitar stopped wailing in Panama City, Noriega was brought back to the United States to stand trial for drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering.  All the while, since he was captured during a military effort, he enjoyed having prisoner of war status… and was treated to an exclusive jail cell with more amenities in it than you have in your home right now.  Apparently, this was in the Geneva Convention somewhere…

I’m gonna go talk to Klink about getting us a big screen TV, a Playstation, and a bidet!

In 1992, Noriega was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in his new Presidential suite prison.  As far as those of us among the unwashed masses were concerned, this was the end of the Manuel Noriega saga, and he subsequently dropped out of our collective conscience.  So, what has Noriega been up to the last two decades anyway?

Soap retriever.

As it turns out, he has been getting the grand tour of the world’s finest penitentiaries.  Because Noriega was on his best behavior while lounging in his luxurious accommodations behind bars, he was granted an early release on September 9, 2007.  Instead of running out of the prison gates and raising his hands to the sky to celebrate his newfound freedom, he instead found a line of other countries waiting to haul him in to fill some of their empty jail cells.  France got first dibs at Noriega, but not before he fought extradition there for three years… all the time continuing to live it up in American custody getting the prisoner of war treatment.  The French finally got their turn at Noriega in April 2010 and sent him to a prison with slightly fewer perks than his hotel in the US had.

Hello, Monsieur Noriega! I am your new cellmate, no?

The country that really wanted to put Noriega in its penal system though was his old country Panama.  They whined and cried as the US sent him to France, and continued pestering France to give him up to them so he could live the sweet life behind bars in a third world country.  Either Noriega or Panama was too much of a pain in the derriere for the French, because after just a year and a half in French custody, he was extradited back to Panama in December 2011 where he has been in prison ever since.

Real Panamanian jail.

And so goes life when you are a soldier, a guerrilla, a spy, a drug dealer, a dictator, and a globetrotting felon.  Today The Nest salutes Manuel Noriega, a man who has done it all and paid the price everywhere.  You may have a face only a mother could love, but as I’m sure you’ve found out during your illustrious career in incarceration, sodomy doesn’t have a face…

I want my representative from the ASPCA!

Play that funky music NES boys!

In trying to come up with posts that my readers find interesting and entertaining, I find that there are many times I shy away from subjects I’m pretty sure a lot of my visitors don’t care about, but which are quite meaningful to me.  What fun is it to have a blog if you don’t feel like you can post about anything that strikes your fancy?

Possums hit everyone’s happy buttons.

So for my final Flashback Friday of 2013, since a number of my fellow bloggers are on holiday hiatus anyway, I figured I’d drop one of those topics that means a lot more to me than it probably means to any of you.  Today, I’m going to present to you my Top 20 favorite 8-bit tunes from games I owned for the classic Nintendo Entertainment System back in the late 80′s and early 90′s.

I find myself killing time on YouTube listening to a lot of my old favorites, and it’s obvious from the comments that there are many people who are just as fond of these old school melodies as I am… I just don’t think many of them also follow squirrel blogs.

Now McDonaldland characters, on the other hand…

So if you don’t think old video game music is your thing, that’s fine.  Come back tomorrow, and I promise I’ll have a Saturday Squirrel you will not want to miss!  But if you choose to continue on into my countdown, here are a few notes I’d like to mention before I begin…

1. The link in each entry is to a YouTube video of the music.  I am not about to embed 20 videos in this post, as even two embedded videos are enough to noticeably slow down the load speed of my blog… twenty would probably make the WordPress server explode like one of Dr. Wily’s robots.

2. I only considered NES games I actually owned.  If something is not here that you really liked, it’s quite possible I didn’t have that game.

3. I did the best I could to minimize the number of entries from the Mega Man series, which is undoubtedly the gold standard in 8 bit music.  But I still wound up with 7 entries from that franchise.

4. There is only one entry from a Mario game here, and amazingly it is not from the uber-popular Super Mario trilogy.  Sorry, but I never found Mario music to be something special.

I just hope I didn’t piss Mario off…. uh oh!

OK, let us begin, shall we?

#20. Kid Icarus: Intro

Kid Icarus was the sister game of the more popular Metroid, both of which were early NES releases in 1986.  Both games had their musical scores composed by one of my favorite names to ever appear on the credits of a video game, Hip Tanaka.

Although, not quite my all time favorite…

The Kid Icarus intro does a fine job of setting the magical tone for the game, which is a mashup of mythology and fucked up humor.

#19. Goonies 2: Restaurant

If I ever do a post on an individual NES game, it will probably be the rather bizarre but popular entry that was The Goonies II, which I played the absolute shit out of back in the day.  No, it wasn’t a sequel to another NES Goonies game, it was called Goonies II because it was supposed to be a sequel to the movie itself!  Here is the first theme you encounter in the game, an 8-bit stylized version of Cyndi Lauper’s masterpiece from the movie soundtrack “The Goonies R Good Enough”.

#18. Mega Man: Elecman

There are a whole bunch of prior rock songs that use the same chord progression as was used in this theme from the original Mega Man game.  The most famous is probably Journey’s “Faithfully”, but I always heard Bon Jovi’s “She Don’t Know Me” when I played this stage.  One of Bon Jovi’s best songs ever, and he’s totally disowned it because it was the only hit he had that wasn’t written by his band…

You give robots a bad name.

#17. Metroid: Norfair

Not many old NES songs were written in waltz time, but the Norfair theme is one of the best.  And since you usually spend a good deal of time in the bubbly Norfair zone while playing Metroid, you get to hear this tune quite a bit.  It grows on you, and never gets old.

#16. Mega Man 3: Dr. Wily Stages 3&4

Mega Man composers really outdid themselves when it came to the music for the Dr. Wily stages in the series.  This is the best one from the third Mega Man installment.  Very catchy and motivates you to carry on to the goal…

#15. Tetris: Music A

Yes, it’s basically a reworked version of the Nutcracker theme.  But I built a lot of Tetris stacks to this theme back in the day, and I’m sure it was what I was listening to when I hit my all time high of 190 lines cleared…

I do love nutcrackers!

#14. Castlevania: Wicked Child

The original Castlevania game had some good but not great music… but this Stage 3 theme was a notable exception!  What a fun theme to listen to while traipsing through Dracula’s castle!

#13. Gauntlet: Music B

Gauntlet had four basic themes which rotated throughout the game depending on which numbered room you were in.  This one was easily my favorite of the four.  Too bad this was a game that was nearly impossible to beat, even if you were that elf who could run faster than the arrows he shot.

#12. Mega Man 4: Drillman

You’d expect a great theme from a robot master who looked like a member of Devo…

Drill it good!

#11. Kid Icarus: Overworld

The only thing that keep this from being a shoo in for the Top 10, and possibly even Top 5 is that annoying part at the end of the loop.  Other than that, this is a fan-fucking-tastic little 8-bit ditty that even gets in a little of that spirit of ’76 and goes along perfectly with the three Stage 2 screens.

