Some Things Kids Growing Up Today Will Never Understand

After the popular "Technology We Grew Up With: On its Way Out" post back in February, I received a slew of suggestions for other ways technology has differentiated today's kids' experiences from our own. It's pretty incredible to recount the swiftness of technological change over the last 20 years. Things have very quickly become significantly more convenient, but they're also aging us at an equally rapid rate. While in other generations our childhood technological experiences should be reasonably well-matched to those of children ten years down the road, our own are proving dated and obsolete after a short period of time. Pretty depressing, right?

Not necessarily, it turns out. Nostalgia for the disputably existent "Good Old Days" is a thriving marketplace of discussion, ably summed up in the thesis "Kids today just don't understand." Just 15 years ago, we were right there with DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince lamenting the lack of understanding among parents. How quickly the "just don't understand" tables have turned. Soon we may not even have the energy to rap about it.

Before we all turn into old coots grumbling about our simpler lifestyles, let's take some time to bask in the glow of our once taken-for-granted but now nearly obsolete pre-2000s technology experiences:


Being Out of Touch (unreachable by phone, text, implanted homing device, etc)

Gone forever are the blissful days of being dropped off by a parent at the mall or movies with a quarter (a quarter!) in your pocket for emergency purposes. Instead, today's kids have the added mischief-thwarting stress of cell phone GPS tracking and parents' persistent text messaging. We've all but pet-style micro-chipped our children, ensuring that parents know of their children's exact whereabouts at all time.


Getting Lost

I'll admit this still happens to me, but mostly because my on-hand portable technology is far behind the curve. For the majority of us, finding our way from point A to point B is as simple as inputting the destination address and letting a robotically polite voice do the guiding. Even the worst case technological scenario involves a printout from an online map service. It's tough to recall a time when we relied on the more primitive "Take a right on Main Street"-type directives scrawled on scraps of paper during a phone call.


Not Knowing who's Calling When You Pick Up the Phone


Once upon a time, you could lift a receiver with a flutter of hope and mystery regarding the identity of the person on the other line. Today, whether it's a potential date or the automated call service from CVS pharmacy calling to remind you of a prescription pickup, you know before even accepting the call. Where's the intrigue and allure in that?


Calling MovieFone


Imagine never having the joy of hearing the jovial deep intonations of the MovieFone guy. Sounds pretty sad, right? Now multiply that sadness times every child out there today who will never experience the joy of MovieFone. Sad, right? A little? Okay, fine, it's not a huge loss, but I'll miss it nonetheless. It's been real, MovieFone guy.


Looking Something Up in the Encyclopedia


Or better yet, looking something up on an encyclopedia CD-ROM. Before the days of the internet, this seemed like a high-tech research breakthrough. We could search for articles, watch videos, listen to sound clips...you know, like what we do now every day with the internet.

Back in the 90s, when we had a query, it was actually possible to come up empty on an answer. A frightening notion, really. There was no Googling to get us out of a quandary. We could go to the library or phone a friend, but failing those options we might actually have to have to write things off as a mystery. When I think of how frequently I type into Google a question about how to get my dog to sit still (positive reinforcement and/or high-grade tranquilizers) or why I'm tired all the time (possibly anemia but more likely daily caffeine overdose,) it's frightening to imagine a time when I'd be resigned to not immediately identifying an answer.


Not Being Able to Place an Actor or Actress
It used to be a source of frustration to see a moderately familiar face in a TV show, movie, or commercial and not remember the 37 other shows in which you'd previously seen that actor. The unanswered question would haunt you, hanging over your head and enshrouding you in a state of generally distracted confusion for days at a time. These days it takes minimal effort to access the internet and putz around for a few minutes on IMDB. Sure, you might learn something, but you're left with that cheap feeling of not really earning it.



