Edumacation

There is this bizarre notion in education that rote learning is unnecessary and harmful to children.  I went to a gifted school and we had multiplication drills, spelling tests, history tests, science tests. When I was in grad school, teaching math, kids couldn't do basic math without a calculator, couldn't spell... I don't know what they knew about history or science, but I'm guessing not much. I think it's great to encourage creative thinking in kids, but there just is a certain amount of rote learning you have to do before you can successfully move on to a higher level of study.

Time Travel

According to scientists, time travel is possible, but only forwards.  So, instead of going back and warning people about Hitler, we can just go ahead and then comment on what a nightmare everything has become (spoiler: it will just get worse from here on out). Something I did as a joke once (because I am a strange person) was to run up to a man on the street and yell "what year is this?" and after he told me (I think this was 2012) said "oh, thank God, there's still time" and ran away.  I hope to this day that he tells his friends he met someone from the future who prevented some sort of catastrophe.

Sasquatch

The notion of Sasquatch is one of the weirdest legends (I would say "urban legend" but it precedes urbanity) ever.  If one of them ever existed, they would have discovered one of their skeletons eons ago. I mean, we know about the Dodo, a bird that existed on a remote chain of islands in the Indian Ocean and that died out 400 years ago.  But somehow we have no empirical evidence of a giant hairy ape man that exists in the mountains of the West Coast to this day?

The Baseball Song

I have always found it slightly bizarre that one of the traditions of baseball is the 7th inning stretch, in which everyone stands and sings Take Me Out To The Ballgame, a song about... the experience of going to a baseball game. It would be as if between the third and fourth quarters of a football game everyone rose and sang Huzzah For Football.

Beardiness

I grew a beard in 2002, and at the time it was considered really "edgy". I worked at an insurance company at the time and I later found, when I quit, that the CFO of the company thought it was a fireable offense, and that I was only spared by the head of my department (the actuarial department) intervening and pointing out that a number of employees had goatees and mustaches and that a full beard wasn't that far removed from those things.

And now... everyone has a beard. I went to the bank the other day and the teller had a beard longer than mine, which would be unthinkable ten years ago. Disneyland, which is notoriously conservative about the appearance of their employees, recently permitted men to have beards.

I once read something that said in times of prosperity, men and women became more androgynous and that in less prosperous times they would revert to standard gender norms.  This would explain the 90s, when every guy had long or shaggy hair, or dyed hair, and girls had bobs or even shorter hair (I even knew a few girls who shaved their head) and the present day, when most guys have short-cropped hair and beards and most girls have shoulder-length hair.

Vinyl not Vinyls

I started collecting vinyl records in the 90s because I could pick them up in thrift shops for $1 a piece. Huh? This record with a song I like? To quote Robocop (the good, original one) "I'd buy that for a dollar."  Then through much of the 2000s vinyl versions of records were cheaper than the CD versions. Then they became millennial fetish items and it was like $10 for the CD version, $25 for the vinyl. And you have bullshit stuff now like comedy albums coming out on vinyl.  Really? Your jokes are going to sound better on vinyl than just downloaded?  Also, the plural of vinyl is vinyl, not vinyls, ya know, kind of how the plural of sheep is sheep, not sheeps.

Under The Skin

Under the Skin is sadly known to most of the internet world as the movie where ScarJo gets totes nude.  Which is unfortunate because it's a really amazing movie about how alien most people seem to other people.  We all sort of feel like we live on a planet surrounded by people we mostly don't understand.  And it has an incredible soundtrack by Mica Levi, a rare female avant-garde composer (most modern avant-garde composers are male) that is appropriately unnerving.

https://vimeo.com/97853822