#10. Mega Man 2: Crashman

One of the longest, yet most satisfying of all early Mega Man themes.  Very catchy, and the perfect background music for battling these silly rotating things:

It’s just what you would expect a world ruled by Crashman to look like.

#9. Solomon’s Key: Room Theme

There are not many NES games I owned that I ever gave up on trying to beat.. but this was one of them.  Solomon’s Key was almost hopelessly difficult to finish, because even if you did make it to the end,  if you didn’t find all of the hidden items you were pretty screwed.  This music accompanied you the whole way through the game in every main room… and it totally captures how absolutely impossible some of the rooms are to beat, let alone the game itself.

#8. The Goonies II: Ice World

I am the walrus!

The ice caverns in Goonies II were my favorite parts of the game.  The enemies were totally unique (penguins, polar bears, eskimos, and yes, walrii!), the floors were predictably slippery, and the music totally ruled.  This is an awesome theme that captures the desolation of the ice stage very well.

#7. Metroid: Kraid’s Lair

Hip Tanaka at his absolute best… this is a totally creepy, hypnotic, desolate, spine tingling, doom impending masterpiece of a musical score.  And waiting for you at the end of the level is this creature…

Kraid just might be Pigladillo’s father.

#6. Mega Man 2: Quickman

If ever there was music that got you going, this is it.  And you’ll need it too, as Quickman’s stage contained the infamous run from the instant death beams!  The absolute finest robot master theme in the Mega Man series…

Faster Mega Man, faster!!!

#5. Contra: Base Levels 2&4

The game Contra is best remembered for popularizing the infamous Konami Code, which for Contra gave you 30 lives, and you pretty much needed all of those to beat this game.  But it contained one musical gem buried within the depths of all that alien warfare… this theme which would guide you through the two enemy base stages, which saw you and your partner shooting at aliens and trying to blow up buttons to remove the electric fence and advance onward.

#4. Dr. Mario: Chill Theme

Dr. Mario was one of the many Tetris inspired puzzle games that Nintendo released in the early 90′s.  You used different colored suppositories pills to kill viruses, trying not to have the pills overflow the jar.  The game had two music scores you could listen to, Fever and Chill.  The latter is a really funky ditty that takes two whole minutes to loop through, practically an eternity for NES themes.

#3. Mega Man 4: Wily Stages 1&2

The most criminally underappreciated 8-bit theme ever composed.  I absolutely love this little 40 second looping ditty, and it seems to get very little love from other video game music enthusiasts.  Very haunting, very catchy, just damn fine synthetic music…

It makes me want to lose my head!

#2. The Adventures of Link: Palace Theme

The Adventures of Link was the first sequel to the very popular original Zelda game, and a game a lot of Zelda enthusiasts like to bury under the carpet for some reason, refusing to acknowledge it ever existed.  I’m not sure what their problem is, but I enjoyed playing this game, and even the most ardent Zelda II haters out there can agree there was one great thing about this game… the palace theme.  Totally kickass and gamer friendly.

And it made battling these armored fuckers a bit more tolerable.

#1. Mega Man 2: Wily Stages 1&2

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who is into old school NES music… the theme for the first two stages of Dr. Wily’s fortress in Mega Man 2 is pretty universally regarded as the best 8 bit music ever composed.  In a world that can’t agree on much, at least we have this 74 seconds of pure awesomeness.  I guess if there is any theme that needed to be directly embedded, it is this one…

Gotta love any level where you have to battle a robot dragon while only having three blocks to stand on…

If you made it through this entire post, thank you for indulging me!  If not, I won’t hold it against you….

I can’t promise the others will be so forgiving, though…

A Real Pal…. until he goes all Chucky on you.

No time for a proper Flashback Friday today, as I’m in the waning hours before I go back to work tonight, and I had a lot of things I wanted (and still need) to do today.  But I figured I’d give a quick shoutout to a flashback a few people have requested before… the one and only My Buddy doll.  There weren’t many dolls marketed at boys that didn’t transform into awesome war machines or wear combat fatigues… but My Buddy sought to break down that stereotype that traditional dolls were for girls only.  Ultimately, My Buddy would fail as no father in his right mind would allow their son to touch anything as fruity looking as My Buddy was.  Look at him… he’s the lovechild of Mario and Rainbow Brite.  That frog was just put there to make him look more like a regular, good old American boy… in reality, he never played outside.  Instead, he stayed in the house and tried on Kid Sister’s clothes and makeup….

Here’s the commercial for My Pussy Buddy and Kid Sister direct from the 80′s….

I may have to revisit this one sometime in a future Retro TV Ad Tuesday post….

In our modern world of YouTube and ever-present social media, anyone can literally become a pseudo-celebrity overnight.  The most ridiculous videos can quickly become viral as they get passed on from friend to friend like a bad case of syphilis.  When Andy Warhol predicted that everyone in the future would have 15 minutes of fame, he no doubt knew that Al Gore was going to one day invent the internet.

You, baby dancing to “Single Ladies”, are going to be famous thanks to me!

But there was once a day when YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist…. and it was good.  Well, unless you wanted to become famous without having to hit the casting couch.  Heck, even making videos of something was much harder in the 80′s than it is today.  It required lugging one of these things around…

Slightly heavier than your typical smartphone.

The technology to make home movies has been around for over half a century, but it wasn’t until the camcorder revolution of the late 80′s that video recording devices became commonly found in average homes across America.  My family, being poor, didn’t get in on this fun until 1992… and that was three years after the television show that made the camcorder a must-have for every family with dreams of fame and dollar signs in their eyes made it’s debut…

America’s Funniest Home Videos debuted on the ABC Network on November 26, 1989, and became a regular series beginning the following January.  It not only had a most excellent theme song and intro montage (Back when TV shows actually gave a crap about putting together a quality theme song and introduction), but it was a prehistoric venue for the viral video in an era when a lot of people still didn’t have computers.  ABC got the idea to borrow Bob Saget from his “Full House” duties long enough each week to showcase silly amateur home videos viewers would send in… and the people loved it!

November 19, 198-whatever… a day that will live in infamy for these two boys.

These days, television producers go to great lengths to carefully script, stage and edit programs that pass for “reality television”.  America’s Funniest Home Videos, however, was reality TV in its purest form… a collection of unscripted videotaped pratfalls, quirky cuteness, and goofballs that entertained us quite well in an era when our video entertainment options consisted of about 40 channels and a VCR.  Who would have guessed that some of the best stuff to air on television didn’t have to first go through overpaid executives, tasteless producers, and a test audience of the desired demographic to make people laugh?

Are you trying to say I’m not needed here?

Of course, one of the big draws AFHV had was not just the chance to embarrass your kids on national television, but the fact that on each show, the featured videos had a chance to compete for one of three cash prizes.  Three videos were chosen by the show’s producers at the end of each episode to be voted on by the audience, with the winning video getting a $10,000 cash prize and a shot at the $100,000 contest held each season.  The people who submitted the three chosen videos were invited onto the show and introduced, which always gave the impression back in my naive days of the show being rigged.