Finding a Number in a Phone Book

You know, those moldy old books that get stacked up outside your house or apartment building when you never bother to bring them in out of the cold? After all, why should you? They serve a pretty limited function these days outside of killing a good chunk of our dwindling forest populations. Any and all relevant contact information can usually be found online. Also, there's no real need to speak to an actual person now that an email can serve in its rapid-response stead. Why talk to a human being when some passive non-confrontational typing will do?


Renting a Movie


Pretty soon, I imagine they will just beam a movie directly into our retinas. I can't imagine what other way they could elevate the convenience of watching movies at home. We used to peruse a local video store, picking out physical copies of our intended films. Today, you can easily access any movie your little technology-savvy heart desires at the click of a remote control button. It's hard to imagine them making it more convenient, but I'm sure they'll find a way to do it. Whoever they are.


Partying like it's 1999


This is a major one. They really have no idea. Unless they plan on living another 990 years, these kids will never get that feeling that Prince so eloquently described through the art of song. Heck, to them, he's probably just the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as a symbol formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince. The words "Party over, oops, out of time" mean absolutely nothing to these kids. For shame.



It may not be much, but we've got to cling to whatever makes our generation uniquely us. Sure, it's just MovieFone and encyclopedias, but someday we'll be amazing our technologically superior grandchildren with tales of our cavemen-esque childhood existence. Unfortunately, they won't even get our well-timed Encino Man references. It's too bad, really, because I'm sure we could have set up some great ones.

So You Want to Start a Boy Band...

So you're interested in profiting off of the ignorant and as-of-yet unpubertized voices of photogenic young men. Congratulations, you've come to the right place. We're here to show you the ropes and tropes in your quest to ascend the Billboard charts. Had you thought to jump on the Boy Bandwagon 15 years ago, you would be well on your way to making easy millions off of the hard earned allowance money and babysitting profits of young girls. In today's music market, it's a bit more hit or miss, so try your best to adhere to the formula verbatim.

These tried and tested tips should set you on a path to exploiting aspiring juvenile singers. While we can't guarantee success, if you don't hit it big with this secret recipe, you've probably skipped a step somewhere along the way. Check your work and try again. It should all add up if you're doing it right.


Step 1. Hire Lou Pearlman or like-minded manager. Try best to avoid fraud.

Talent manager Lou Pearlman would make a natural first choice as a partner, but his money laundering and conspiracy charges may cause a hiccup on the road to your goal of wallpapering your guest bathroom with hundred dollar bills. If he's not willing to strike up the biz again for fear of setting off a court-appointed anti-boy band formation ankle bracelet, you can probably make do with a cheaper imitator. A Queens accent and noticeably Semitic last name can't hurt, though.


Step 2. Assemble a pack of harmony-prone teenagers

If possible, try to find a group of teens on the street who randomly but conveniently erupt in harmonious song. Failing that route, feel free to hold some open casting calls marketed at crazy stage mothers and former Mickey Mouse Club members. As a last resort, stage the audition process as a reality TV series. As a warning, the popularity of the resultant band will be fleeting, but you do get the added bonus of some fun televised in-house drama. All in all, sort of a tradeoff.


Step 3. Establish the stock characters:

Try your best to populate your newly formed boy band with some combination of the following prototypes:

The Sensitive One: It doesn't hurt to have one guy who exhibits general displays of feelings. Socially awkward and otherwise alienated teen girls eat that stuff up, so cast with their quiet desperation in mind.

The Baby: To effectively market your group to a wide age range of fans, keep your band demographic varied in age. "The Baby" is a necessary component, both for his help filling in on that high F note and his statistically adorable innocence.

The Bad Boy/Rebel: If the guy you've cast as the Bad Boy doesn't yet have any tattoos, feel free to adorn him with some ambiguous Chinese characters and a barbed wire ring around the bicep. He may also wear sunglasses at inopportune times,such as indoors where there's particularly dim lighting. He does what he wants; he doesn't need to follow society's rules about vision.

The Heartthrob: This is the guy you need at the center of every album cover to ensure the screaming young girls come out in full force. He may be a handful sometimes, but just try not to punch his teeth out. Those pearly whites will be paying your bills.

