You know you are getting old when:

[GHT]

My Godson is cracking up. He didn't believe that schools used to have a regular visit by a nurse. She used to examine the kid's hair for lice. He checked this out with a quick search. What cracked him up was the nick-name the kids gave said nurse. In the UK head lice was more commonly known as nits, the nurse was known as Nitty Nora, the bug explorer.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We used to call her "Mrs. Cootie-Catcher."

 

[tonyb]

You know you're getting old when you remember when cheesy network TV used to be taken seriously.

A fellow I've known for something like 45 years, a fellow who has had a couple-three serious brain events over the past dozen years or so, a fellow with whom the fates have put me in close contact in recent months, passes most of his day watching a cable channel called COZI, which, as I've become more aware than I would ever have wished to, shows TV comedies and dramas dating from the 1960s onward, what we used to call "reruns" back when those shows were in production.

The Munsters I can handle, but I'm convinced that anything with Michael Landon in it causes brain damage.

 

[Harp]

The Munsters I can handle, but I'm convinced that anything with Michael Landon in it causes brain damage.

Leo Durocher appeared cameo as himself on The Munsters.
And Eddie Munster's mom was in The Ten Commandments, played opposite Charlton Heston as that
eminent Irishman, Moses. Moses was the first guy who broke all Ten Commandments, and he did it all at once.
Only an Irishman could have done that. Proving conclusively that the Irish are the lost tribe of Israel.

 

[EngProf]

A lot of sports stars and other famous people showed up on the old TV shows.
Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, and Red Barber were in the same episode of "The Phil Silvers Show" in 1957.
In the Yogi episode, Dick Van Dyke plays a baseball player in Sgt. Bilko's platoon whom the real baseball people are interested in. (Van Dyke plays a Southerner, and sadly demonstrates that he can't do a realistic Southern accent either - along with most Hollywood stars.)

One of the more interesting aspects of watching those shows is looking for people who became much more famous later.
For example, Warren Beatty was a semi-regular on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis". (And Maynard G. Krebs later turned into Gilligan.)

Aside from seeing the future-famous people, watching the old TV shows has convinced me that Eve Arden ("Our Miss Brooks") is/was 100% sexy.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Durocher started his show-biz career in radio during the early forties, appearing in guest shots on all the major comedy shows. He was already a major celebrity in New York as manager of the Dodgers, and his pal George Raft got him in with the show-biz crowd out in Hollywood. He was actually a very talented comic, who was willing to do any ridiculous thing he was given, and he was especially good in sketches with Fred Allen. Probably his best bit was a Gilbert-and-Sullivan parody with Allen, called "The Brooklyn Pinafore," in which he sang, quite credibly, in a loud, braying voice...(sketch begins at 14:17)

Leo became such a popular radio comic that there was serious talk of giving him his own show, until Branch Rickey, who considered show people one step up from cockroaches, warned him that he could be a radio star or a manager, but he couldn't be both. Later on, though, during his brief hiatus from baseball in the late fifties, NBC finally did give him his own show, a television variety hour, which proved to be a surprising fizzle.

 

[Harp]

Leo Durocher had a dark side and his off field reputation less than stellar. Ernie Banks had a somewhat
difficult experience with him when he managed the Cubs, ditto fans. My grandmother absolutely detested him.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Durocher was like what a Damon Runyon character would have been like if such a character had actually existed. Perhaps his definitive moment was the day he had an Ebbets Field heckler brought under the stands so he and a security guard could work him over with brass knuckles. During the game, yet. He's also a guy who seduced another man's wife on a piano bench -- said wife being ultra-wholesome movie starlet Laraine Day -- while that man slept in the next room. BRAND LIPPY LOVE PIRATE screamed the headlines.

If there is one personality of the Era whose excesses would simply not allow him to exist in the 21st Century, it's Leo Durocher.

 

[tonyb]

Sounds like Leo found the right time to be Leo.

 

[Harp]

Durocher was like what a Damon Runyon character would have been like if such a character had actually existed. Perhaps his definitive moment was the day he had an Ebbets Field heckler brought under the stands so he and a security guard could work him over with brass knuckles. During the game, yet. He's also a guy who seduced another man's wife on a piano bench --

If there is one personality of the Era whose excesses would simply not allow him to exist in the 21st Century, it's Leo Durocher.

Durocher exist he did, a smaller than life low life two bit bag of bones, sinew, and smart ass attitude.
He stood prosecution for assault and was acquitted, a miscarriage of justice small ball jack leg lawyering bit,
and he went through life with a slip and quip approach so characteristic of the male equivalent of slut.

 

[tonyb]

... he went through life with a slip and quip approach so characteristic of the male equivalent of slut.