Not that it wasn’t… the damn cute babies won EVERY TIME!!!!

Of course, as the show became more and more popular, and the thought of being able to win money just by looking like a dumbass became more and more realistic, some devious people began submitting videos of their fails that were quite obviously intentional.  Soon, AFHV was full of some of the worst acting outside of a B horror movie that would even put someone trying to commit insurance fraud by purposely slipping in a puddle of water in the middle of Mecca look like an Academy Award winner…

Help! I’ve fallen, and I can’t reach my attorney!!!

Eventually, as the home video clips began to get more and more ridiculous, America’s Funniest Home Videos began losing its initial appeal of fun loving innocence, and started looking more and more like the scripted faux-reality BS that would plague the airwaves in the 21st century.  Even Bob Saget got tired of the show after the first few seasons… and he somehow tolerated the Olsen twins and Dave Coulier all those years on Full House.  For much of the late 90′s, AFHV was an on again, off again series on ABC before somehow being revived and going on strong for the last 13 years now with Tom Bergeron as host.  How a show of this format can continue to exist in an age when crazy cat videos are being posted and reposted on walls every day is beyond me… but then again, maybe Bergeron is some kind of mysterious television genius with the magical ability to make anything look good on TV.  After all, he also hosts a wildly popular show that features celebrities nobody has ever heard of learning how to dance with as little clothes on as possible…

Tom Bergeron may have even been able to salvage “Cop Rock”…

There is nothing more charming, nostalgic, and embarrassing than our very own home videos we made ourselves to cherish forever… and here at The Nest, we would like to give a huge 6 hour EP VHS salute to Vin DiBona and the people at ABC who brought these grainy, date inscribed masterpieces into our homes every week to the amusement of us viewers, and to the shame of its stars.  Not since The Three Stooges was slapstick comedy ever so funny.. whether it was Uncle Earl falling onto the barbecue grill while drunk, Baby Emily enjoying a fresh serving of doggie poo, or dear old Dad getting speared in the nuts by a lawn dart.  Thank you for making stars out of the common people for the mere price of a red face and a few broken bones, and we strive even in these more technologically advanced days to keep recording those memories we’d much rather repress.  As Bob Saget would say in conclusion… keep those cameras safely rolling!

Keep at it, you naughty possums! I practically have the $10,000 in my bank account already!

When the M stood for “music” instead of “moronic”.

Back in October, I dedicated a Flashback Friday post to five forgotten music videos from MTV’s glorious 80′s past that stood out for their awesomesauceness, suckiness, just plain weirdness… or all of the above.  I said I would do another post of more lost music videos later on, and here I am today to deliver on that promise!  Here are five more lost 80′s videos that deserve a second look to be applauded, jeered and mocked by the expert applauders, jeerers, and mockers here at The Nest.  Put on a heavy dose of eyeliner (boy or girl, it doesn’t matter) and your best leather outfit… we’re traveling back to the days when MTV actually mattered!

“Sea Of Love” – The Honeydrippers

Under The Sea Of Love…

Anyone who grew up in the 70′s knows who Robert Plant is, the dazed and confused frontman of the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin.  Who would have ever guessed that the same man who was wailing in “Black Dog” would just one decade later form his own band and cover one of the most pussified songs in the history of rock and roll.

That’s the daaaaaaaaaay, I knew you were myyyyy pet!!!

“Sea of Love” was originally a #2 hit for Phil Phillips way back in 1959, over 50 years before he’d go on to win American Idol.  Plant’s new band The Honeydrippers (even the name of the band sounds like some shit a folk group would come up with after smoking organic weed) would remake it in 1985, and here is the schmaltzy video the former wild child of classic rock made for the song…

The video itself, as you would expect for a song that could sure insomnia, is rather uneventful, with the exception of….

I’m just admiring your Big Log, Mr. Plant…

Holy Nightmare Fuel!!!  Where in the hell did Robert dig up that hairy beast playing the marimba, and why did he decide the best choice of outfit for the video shoot would be an all-too revealing speedo!?!?  This song is supposed to put people in a romantic mood, but when you flash images of THIS GUY…

Who wants to help me apply my tanning butter?

…very inappropriately dressed, that’s going to suck the air out of any erogenous balloons that may had begun to inflate faster than the Hindenberg blowing to smithereens.  Thanks Robert Plant, for totally ruining our MTV experience in the mid 80′s by inviting that creepshow along…

“Pop Muzik” – M

Sorry, Mario, but our Princess is in another parking lot.

Who cares if M didn’t know how to spell (which is probably why he gave himself a one letter name), we loved this little piece of New Wave post-disco muzik music.

New York, London, Paris, Munich, Everybody talk about…. Pop Muzik!!!

Like just about every other music video in the prehistoric days before MTV even existed, the artistic and professional qualities in the video for Pop Muzik are a little below standard, even for 1979.  M is dressed up as a disc jockey, grooving along to his little piece of one-hit-wonderdom, accompanied by two department store mannequins dressed in leather who were either brought to life by Jonathan Switcher or Waldo the Magnificent…

Hocus Pocus Alamagocus!!!

But if you think his two female companions look lively, check out the poor chick who sings the backup vocals during the chorus (1:01, 1:42, 2:38).  Ladies and gentlemen, we have officially found the most excited person to ever appear in a music video!!!!

Three times the level of excitement!!! (3X0=0)

“Der Kommissar” – Falco

Rock Me Rainbow Donkey!

Wait a minute, you’re saying… I have the wrong OHW on this song.  After the Fire did “Der Kommissar”, and Falco did “Rock Me Amadeus”.  Those statements are both true, but the fact is that Falco performed “Der Kommissar” first in 1982, before ATF came along and showed him how it should have been done.  As inferior as Falco’s version of the song is to the better known ATF version, the video is even shittier.  Here’s what you can do with 20 douchemarks and an hour of recording time in a Make Your Own Video booth…

The entire video is Falco doing the running man in front of a green screen with police cars “chasing him” in the background.  Oh sure, he stops every once in a while and tries to act cool… and by trying, I mean, failing absolutely miserably…

No caption I could possibly come up does a better job of mocking Falco than this still from the video…

By the time this travesty is over, it’s pretty obvious the police are pursuing him for making such a criminally pathetic video.  At least if he would have invited C.K. Hope along to dance on the police cars, it could have salvaged this absolute dreck.  But we can forgive Falco this early lapse of judgment, as he did totally nail it four years later in Rock Me Amadeus.  A lesson to all of us out there that no matter how much we may suck, we could someday still end up on top of the world after all… or at least in the annals of music video history.