The Older One: To appeal to the full demographic of pop music listeners, it's always okay to have one out-of-place significantly older band member. Just give him a sort of big brother/fatherly role in every photo opportunity and no one will notice that he's 43.


Step 4. Commence ad nauseum photo shoots featuring matching outfits and comically serious expressions

Matching outfits display a sense of solidarity and unity, so your fans will know not to differentiate the band members as individual human beings. The serious expressions establish their reputation as legitimate artists. Just kidding, they just make awesome centerfold shots for BOP! Magazine.


Step 5. Amass Screaming Fans, preferably of the teen girl variety

Recruit a loyal army of young girls with supple vocal chords and a propensity to throw teddy bears and training bras onstage during a particularly soulful performance of your band's hit ballad. Bonus points if they'll cry on camera as they express their unwavering love and adoration for your act.


Step 6. Sell millions of records

This is the backbone of your operation, so invest most heavily in this step. No one really buys records anymore, so this is one of those steps that would have played out better 15 years ago. Nonetheless, you can't have a successful boy band without some sort of musical backup to justify your existence and fame...no matter how inconvenient it is to schedule those pesky recording studio sessions between photo shoots and autograph ops.


Step 7. Release incredibly expensive videos with high production values

Fear no special effect; they will prove invaluable on your quest to mass-marketing your boys' faces as a desirable product. This again may have worked better back in the days of Total Request Live when occasional music videos actually graced the airwaves of Music Television, but try your best to improvise with whatever's left of the genre's diminishing fan base.


Step 8. Decline in Popularity; attempt requisite comeback

Prepare yourself for the inevitable: your once fiercely loyal fans will eventually grow into some semblance of adults and will thus lose screaming interest in what you're peddling. As your popularity wanes, you may want to repackage your band to poise them for a late-breaking comeback. There are no guarantees, but the respect they command is too low to warrant a dignity-excusable cop-out. Milk this one for all it's worth.


Step 9. Hope for the best with members' respective solo careers and/or allow them fade quietly into obscurity

At this point, your boys are no longer boys, but over-the-hill 23-year old men--except the Father Figure guy, who's probably pushing 50 by this point. Some may choose the solo career path, though few will succeed. Others will go quietly into the night, but not everyone will settle for this quick relinquishment of fame. Those select few have several options, the most headline-grabbing of which are to come out of the closet, get arrested, or start a reality television series based on the antics of their colorful family. Choose wisely, though; they only get one shot at that People magazine cover, so we suggest encouraging your guys to tread carefully.


So there you have it: a foolproof formula to establishing and marketing your very own boy band. We're not really supposed to make this sort of sensitive information available to the general public, so consider yourself lucky to be among the privileged privy parties. We don't want this information getting into the wrong hands, of course. Well, not again. And again. Really, it keeps happening. Just be ready to apologize for your eventual fraud charges when they go public, okay? That's pretty much all we can ask.

More Fun with Children of the 90s Search Terms

There have been so many hilarious search terms popping up in my Google Analytics tracking data, I felt it was only fair to spread the funny around and share them with you. After all, haven't you ever wondered what make other readers and/or random internet lurkers like yourself curious about the 90s? What's that? No? You'd rather just reminisce about the 90s? Just kidding, of course you do. Due to popular demand, we're having another brief interlude to examine just how confused some of us 90s fanatics really are.

In the case of many of these terms, it seems the asker is simply misguided or possibly suffers from incredibly vague childhood memories. Others, though, are far more troubling. For one, it makes me want to build a makeshift time machine with suicide doors, gun it to 88, and knock out the guy who came up with the bright idea of teaching Whole Language in lieu of grammar in elementary schools. Clearly, many of us are still suffering from the unfortunate ramifications; if the frightening structure of some of these searches are indicative of our grammatical prowess, I'm about to invest in widespread remedial training.

