That awkward moment when the doctor shines that light in your inner ear, and you take your glasses off so he can better see in there.
Also … it makes me feel really old when they give me that cheery thumbs-up and say “Stay active!!” I liked it a lot better when I was a young man and they were all like, JESUS, SLOW THE F*** DOWN.
Fun fact — I actually broke those very same glasses when I got home by sitting on them. So that’s sort of an O’Henry ending for our story today.
This popped up on Twitter the other day. Behold one of the biggest pains-in-the-ass of my childhood.
As you can see from my response, we called these “hitchhikers” on my native Long Island. A lot of people from the northeast chimed in that they likewise remember the appellation.
People elsewhere know them as “travelers,” “stickers,” “bindies” and (drum roll please) “Satan’s Spurs.” That last one is truly inspired.
Meep meep.
Somebody please tell me I did not graduate from college almost 30 years ago.
(Without any jokes about my diploma being fake because I can totally see that one coming.)
I just refuse to believe it. That’s how it works, right? Fake news?
Welp. I guess I’m “old as shit.” Cap guns weren’t even really an 1980’s toy, as far as I remember. They’re something that I mostly associate with the tail end of the 1970’s. Oh, we definitely played with toy guns in the 80’s — every kid had a rifle to grab in case a game of “army” broke out. But we didn’t bother with caps by that age. (And Wikipedia tells me that the toy’s popularity declined along with the popularity of cowboy TV shows in the 1970’s.)
There also seems to be some confusion out there about whether cap guns are legal. They’re fine — just so long as they’re manufactured with an orange ring at the end of the barrel, so that authorities can tell that it isn’t a real gun. (That law was passed in 1988, and it seems like a good idea.)
Cap guns aggravated the hell out of adults. (The only more pernicious gift for a child was a musical instrument.) For you millennials who are unfamiliar with the toys, there’s a breakdown of how they work at this theatrical weapons site. (But it does make the toys sound a hell of a lot more dangerous than I remember them. Yikes.) The caps contain an explosive mixture called “fulminate;” we kids thought it was actually gunpowder. (And we wondered whether it was possible to make a cannon if you carefully dissected and emptied a million caps. None of us ever got around to so time-consuming a project, despite its allure.)
My older brother had a replica antique cap pistol; I thought that was pretty neat. I’m pretty sure it is the one at bottom right in this picture.
It looks like the kind of thing that you could only buy at a Disneyland or Disneyworld gift shop? Come to think of it … there were a few items in our house growing up that inexplicably were Disney theme park stuff. (That’s where that totally awesome Randotti Skull came from.) I’m starting to think maybe my parents took my siblings to Disneyworld without me. Maybe it was that one week they sent me upstate to my aunt’s house.
Photo credit: By Hmaag – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76166977
I try not to give in to peer pressure. But I just need to store classified documents at my home because EVERYBODY’S doing it.
And in the endless clownish ignominy that defines my mid-life, I now realize I cannot work a handheld can opener.
WTF, is it wireless?
Why is there a button? Why is there a button?
You can DO this, Scott Lang.
You’re ANT-Man, not Can’t-Man.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 