“Shiny Shiny” – Haysi Fantayzee

And Johnny Depp thought he was being original…

Haysi Fantayzee was but a blip on the New Wave radar, and their lone song of any importance “Shiny Shiny” was even more insignificant as far as the music charts went, peaking at #74.  But this was 1983, and MTV would play just about anything that had music in it, so the band’s song got some airplay.  Here it is for your enjoyment…

Once you get past the freakily dressed duo of Jeremy Healy and Kate Garner who front this band, this is actually a rather enjoyable song to listen to.  However this video’s main legacy to the music video industry was in defining the important role of the video vixen… dressing provocatively, shaking the ass, and giving the video the sex appeal that the lead singer only wishes they could.   And no woman now, then, or in the future will ever out-vixen the performance Kate Garner gave in this forgotten 220 seconds of pure MTV gold.

Suck it, Tawny Kitaen!

“No Money Down” – Lou Reed

Who wants to take a walk on the wild side?

Finally, we have a video I wanted to include in my first installment of the MTV Classic series, but had to scratch because at the time there was no clip of the video on YouTube for me to embed here.  The strange thing is, just nine days after I posted that first series of videos, legendary singer and songwriter Lou Reed passed away.  Apparently, that was what it took for whatever entity owns Lou’s schtuff to get this damn video for everyone out there to enjoy on YouTube, as Reed’s Vevo account just uploaded “No Money Down” back in November.

Now, as you watch this video, you’ll quickly see why it is strange, but in a “meh” kind of way.  In fact, if it doesn’t particularly interest you, you might watch the first 30 seconds to a minute of it and say to yourself, “OK, so it’s a robotic head swiveling around and lip synching to the song… big deal…”

And that’s all you’d think if you got bored too easily and only saw the first 90 seconds of the video.  At the 1:34 mark, though, things start getting interesting…. and by interesting, I mean COMPLETELY FUCKING CREEPY AS SHIT!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As if the animatronic head wasn’t bad enough, the entire last half of the video is two hands reaching up from below to rip every piece of fake flesh off the Reed mockup bit by bit!  What in the name of diabolical horror was whoever came up with this idea huffing!?!?!?

The song didn’t even chart when it was released in 1986…. but the video for it will go down in history as by far the creepiest fucking music video ever made…

And that is saying something….

Well, that’s all for this edition of the good, the bad, and the just plain fucked up from the good old days of MTV.  I’ll do this again in the future and dig up five more videos that need one last look before we bury them in the litter box of time once again.  Until then….

DUN, da DUN, da DUN, da DUN!

When I was in sixth grade, my teacher organized roller skating parties down at the local rink once a month.  This was back in 1986-87, firmly on the downward slope of roller skating’s popularity, which peaked in the 70′s when the combination of roller derby and disco had skating rinks the happening place to be seen rolling around on 8 wheels in a leisure suit.  It was still a blast though, and in ways only the 80′s could make things fun for the children of that decade.  Chances are, if you grew up in the 80′s you attended a few roller skating parties, and perhaps you can relate to some of the memories I’m about to share with you of those awesome Skate Night Thursdays of my youth in this week’s Flashback Friday…

Brace yourself and have a good time!

First, let’s talk a little about roller skating in the 80′s.  I was lucky to grow up in a time when roller skates were still designed like roller skates, and not like ice skates.  I tried standing up in ice skates before… and by standing up, I mean constantly plopping my butt on the ice.  I can’t imagine trying to skate like this…

In those skates… not the bikini.

Instead, roller skating in the 80′s looked more like this…

Much less chance of falling and breaking those tube socks…

Even a clutz like me could get myself going and stay upright on the classic roller skate design.  Of course, getting yourself going is the easy part.  Skates were designed with little rubber pegs at the toe that were supposed to help the skater stop should they need to avoid rolling out in front of a bus or even worse, plow into the classroom bully and his girlfriend.  YouTube can show you how to do literally everything except achieve world peace, and yes, they even have a video that show’s you how to stop on roller skates…

Yeah, right.  This was how I had to stop once I got started….

They needed more poles in roller rinks.

Upon arriving at the rink, the first thing you had to do was rent a pair of roller skates, because the manager of the rink didn’t want you rolling in your scuffed up street skates that would mess up their already rotten, warped and cracked floor.  There was plenty of other oppressive rules and regulations us kids had to follow while trying to have a good time.  At our rink, the enforcer of the Skating Rules and Regulations was this old, creepy looking guy who had about half his teeth and wielded a flashlight that was always on.  He would skate up to any troublemakers and read them the riot act, and maybe even make them take a skating timeout if they did something horrible like give the skater in front of them a wedgie.  It was like having Barney Fife on skates…

I’m ready to nip those wrong way skaters in the bud, Sheriff!

Special parties like our class’ skating nights called for even more restrictions on the type of skating you could do at certain times.  In fact, everything was on a strict schedule.  We had this lighted signboard straight out of Orwell’s “1984″…

Deputy Fife never let us race…

Yes, once a night you had to skate the opposite way around the rink.  After making only left turns for over an hour, that’s like moving to England and getting a crash course in driving on the wrong side of the road.  Then there was Couples Only…. wonderful, this is a group full of sixth graders.  Sixth graders might end up on Maury Povich nowadays, but back in the 80′s most 6th graders still didn’t know what a hormone was.  And besides, why just skate with one pretty girl in the Couples segment when you can wait for a menage a trois when the board lit up “TRIOS”.

This trio might get a little rowdy. Better get the flashlight ready, Barn..

And yes, we did the hokey pokey.  The hokey pokey is stupid enough to do when you don’t have eight slippery wheels of hell attached to your feet.  Try shaking your right foot all about without falling on your ass…

That’s what it’s all about…

And yes, that’s the Limbo on that sign up there.  We did the limbo at every skating party.  Not the way you would normally do the limbo, of course, that would be just asking for head trauma.  No, we did it bending forward like this…

We may have rode in the beds of pickup trucks back in my day, but we weren’t fucking crazy…

And we did the limbo every time to the same two songs.  “Break My Stride” and “The Curly Shuffle“.  I’m not kidding… and the rest of the music that was played throughout the night was just as cheesy and totally 80′s as those two songs.  We whizzed around the rink to Juice Newton, Wang Chung, and pretty much any other record the owner could find in the bargain bin at K-Mart.  They could have played MacArthur Park for all we cared… we just wanted to skate…

Oh, that sweet green icing…

Well, the Session Closed sign is flashing, and that means The Nest’s little 80′s skating party we threw for you has come to an end.  We hope you enjoyed the exercise, the bumps and bruises, the hokey pokeying, and the endless parade of one hit wonders.  And if you didn’t have a good time, well, don’t worry.  Pretty soon the more serious 90′s will come around, and we’re going to regret the fact that we were ever a part of the flashy, colorful 80′s…. at least until we grow up and yearn for those younger days again.  Uh oh, look out.  Barney and his flashlight are coming our way!

STOP! Grab a pole this instant! You can’t outskate the fashion police!!!

Da Squarls!

The Super Bowl is such a white hot event, that it can make stars out of just about any space dust that happens to get caught up in its gravitational pull.  This includes heroes like Joe Namath and Adam Vinatieri, goats like Jackie Harris and Scott Norwood, and can even make millionaires out of guys who happen to be in the right place at the right time like Larry Brown.

