You know you are getting old when:

[scottyrocks]

You know you're getting old when you have so many pairs of current and slightly out of date readers that they are all over the place.

At least I can always see something.

 

[2jakes]

No longer wear as much the RayBans with the wire cable earpiece.
These are more comfortable.

 

[Zombie_61]

Well, if you actually had some weather, it might be different.

I can't disagree, but I like it this way. At least we wimpy southern Californians don't need a completely different wardrobe for every month of the year.

 

[GHT]

You know you're getting old when you have so many pairs of current and slightly out of date readers that they are all over the place.

At least I can always see something.

You're psychic, I have a pair in the kitchen, another in my office, a pair beside the TV, another in the car, probably a lot more too, if I could remember where I left them.
You know that old gag about your back going out more than you do? Well for me it's memory, but only short term memory. Just as an exercise, after a frustrating time trying to remember something, I concentrated on all my classmates when I was five years old. I could remember every name of the kids that sat within the vicinity of my desk. Mea culpa time. The boy next to me wasn't all that bright, he used to copy my work, so I set a simple trap. We had to write down three lines of three digits that the teacher had written on the board and then add them up. My memory is not so good as to remember the sums that day but I do remember that if the first line was 5 7 7. I wrote 7 5 5. Instead of copying the problem from the blackboard the silly boy copied it from me. Having seen what he had done, and as we all wrote with pencils, I simply changed my copy back to 5 7 7. The look on his face was a picture as our teacher was checking our answers. "You are right Joseph," teacher said. "Joseph beamed. "Now take your work and copy it onto the blackboard so that you can show others how it was done." Poor Joseph, wicked me.
Now where did I leave my specs?

 

[EngProf]

I can't disagree, but I like it this way. At least we wimpy southern Californians don't need a completely different wardrobe for every month of the year.

"... a completely different wardrobe for every month of the year." Come to Nashville and you'll need several different wardrobes per WEEK.
On Monday of this week I was wearing a heavy parka, thermal underwear, hat with chin flaps, and thick gloves. Tomorrow I plan to wear a long-sleeve shirt with no jacket. On Friday it will almost be back to parka weather.
The nightly weather reports here give the next-day temperature profiles at ~2-3 hour intervals. A 30-40 degree temperature fluctuation from morning to afternoon is not that unusual.

 

[2jakes]

Btw, in my neck of the woods it's not unusual to have 4 seasons occur in one day!

 

[GHT]

One of life's mysteries to me has been the tantalising question of why the ladies measure their bras by cup size. Now, here I am, in my dotage, and I have just found out the answer. It always comes to he who waits:

 

[2jakes]

You know you are getting old if you know
what this is or the tune from the ad on TV.

 

[Zombie_61]

You know you are getting old if you know
what this is or the tune from the ad on TV.

And can remember when they were made from metal instead of plastic. The same could be said for Tonka trucks.

 

[LizzieMaine]

You know you're really old when you used one of those, not as a toy, but as a shortwave radio antenna. Made Radio Moscow boom in like a local.

 

[redlinerobert]

...you hop in the elevator in your hotel in Las Vegas, and the two young, scantily clad women you're sharing said elevator with look at you the way they'd look at their grandpa...

 

[2jakes]

You are definitely old when you see this:

and this comes to mind...

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

...you hop in the elevator in your hotel in Las Vegas, and the two young, scantily clad women you're sharing said elevator with look at you the way they'd look at their grandpa...

The effect is multiplied when you realize that the women are actually guys. This has happened to me in Vegas and New Orleans.

 

[Fading Fast]

You know you're really old when you used one of those, not as a toy, but as a shortwave radio antenna. Made Radio Moscow boom in like a local.

Was that radio for USSR citizens or did the USSR broadcast its version of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty to America?

 

[LizzieMaine]

It was an English-language overseas service -- every country had one in those days. You could travel the world without leaving your chair just by scanning up and down the dial, and you never knew what you'd come across. That whole era ended by the early 2000s -- there's still a few stations broadcasting in English on shortwave, but most of them are either bizarre conspiracy-hound things, extreme religion, or Radio Havana Cuba.

 

[HanauMan]

Was that radio for USSR citizens or did the USSR broadcast its version of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty to America?

