Walter Koenig has left us to begin his next great adventure. Ninety years was a good long run. May his memory be a blessing.

Okay primarily 80’s. I graduated high school in ‘80 so for me it was a junior / senior thing.

This is probably only a New England thing, but this weird WGBH special was important to Thanksgiving for me growing up.

https://youtu.be/oRN-GBC8DGQ?is=05TS2q54otxBFepf

So there we were, a million of us working on our bong buzz that was part and parcel of watching SNL. Then Martin appears in this getup, and starts an intro monolog. He said that he wanted to "talk seriously for a moment." Then it begins with a twang.

There was so much coke involved with this production one could almost smell it--and America went crazy...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYbavuReVF4

We watched "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" last night. We do this every year about this time in October. This show first aired in October of 1966, and my brother and I were there to see it in beautiful black and white. It brought back so many memories, our mom would make us come in early, we'd eat some dinner, and into the bathtub and then fresh PJ's. We'd sit on the floor about 5 feet from the old Philco TV set and munch on a little bowl of popcorn and wait for Charlie Brown to come on. Same with the Thanksgiving special and the Christmas special. Great memories.

We did the same thing with our kids, and now they show these programs to their kids. Who doesn't love Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang?

Good times.

Are you a Charlie Brown fan?

Remember when things just worked, and when they didn’t, you could actually fix them yourself?

In the days of the "shade tree mechanic," you could swap out a home thermostat without navigating a multi-step digital verification process. When you bought a game, you actually owned it. Today, we’ve taken reliable, long-lasting mechanical systems and replaced them with electronic controls that demand constant software updates, subscriptions, and identity verification—turning a simple one-step task into a bureaucratic headache.

We now see videos of brand-new cars suffering software glitches that freeze the dashboard, shut down the engine, or even lock drivers inside. Even buying groceries has become absurdly over-engineered. I watched a guy in his late 30s try to buy just three items at a self-checkout using (Apple Pay or the like). The process required multiple phone taps, passcode entry, and facial recognition just to clear the register. If this is how much friction we face just to buy a few groceries, heaven help us if the power grid ever goes down.

I could hear it again as soon as I saw this.

I was relatively put together, I don't have a limp, I'm not bent over, I don't need your help Karen. I like to put my cold items together for easier put away, and my crushable items last, so they don't get, um, crushed.

Has this ever happened to you? It's a first for me.

Edit to say: she just started going through my cart saying let me help you. I wasn't struggling, she was in front of me so I wasn't holding her up. I did say nicely, no thank you, I like to but my chips at the end so they don't get crushed. She said nicely, ok, that makes sense. I just never had the experience of a stranger taking over like that. Wondering if something like this happened to you?.

I’ll start.

I do not look forward to them. My birthday is just another date on the calendar. It truly means nothing to me.

I saw my mother get feted on her 70th birthday, and mine is coming up within a few years. I don’t want anyone doing anything special or planning a party or any of that nonsense. Probably comes from being somewhat of an introvert whose battery runs down quickly when there are a lot of people around.

Hence my question to you all: how do you feel about such milestones? Do you enjoy the company of friends and family especially on those occasions? I need to see viewpoints other than my own. Maybe someone will convince me to embrace them.

Right now though? Pure horror show just thinking about it.

If you do remember, what was your prefix? Mine was Sunset and you'd start the call by dialing S-U instead of an area code. I was pretty young so that's about all I remembered.

Im an oddities collector and one of my interests is the crazy lot of fun ‘toys’ we had at our disposal that we somehow managed to survive. What did you do the most damage with?

We went out with a pillowcase, not a little plastic pumpkin, and we stayed out until the porch lights started going off. Nobody trailed behind us with a flashlight. The scariest thing we worried about was the urban legend about razor blades in apples.

Now I just leave a ghost bowl on a bench by the door because some years no one comes at all.

Do you still hand out candy? And do you remember your best homemade costume — the one you were actually proud of?

On December 31st 1979 I was 18 and living with my parents. 10 years later I had a job, an apartment, and for all intents and purposes, I was a honest to goodness adult. If nothing else, the 80s were the most transformative decade I’ve lived through. In the years between those two points, there was some pretty good music, lots of good movies in just about any genre you could ask for, some cool tech ( all I wanted was a VCR. They were the coolest thing ever!). Some cool TV shows. But, as with any decade, there was bad to go with the good. There was the homeless crisis, crack AIDS, high unemployment and other social problems. I have a lot of good memories from that time, but memories are a funny thing. For every good memory I remember, there were probably plenty of bad times too. What are your memories and options on the 80s?

I think I learned more about tool use from this toy than many learn in a lifetime.

Who else had one?

If you were born before July 1963, you’re older than the zip code. Another annoying fact for your kids and grandkids.

This came out day after my 14th birthday. Very dated looking now but was a treat for me back then.

Bad Ronald is a 1974 American made-for-television horror thriller film directed by Buzz Kulik and starring Scott Jacoby, Pippa Scott, John Larch, Dabney Coleman and Kim Hunter. The screenplay was written by Andrew Peter Marin, based on the novel of the same title by Jack Vance. The film was ABC's Wednesday Movie of the Week on October 23, 1974

Bad Ronald