Thanks Al Davis for that big contract! Oh, thank you too, Neil O’Donnell, for making me your favorite receiver in Super Bowl XXX!

And while The Big Game has become so big now, that even the commercials are getting their own pre-game shows, one team took the reigns of Super Bowl fame to heights not seen before or after during a more modest era in the game’s history.  In 1985, the Chicago Bears managed to put one of the best teams ever assembled out on the football field… fielding a competent offense that was dominated by one of the greatest running backs in NFL history, which was more than good enough given that they were backed up by one of the stingiest defenses to ever set foot on the gridiron.  The Bears quickly began to make mincemeat out of their schedule, winning the first 12 games, and at one point in that stretch, allowing just 29 points in a 6 game span.  This certainly seemed like a team that was destined to win the Super Bowl…

And boy did they know it.  In the midst of that steamrolling run, the team recorded a rap video called “The Super Bowl Shuffle”… and you can see the boys strutting their stuff on this link.

No, we will NOT play “The Night Chicago Died”!

While it wasn’t quite the first of its kind, “The Super Bowl Shuffle” was one of the first songs to be written around a particular sports team… and inspired many, many, many imitations by other teams who thought they were bound for glory in future years.  It was also the first, and really still only sports team song to gain widespread nationwide popularity.  As the Bears stomped their way through two playoff shutouts in January 1986, the Shuffle even cracked the Billboard charts, peaking at #41.  The video that was shot along with the amateur rap made stars of the players involved in it even more than their accomplishments on the field did…

I’m the star of this team… can’t you tell by the shades?

I’m the punky QB known as McMahon
When I hit the turf I’ve got no plan
I just throw my body all over the field
I can’t dance But I can throw the pill

Jim McMahon was a mediocre quarterback with a huge ego who just happened to land on the right team that didn’t actually need his passing skills.  He somehow managed to stay in the NFL for 11 more seasons thanks in large part to the name recognition he got being the signal caller for the ’85 Bears.  If only the Chargers had managed to build a team like that around Ryan Leaf…

Damn, I’m hungry for a McDLT…

But even more ridiculous than the stardom foisted upon McMahon was the idolization of Bears rookie William “The Refrigerator” Perry, who became an even bigger household name in the mid 80′s than their Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton.  Despite his largeness and ultra cool nickname, he won his way into the hearts of America by being the world’s fattest scoring machine.  Apparently the Bears were too overconfident in their talents, and decided to show off by letting their 900 pound defensive lineman do a little rushing and receiving on the side.  He managed to score three touchdowns during the season, and one in Super Bowl XX that featured a Richter Scale triggering spike…

All the stolen video in the world wouldn’t help Bill Belichick stop this…

The big man who became famous for bellyflopping his way into the endzone had a combined nine yards of total offense in his career… which somehow lasted until the 1994 season.  The Fridge still rings bells among those who were alive in the 80′s to this day, and of course, he got to rap the last verse of The Super Bowl Shuffle…

Go for yours, Fridge!

You’re looking at the Fridge, I’m the rookie
I may be large but I’m no dumb cookie
You’ve seen me hit, you’ve seen me run
When I kick and pass we’ll have more fun
I can dance, you will see
The others, they all learn from me
I don’t come here looking for trouble
I just came here to do The Superbowl Shuffle

And speaking of names the ’85 Bears made famous, though he didn’t appear in The Shuffle, we can’t leave out this man….

You just just see the thrill of victory in Mike Ditka’s face…

Mike Ditka oversaw the rise of the Bears, and coached them throughout their dominating run from the mid 80′s through the early 90′s.  Ditka became a coaching legend almost overnight thanks to the success and popularity of the ’85 Bears, and is still a highly regarded and sought after name to this day despite all the failures he had after his Chicago days were over…

Ohhh, this may ruin your manly image, Coach Ditka…

Ditka moved on to New Orleans in the late 90′s and coached the Saints to three miserable seasons before getting axed, while at the same time totally ruining the team’s future by blowing an entire draft on one premier running back out of college who was more interested in scoring hits on the bong than touchdowns on the field.  If The Fridge hadn’t already hung up his defroster, no doubt he’d have been backing up Ricky Williams in The Big Easy, though it would be scary to think of The Fridge getting a case of the munchies…

Jim McMahon, The Fridge, and New Coke. It doesn’t get any more 80′s FAIL than that…

While the ’85 Chicago Bears may have been a little too big for their britches, and made many mountains out of molehills, we at The Nest admire their fun loving arrogance and narcissism that ensured they would be remembered even longer than Joe Montana’s more 80′s dominant San Francisco 49ers teams.  And of course, we are thankful for the awesome retro video memories that are evoked in watching The Super Bowl Shuffle.  While Da Bears may have only enjoyed one season in the sun, the sunburn that year inflicted on many of the personalities from that team lasted a lifetime…

Now before you go, fetch a plate of polish SAHsage and treat yourself to this video of the best of Saturday Night Live’s Superfans…

Had this been an actual emergency, possums everywhere would have attacked!

It’s a beautiful Spring day back in the 1980′s, the perfect time to be lounging around inside on the couch watching the tube.  You’re just sitting there, half paying attention to the program while playing on your smartphone trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, when all of a sudden your ears are viciously assaulted by the tone they play at the gates of Hell while some voiceover guy is reminding you that everything is just A-OK…

Congratulations!  You have just been brought to attention by a test of the Emergency Broadcast System!

These required tests used to scare the shit out of kids back in the day, and even adults had to get a bit of a chill down their spines every time they heard the infamous EBS tone.  What in the hell is the Emergency Broadcast System anyway, and why did it have to be tested so damned often?  This is not a test… the EBS system will be the subject of this week’s edition of Flashback Friday!

Take cover immediately!

Back in the 1950′s, atomic weapons and the rise of the Soviet Union as a world superpower created a perpetual game of chicken between the US and the USSR.  This in turn led to the public’s fascination with the fact that we could literally be wiped out in a matter of minutes were we to be nuclearly assaulted by that dreaded enemy communism.  We needed to know immediately when the bombs were coming so we could have time to wet our pants before we turned into a ducking, covering pile of cinders…

This is it, the apocolypse.

So the US Civil Defense Department, in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission, devised the old CONELRAD system… which when alerted would require all TV and radio stations to stop transmitting except for two designated AM radio frequencies where information on the national emergency would be broadcast.  CONELRAD was in effect from 1951 through 1963, when it was replaced by the much more familiar Emergency Broadcast System…

CONELRAD in action…

The Emergency Broadcast System was a more updated version of CONELRAD that when activated, alerted stations to broadcast a message directing viewers to tune into whatever the designated primary EBS station was in each media market.  It was designed to give the President a fast way to communicate to the public nationwide in the event of a national emergency.

You heard me, activate the Emergency Broadcast System! You’ll never believe what I just saw out of my window!

During the first few years of the EBS’s reign, stations were required to continue conducting weekly tests in the same method as was done under CONELRAD… which required turning their transmitters off, on, off, on, then broadcasting the attention signal, assuming the transmitter didn’t blow up from being turned off and on like that.  But beginning in 1976, the testing procedure changed to the one we are most familiar with today… and it went a little something like this.