Granted, we all behave differently when we think no one is looking. We act differently in the comfort of our own homes than we do in the presence of others. After all, we'd be far less likely to blast the Tom Jones and break out the Carlton dance if company was present. Google has granted us with a precious gift of insight into these innermost thoughts of our fellow 90s fans, and just what kind of nostalgiaheads would we be if we didn't accept and delight in that gift?

I appeal to you, fellow 90s fans, for help in decoding these Google quests. Between the lot of us, we've got to be able to provide these poor lost souls with some answers. If we can't come up with anything, well, then there's always mocking.



19 ninety's nickelodeon game show
I just really like this interpretive spelling; I propose we issue extra credit for number breakdown creativity.

90's cartoon that has a strong man that when changes back to a kid, green goo release
I'll need your help with this one, I'm drawing a blank. Admittedly the description is lacking in...everything. Mostly proper tenses and pronouns.

3 boys, brothers. blonde hair, young musicians from the 90s, who were they
First of all, they were Hanson. Second of all, I feel like you're giving progressive clues on a game show. What do I win?

1993 music video with kids wearing bee

Really? Just wearing a bee? That's it?

90's hair styles what were we thinking
Good question. Unfortunately, my crystal ball is in the shop, so I'm unable to ascertain the specific collective spirit of our innermost thoughts and feelings. I'm guessing you could probably search deep within yourself and find the reasoning, if you just believe.

are you afraid of the dark janitor
Maybe it's just the political correctness in me, but I'm reading this as racist. For shame, anonymous googler.

children running away from foster care movies in 90s

What do you think, were there really that many of these in the decade? Enough to warrant their own genre? It seems a bit suspect. Unless maybe they mean children who ran away from movies about foster care. In that case, this might be very serious.

fruit snack in the 90's that are made of noodles like a fruit

They're probably talking about String Thing here, but there's something to be said for the creative license in that description. Made of noodles like a fruit? Not noodle-like fruit, that might make some semblance of sense, but just noodles like an actual fruit. The comparison is baffling.

describe the types of lifestyle children live in the 9o’s and in the currant year that promoted fatness
We could probably start with the currant, the fruit is very sugary. Other than that, we've got an "o" instead of a zero in 90s, some very confused grammar, and the word "fatness." That word is pretty awesome.

compilations of awesomeness 90s
Look no further--you're already here!

edward scissorhands is so sad
Good point. No, really, I appreciate you sharing. I'm glad we had this talk.

oh we have that baby-sitter died
I don't even know where to start with this one. What? I guess it could be some very confused variation of Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, but it's really all over the place.

kid show that has talking plains on nickelodeon

Oh, I always preferred the ones with the talking mesas. As far as slope landforms go, they're pretty much tops. You know, elevation-wise. At least compared to the plains. I think I'd better stop while I'm behind on this one.

90s song can i get your number the one with the seven digits

I know the song you're referring to, but I can't help but love this misheard interpretation of it. Oh, that one. I was going to give you one with the area code included and/or my European access code, but then I was like, hey, just the seven. Got it.

dont you hate it when your eating a dunkaroo and the biscuit breaks in the
In the what? The what? The suspense is killing me now. And for the record, I totally do.

how many kids in the 90's didn't have a dad
Um, total? Worldwide? Fictional? You've really got to be a little more specific. I'd like to help, but you're throwing a two centimeter lure into a 343,423,668,428,484,681,262 gallon ocean. Yes, I just had to google "gallons in the ocean," so someone will probably be making fun of me on their Google Analytics search term round-up sometime soon.

90's cartoon which superhero usually says lets get dangerous
I just like the phrasing on this one...usually. Did Darkwing Duck occasionally forget his lines or have flash of creative discretion? Maybe sometimes he just didn't feel like it.


That's not even the worst of it, but I used my discretion in censoring the really obscene and/or absolutely non-native English speaker-generated content. If any of you know these answers, please, throw these poor souls a line. It's the least we can do. Well, actually, we could probably not do anything, so it's the second least we can do. Regardless, they truly need your help.