That particular slur has become less gender-specific in recent years.

Some of my favorite people wear it proudly.

 

[Harp]

You know you're getting old when you realize it's been twenty-five years since you read your favorite novel. Can it still be called a favorite after such an absence?

I just finished Rebecca Meade reviews of her twin effort The Road to Middlemarch and My Life in Middlemarch.
The latter book I have given to a number of young ladies with Elliot's Middlemarch, hopefully they will
find both enchanting and kindle a flame for reading.

Meade reviewers include Joyce Carol Oates, an advocatus diabelli, a kid at Harvard, and Rachel Cooke
writing for The Guardian in London. Oates is a catty critic, cynicism underlies obligatory nod toward Meade,
Oxford grad and expatriate New Yorker. Harvard Review's kid picks up Oates' cynicism; also voiced by
Rachel Cooke, Meade's tale of Middlemarch lasting influence seen as ancillary appendage instead of
literary needful talisman. Be that as it may be, Meade makes a convincing argument for both Middlemarch
and her derived life benefit.

 

[Harp]

Although I hate to admit this, after-the-fact review of the Chicago Cubs Yu Darvish trade out
west to Southpaw California is becoming more digestible to my Irish peasant plebeian palate.
Lester ditto. Last season an intact Cubs team failed to win the World Series whose window here
had been kept propped open with 2x4s, bricks, chewing gum, tobacco chaw, spit, barbed wire tanglefoot.
A little more tanglefoot, punji stakes, anything to keep hope alive. Busted flush, no go, forget it,
not even gonna happen. And the front office needs to be keepin the eye on the ball, future stuff
writ large, writ small, and such trivia the fan base must also bear in mind with fortitude, panache,
slap some mustard on that dog Chicago. But, it must be stated. Owners must absolutely stop squeezing
fans like turnips for that last drop of blood. Put some skin in the game. And I mean ass-skinning.
Fans pay the freight and our absence from the ballpark shows a loss of the game's bloodstock.
The noise, singing, moans and groans fire heart and soul. That's fan power. Show some respect.

 

[Trenchfriend]

In the 2010s, it's "Gamer"

In the 90s, we called it still "Addicted".

 

[Seb Lucas]

When people tell you they love all the old classic songs on the radio and there's nothing there older than 2009...

 

[LizzieMaine]

A radio station today playing '80s music is equivalent to a radio station playing '40s music in the 70s, except the latter was much, much better. As long as they didn't play any of that postwar slop.

 

[Harp]

A radio station today playing '80s music is equivalent to a radio station playing '40s music in the 70s, except the latter was much, much better. As long as they didn't play any of that postwar slop.

Chicago had a number of regular Big Band era radio gigs, usually weekend fare catchable Saturday
or Sunday nites. Gone now, of course. WGN 720*AM was a favorite and its host, a WWII vet had spent
time inside a Stalag POW camp. A Toronto radio station plays the era Sunday eves 8-9pmCST.
If the signal is good, it is clear and wonderful.

 

[Zombie_61]

A radio station today playing '80s music is equivalent to a radio station playing '40s music in the 70s, except the latter was much, much better. As long as they didn't play any of that postwar slop.

There is an "oldies" radio station here in the Los Angeles area that has decided "oldies" is defined as any "popular" music that is approximately 30 to 40 years old. One of my fellow employees at a company I worked for in the mid-1980s was a fan of that station, and at that time they regularly played music by artists who were popular in the 1950s--Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Buddy Holly, and so on. I recently stumbled across this station (which I had all but forgotten about) and now that we're in 2021 they're playing "hits" from the 1980s--mostly Eurotrash garbage that my wife and I and friends used to dance to when we were first married. If I never hear another computer programmed synthesizer in my life it'll be too soon.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Ugh. European computer disco. Glad that is (mostly) gone.

On Spotify I put together a 1940s playlist. My college-aged daughter thinks it is the coolest thing!

 

[Rats Rateye]

I was going through the drive-through at McYuck and ordered a burger with no cheese. But as the window opens one of the young guys yell,"Hey! Who ordered this quarter pounder, no cheese?!". That's when I heard one of the little punks yell his scathing reply, "I don't know dude! Some OLD GUY at the window!"..... That's when I suddenly realized that they were talking about me! Now mind you, I've dressed vintage for a long time, even during the humid summers. So a white t-shirt, a nice cotton or linen button down? Maybe a vintage vest? I mean, such wears weren't uncommon for me. However! The kicker is that when this traumatic experience occurred, I was only "twenty-four" at the time... TWENTY-FOUR! I mean, I was still getting "carded" sometimes. But WOW! Talk about a shock.