Normal programming was interrupted to conduct the test (though it was usually slotted during commercial breaks)…

I think I may be in danger.

The station announcer would be heard announcing that the station would be conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System, and that it was ONLY A TEST!

Too late!!! I’m already on my way to buy six months worth of milk, bread, and toilet paper!!!

Then you would hear the infamous EBS tone for about 20 seconds that was intentionally designed to make your ears bleed.

It may have only been a test, but now it’s become an all out aural emergency!

The announcer would then come back on and, assuming you could still hear, would again remind you that this was ONLY A TEST, and that had it been an actual emergency, you would have been given “official information, news, or instructions”.  Yeah, like I’m going to listen to anyone who wants to assault my eardrums with that fucking tone.

This is a test of the Emergency Go Fuck Off And Die System. This is only a test…

Before returning you to somewhat normal programming, the announcer would then have to remind you what city they are broadcasting from, just in case you forgot where you lived.  And finally, the reassuring “this concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System”.  Well, if you didn’t know what city you were watching your TV from, you just might need help identifying when the annoying test was over…

Elementary, my dear Dumbass.

In 1997, the FCC got bored and wanted to create a new acronym, so they replaced the Emergency Broadcast System with the Emergency Alert System.  The EAS was superior to the EBS because it contained not just one, but two fucking annoying signals…

Great!  Now we get the old EBS tone sandwiched in between triplets of damn electronic crickets!  The nukes are going to be a welcome sight after having to listen to that every week for all eternity…

Here’s an interesting tidbit… in the 50+ years the United States has had the EBS/EAS system, it have never actually been activated for an actual national emergency.  Not once.  In five decades!  You mean all those tests and spine tingling tones were for naught?

You only did this just to fuck with us all, right?

And why should it?  Its original purpose was the give the President a quick forum to speak to the nation, as well as to provide a single broadcast that could be seen everywhere to swiftly brief the public on emergency events.  But really, who needs that nowadays with the 24 hour news cycle, media outlets rushing to be the first to report new information, and all of the amateur “reporters” that social media has made out of everyone.  Hell, you could probably find out about a nuclear attack on Twitter before the EAS could even finish its string of cricket calls…

GASP! Justin Bieber’s in trouble again! I’m being instructed to tune in to the CNN app.

Nostalgia isn’t just about the things that made the good old days so good, it’s also about the memories that were not so pleasant.  We at The Nest would like to thank the civil defense minded folks at the FCC who gave us the weekly intrusion known as the Emergency Broadcast System test by conducting a test of our own.  This is ONLY A TEST!  We would also like to remind you that The Nest serves the greater WordPress metropolitan area, and that had this been an actual emergency, official information, news, and instructions would have followed… like in this real EAS activation at a Montana station just last year that was the result of clever hackers:

This concludes this test of The Nest’s Flashback Friday Broadcast System.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

In lieu of tips, I’ll take Beggin Strips…

Pizza is one of those great American foods that I just don’t really care for, but a lot of other people sure do.  Pizza chains are a dime a dozen, and no doubt there’s probably about five to ten pizza places in your hometown who will gladly deliver their freshly baked wares to your door.  Heck, what pizza place doesn’t deliver?  For whatever reason, pizzas were declared to be more deliverable than burgers in styrofoam cartons or buckets of greasy chicken.  The pizza delivery man is practically a staple of American culture, and someone you don’t want to mess with.  Not only does he work for tips, but he has to do his job and do it fast…

This looks like a safe speed in this residential neighborhood…

Domino’s Pizza was one of the pioneers in the business of pizza delivery, and during the 70′s and 80′s, they were well known for their guarantee that if your pizza wasn’t delivered within 30 minutes of you placing your order, you got the pizza at no cost.  What a brilliant marketing concept!  Even if you can’t be bothered to start up the car and drive down to the pizza place, they will still ensure that you have a hot, delicious pizza sitting on your table within half an hour!  What could possibly be bad about that?

Thank you Domino’s for including the free appetizer for me!

Well, for one thing, it’s bad enough you put your drivers on a strict time limit where they might have to deliver a pizza five miles across town in less than ten minutes.  Combine that with the fact that many pizza delivery drivers were inexperienced teens and young men with lead feet, and it couldn’t have been a more toxic mixture for a road safety disaster if there was a bong built into the dashboard and the windshield was covered in unicorn shit.

Bombs away!

The wreckage and the bodies piled up for several decades, all in the name of fast, freshly delivered pizza.  Finally in the early 90′s, after two big multi-million dollar lawsuits against Domino’s involving crashes their delivery drivers got into, the chain dropped the guarantee… and we would assume, they also informed their drivers they no longer had to cruise through town like a maniac on crack…

Ummmm… didn’t we order this last week?

Yeah, right.  I pass by a Domino’s store on my way to work each night, and I still get blown by and cut off by their drivers all the time.  If you ever wanted to race cars for a living and get the adrenaline rush of going at high speeds on non-closed courses, but thought being a NASCAR driver was too dangerous, you should get into the booming world of pizza delivery.  And if you aren’t a fan of handling pizza, there’s another fast food chain out there that is carrying on the fine tradition of reckless driving that Domino’s started!

Mustangs so fast you’ll freak!

Jimmy John’s has become the new standard in “freaky fast” delivery that cares only that you get your sandwich in a very timely manner, and not for whatever collateral damage may arise from that.  Is it really that imperative that when we order food from a restaurant that we expect to have delivered to our home or office that it must arrive in two shakes of a possum’s tail?  If you’re that hungry, try looking in the icebox fridge for something edible, and if that fails, I’m sure mold is full of healthy nutrients.

Guaranteed to kill most forms of venereal disease.

We live in an impatient society, and because of that we will always have businesses issue speedy service guarantees, even if it means putting the public in grave danger to accomplish.  For that bold, forward thinking idea of putting customer satisfaction first and innocent lives second, we at The Nest would like to pull off the road and salute Domino’s Pizza for their classic 30 minute guarantee!  Thank you for feeding the hungry in the good ol’ U.S. of A. who couldn’t wait a few extra minutes to begin cramming pizza down their starving throats.  However, if you don’t mind, tonight we’re going to play it safe and just eat in…

And save on the tip!

There is no doubt about it that the 1985 movie “The Goonies” is one of the most loved and revered movies by those of us who grew up in the 80′s.  The fantastic tale of kids on the poor side of town looking to save their neighborhood by uncovering lost pirate treasure while being chased by a ruthless criminal family was an instant classic that didn’t need years of aging to become a cult phenomenon.  It was the kind of cinematic masterpiece that would naturally inspire one of the most fucked up 8-bit Nintendo games ever created…

Oh good! They made a video game based on… wait a minute! When did they make a sequel to The Goonies!?!?

The Goonies video game did what no other video game based on a movie had ever done before, and maybe hasn’t done since…. it declared itself the sequel to the movie!  The Goonies II never came to a theater near you, it only appeared on your NES if you were lucky enough to own this awesome game from the early days of the greatest video game system ever built.

As you might expect in a sequel, a few of the plot elements have been altered from the original.  In the video game, you play Mikey on a mission to rescue the other six Goonies from the clutches of The Fratellis, who have now gone into the lucrative child abduction business. They have hidden your friends in such remote places like underground caverns, frigid polar regions, and even in lava covered pits guarded by dragons…

Fire breathing and unbreathing dragons!!! Credit to the awesome C.K. Hope

If you thought a call to Child protective Services was in order, just hold on a minute because I haven’t even told you about the most dastardly thing the Fratellis have done yet!  They have kidnapped Annie the Mermaid!!!  Go ahead and rack your brain… there was no Annie in the movie, nor was there a mermaid, unless that scene got left on the cutting room floor along with the octopus that made Data wet his pants.  No, Annie is purely the product of the imagination of a group of Japanese game designers… and if you don’t believe me, take a look at her…

Look Mikey! No bra!!!

She couldn’t be more like a Japanese cartoon character if she were wearing Hello Kitty water wings and dressed like a schoolgirl with hair ribbons.  Well, OK, she’s pretty flat chested, a no-no in any good anime girl worth her fox ears.  But rescuing Annie is the ultimate goal of this game, and you’ve got to wonder what in the hell Mikey was thinking when he decided to go through with this quest.  Sure, you can rationalize that maybe he wants to save his friends, even his prick of a big brother.  But what does Annie hold over him?  Did One-Eyed Willy curse him to guard her for the rest of his life?  Is her cute pink hair that much of a turn on?  Does Mikey have a thing for mermaids that makes him lose all control?

WHEEEEZE!!! WHEEEEEZE!!!

So anyway, you start off in the Fratelli’s restaurant without so much as a wet noodle to hit anything with.  Don’t feel bad, Mikey… Link came unprepared for his quest too.

You stupid fuck! You’re lucky I happen to have a spare sword lying around.

Alas, Mikey isn’t old enough yet to be playing with swords.  So Konami gave him a weapon in the first room more appropriate for a child his age… a yo-yo.  Good luck slaying dragons and those fucking hopping skeleton things with a goddamn toy!

A well placed yo-yo shot can stop anything!

Along with collecting items in the various rooms by banging your knuckles against the wall or beating them down with a hammer, you’ll also run into an interesting assortment of people who apparently got lost a long time ago and just decided to just live deep under the earth rather than wander back out into the light…

That’s the same line he used on kids to lure them into his van before he had to hide from the police.

This old man will magically take you from place to place on the map.  Unlike in most other video games with optional warp zones that just took you to later levels, traveling through the warp zones on Goonies II was required to progress to otherwise unreachable areas of the game.

Well, you bitch! I’m armed with a yo-yo, you know…

This crabby old lady wearing a too-short kimono would pop up several times over the course of the game.  The one pictured above is a real piece of work… and the programmers know how much fun it is to try to assault the non-enemy characters in video games, and they actually allowed you to hit and hammer away at the dumbasses who dared to slow down your progress…

You’ve been bitchslapped!!!

Hit this particular lady five times, and she gives you a candle which lights up the darkened rooms.  Maybe next time she’ll learn to help me out before I have to put five hammer dents in her skull…

Put some pants on before you say something like that, prevert!

Konami Man was more than just a walking advertisement for the company that made the game… he would appear in random rooms, often accessible only by hidden doors, and refill your energy.  Unless you hit him, that is.  See, Konami Man’s a jerk and knows how to hold a grudge, and all of his identical twins that appear throughout the game stick up for their wounded brother… you won’t get a single bar of life from any Konami Man the rest of the game if you so much as lay a hand on one… no matter how fun it may be to punch him in his spandex drawers…

Au contraire! I see one douchebag in a fur coat.

If you want to go medieval on one of the bystanders, take it out on someone like Eskimo.  He only appears once, and has absolutely no function in this game other than to show Japanese sensitivity towards native Inuits.

Y.O.L.T.

This strange looking fish creature takes the place of the other strange characters in the underwater rooms.  If I was Mikey’s age and saw that, I’d be running for the exit and forgetting about saving any mermaids or stupid friends.

You hooking me up?

Finally, there is this poor geek who got lost on the way to ComicCon and wound up living in this room for the rest of his so-called life.  This game is great at giving you forehead slapping advice… at least for this tidbit you don’t have to waste a key in one of the many safes that can be found just to facepalm yourself.

So anyway, you trudge through the game rescuing the six trapped Goonies, who are oh so happy that you came along to let them out of their lonely prisons…

Holy shit… fuck you!!! See if I ever rescue your lame ass again!

They are all so happy to be freed, that they don’t even bother to help you out on your mission to save Annie or any of the rest of the gang.  Heck, I’m not even sure how they manage to get back out into the open.  This Goonie above (Who I always figured by the attitude was Brand) was locked up in one of the underwater rooms.  Mikey can’t even get there without the diving suit, which he has to traverse across every colored cavern in the rainbow just to find!  Maybe he got underwater breathing lessons from Annie…

OMG, you talk in hearts. Really? Aren’t you a little before your time to be a damn texter?

I haven’t talked much about the bad guys in this game, because there’s enough insanity that went into creating just the good guys.  But watch out for those Fratellis… especially that bastard Jake, because he’s somehow managed to clone himself….

Will the real Jake Fratelli please stand up? Please stand up? Please stand up?

However, your biggest enemy in this game is one that can’t even kill you.  When you pick it up in the ice cavern, you will quickly discover that the boomerang is far and away the best weapon in the entire game… yet there is one strange creature that looks like a flying hand that will munch your boomerang for breakfast.  They’re only located on the bridge, but you’ll have to cross the bridge several times over the course of the game.

Hand over the boomerang before I latch on to your one-eyed willy!

So anyway, you finally get to the end and it’s time to rescue Annie from her cell so she can go back to updating her Facebook status.  Here’s the room with the mermaid’s prison…

Jesus H. Christ! Isn’t that awful heavy security for a little, harmless mermaid? Charles Manson isn’t even held in a jail cell this strong!

Despite the ultra quadruple steel doors made to keep even a herd of elephants from escaping, the same keys that open the cheesy safes in this game will also open Annie’s cell.  And unlike the moody Goonies who are rather ungrateful that Mikey risked his life to save their pathetic asses, Annie is overly happy to see her red-haired rescuer…

Hmmm…. would this be considered interspecies love, or only halfway? Would it be legal in Russia or any red states?

By the way… ever watched a NASCAR race before and noticed how the drivers always make sure to get plugs in for all of their sponsors whenever they are interviewed?  Konami made sure this game was a lot like watching a NASCAR race…

Hurrah for Konami! Toyota! Dura Lube! And Rice A Roni, the San Francisco Treat!

What you accomplished was so super awesome, that the town of Astoria sends out its crack reporter Clark Kent to do a news story on a mermaid being rescued.  Something tells me this happened during sweeps month…

And that’s all on the great mermaid rescue! Now here’s Chip at the sports desk to tell us about the thrilling curling match between Belize and Bangladesh!

So there you have it… at The Nest, we feel that the NES game The Goonies II is just as much of a classic as the movie itself!  Just trade One Eyed Willy for Annie, Chester Copperpot for the weird room dwellers, and The Fratellis for….. more Fratellis.  And of course, if you made it through this entire post on this awesome game, you are probably asking yourself just how awesome it can be if it doesn’t have this man in it….

Baby Rooooooth!!!

Well, the only logical explanation for why Sloth was left out of the NES game is actually quite simple.  You may remember at the end of the movie how Chunk told Sloth he was coming to live with him.  Chunk never asked his parents if they wanted to spend the rest of their lives living with a seriously deformed, retarded man… no matter how kindhearted he may be.  We can only assume Sloth wound up being taken care of in a room not too unlike what the Fratellis locked Annie up in….

Me…. going…. to…. NUTHOUSE? But… Sloth… love…. Chunk!!!

No peeking now while I head to the potty! Heh Heh Heh!!!

So it’s been 5 weeks since I last posted a Flashback Friday post on my blog.  “What in the hell is up with that?”, you ask yourself as you move that cursor over to the unfollow button.  Well, first it was just the time I had on Fridays, and now it’s the ideas, or lack thereof.  After almost 50 FF posts, I’ve reminisced on quite a bit of the past already… and while there’s still much, much more nostalgia out there waiting to be lampooned in The Nest’s familiar style… it’s getting hard to find topics I already know enough about or that I can quickly research, while also being something I can make funny and entertaining.  Flashback Friday certainly hasn’t run its course… but it will probably no longer be an every week feature.  I apologize in advance.

Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?

That said, me and one of my friends from that other internet place I hang out at were chatting it up a few days ago, and the subject of antipodes came up.  If you know what an antipode is, let me assure you they generally don’t come up very often in my everyday conversation… this had to do with a trivia question on a game show, which is still a pretty shitty excuse for talking about antipodes.

Yeah, I’ve just been spending the day calculating the antipodes of each room in my nest…

An antipode is the spot on the other side of the earth you would end up at if you were to travel in a straight line directly through the earth’s center.  For much of the US, our antipode is in that deathtrap known as the Indian Ocean.  If you believed those myths about digging a hole to China, well, be lucky you didn’t act on it or you would have drowned instead.

Hey! I found the sweatshop that makes my doggie treats!

As I was trying to figure out the antipodes of the four capital cities listed in the question as it was presented, I commented on how much easier it would be if I had a globe.  It then occurred to me that globes seem to have become one of the forgotten items of obsolescence.  When was the last time you saw a real, honest to goodness globe?

Hey, where’s the firefox at?

I remember we used to sell globes at Mecca every year at Back To School time… but it’s probably been a decade since the last one rolled off of our shelves.  Kids don’t need globes anymore when they have instant access to all the maps they want on the internet.  A globe is kind of a bulky and awkward thing to have taking up space when it serves no purpose once kids get bored from spinning it around as fast as they can.

And you just thought it was your imagination that the days were getting faster.

I wonder if they even have globes in classrooms anymore.  I kinda doubt it, but it’s been a while since I was in school.  The last time I was in a classroom, there were no computers to be found.  Teachers had to take the class to the computer lab if they wanted us to do things on the Apple IIe.  And nobody in the class had a cell phone.  When I was in school, the only cell phones were big enough to be considered weapons and banned…

Hmmmm, that gives me an idea for having smartphones classified as weapons to keep them out of schools… but that’s for another post.

Remember those globes that had the physical ridges for the mountain ranges!  Those were a lot of fun to run your fingers across… unless I was the only one who ever had a globe mountain fetish.  These kind of globes came in handy for the blind if they were ever looking to traverse a difficult mountain range…

Oooh, I feel something sludgy! I must have my fingers in Lake Erie!

Lastly, to give this post a real Flashback Friday feel, let’s take a look at the role globes played in the awesome music videos of the 80′s!

Annie Lennox had one to spin around in “Sweet Dreams”

I traveled the world and the seven seas, whatever those are…

Asia used one in the very underrated video for their very underrated song “Heat of the Moment”

Hurry up, Europe needs to use the globe for shameless self promotion in their video too!

And the ever lovable Ringo has all kinds of fun with this globe in the video for Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”

Back off from my globe, Boogaloo!

And there you have it, a pseudo-Flashback Friday post on the good ol’ geography teaching aid, the globe!  Be sure to keep your globe on its 23 and a half degree axis, and store it in a cool, dry place.  No marking out countries we don’t like, scraping the ridges off the mountains, or doing donuts on the annalemma.  And study hard, because there will be a quiz on antipodes when you come back to class on Monday.

Geography geek fun for everyone!

Ahhhh, the good old days…

I was sitting out in my car this morning waiting for Long John Silvers to open for business when I was inspired to dig into my car’s personal archive…

Yes, it’s a rolling trash heap.

What, your car doesn’t have a personal archive like mine does?  That means you are either someone whose car isn’t very old, or you just like to ride in a clean machine.  I’ve owned my car now for 13 and a half years, and cleaning the junk out of it is something that rarely never crosses my mind.  It has become a veritable rolling Smithsonian, particularly when it comes to charting the price of gasoline in this area over the last decade and a half.

Yes, I have an armrest full of old, old, OLD receipts from gas pumps… and that’s what I decided to dig through this morning.  I knew exactly what I was looking for, and here it is for you to gaze at and reminisce about a simpler day and time….

Printed on genuine papyrus.

Yeah it’s faded out a bit… what would you expect from a relic that’s spent 13 years rotting and sweltering while hidden away in my car’s armrest?  But you can still make out the important details of it, and if you don’t have your spectacles on you, let me highlight them for you….

Woohoo!!!! Now that’s what I call a fill up!

I got this precious fossil fuel for a mere 93 cents a gallon on December 16, 2001!  Now, this was the Murphy’s gas station outside of my Mecca I worked at, and since I used a Mecca gift card, I got 5 cents off per gallon… but that still means regular unleaded gas was selling for 98 cents a gallon at that time.  I like to bring this up every time someone complains that gas hasn’t been under a buck in two decades.  People seem to forget that the price of oil, and subsequently gas, crashed and burned in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy in 2001… which was odd given the overwhelming fear at the time that gas would instead shoot through the roof.  This reprieve on our wallets lasted into the first week of 2002 before the price climbed back up into triple digits and never looked back….

Don’t worry… there is a loan officer on site for your convenience.

Alas, I don’t have a receipt from when gas was 65 cents a gallon in December 1998 because I didn’t have a car at the time… but I hope this little fossil I unearthed was both informative and satisfied your thirst for a blast from the past.  Oh heck, it isn’t even Friday, but since it’s been away for so long, let’s go ahead and brand this post….