The USSR, as did most eastern European countries, had their versions of propaganda radio frequencies aimed at the west as we had ours aimed at them. I used to tune into Radio Moscow when I lived in Europe as a teenager using my dads radio (a Zenith Trans-Oceanic which I still have). I used to try and get radio stations back home, find an English language station and listen to it, trying to ID where it was broadcast from. 9 times out of 10 it would be a eastern European, Russian or Nordic station in English. The only US station we had was AFN though I sometimes tuned into the BBC and, also, the West Germans would broadcast in English on some frequencies. Depending on the weather I could pick up middle eastern radio stations (usually ID'd because of the Muslim music being played) and, rarely, I'd pick up China and, only once, Vietnam. To be fair, whether it was Radio Moscow or Radio America, it was pretty boring to listen to. In between the radio stations you'd hear things like morse code, pilots talking, even military chit chat. The hours I spent trying to pick up US FM stations before I found out that they wouldn't be heard from where we lived. But it was fun.

 

[Fading Fast]

It was an English-language overseas service -- every country had one in those days. You could travel the world without leaving your chair just by scanning up and down the dial, and you never knew what you'd come across. That whole era ended by the early 2000s -- there's still a few stations broadcasting in English on shortwave, but most of them are either bizarre conspiracy-hound things, extreme religion, or Radio Havana Cuba.

The USSR, as did most eastern European countries, had their versions of propaganda radio frequencies aimed at the west as we had ours aimed at them. I used to tune into Radio Moscow when I lived in Europe as a teenager using my dads radio (a Zenith Trans-Oceanic which I still have). I used to try and get radio stations back home, find an English language station and listen to it, trying to ID where it was broadcast from. 9 times out of 10 it would be a eastern European, Russian or Nordic station in English. The only US station we had was AFN though I sometimes tuned into the BBC and, also, the West Germans would broadcast in English on some frequencies. Depending on the weather I could pick up middle eastern radio stations (usually ID'd because of the Muslim music being played) and, rarely, I'd pick up China and, only once, Vietnam. To be fair, whether it was Radio Moscow or Radio America, it was pretty boring to listen to. In between the radio stations you'd hear things like morse code, pilots talking, even military chit chat. The hours I spent trying to pick up US FM stations before I found out that they wouldn't be heard from where we lived. But it was fun.

Growing up in NJ in the late '60s/'70s, I was excited when I picked up an Ohio or North Carolina station - little did I know I should have been aiming higher. I would have been thrilled out of my mind to have picked up something from Europe or - holy cow - the USSR.

It's odd how it gave you a feeling of connection to hear a station from Ohio basically saying the same things and playing the same music that your local stations did. That said, when you would hear some local news and advertising from, say, the Ohio station, it felt almost like eavesdropping.

Ah, what kids did before the Internet brought everything right to them.

 

[HanauMan]

I would have been thrilled out of my mind to have picked up something from Europe or - holy cow - the USSR

It wasn't that exciting. They really did go on a lot about tractor production numbers and new factories and dams. Plus a lot of political Workers' Paradise stuff that went right over my head.

You know what, I'm going to drag out that old radio and check out the airways today, just for old times sake.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I always enjoyed "Moscow Mailbag," which had a rather puckish sense of humor in the way it answered listener letters on the air. I was always afraid to write in, though, for fear my name would end up on a FBI watchlist. Of course, by now it probably already is.

There was a lot of interesting stuff on the shortwaves you weren't supposed to hear -- coded Mossad spy messages, clandestine CIA stations, pirate broadcasters, raw news feeds, mysterious radar sweeps, and radioteletype signals that sounded like some kind of weird, garbled outer-space transmission. And if you were a baseball fan, you could tune in to AFRS for their relays of baseball broadcasts hosted by "Ken Allan In Washington." These picked up the regular local broadcasts of selected teams, but with all commercials blacked out with bits of news or sports scores. It was always entertaining when Ken Allan was late on the stick, and you got to hear a small bit of commercial sneaking in.

The religious crackpots were rampant on shortwave then too. Harold "End of the World" Camping was a very prominent presence with his "Family Radio," but the real howler was "Pastor Gene Scott," who would lean asthmatically into the mic and order his followers to call in with donations. "You better get on those phones RIGHT NOW!" Those who think the internet lunatic fringe is something new didn't own a shortwave radio forty years ago.

 

[NattyLud]

I don't know much about radio, but I once got a crystal set kit for Christmas, and it was a truly magical experience to put that together and [faintly] receive voices from distant broadcasts. My home was usually very quiet and empty, and this had the effect of bringing a party right into my bedroom.

In the age of Snapchat, truly prehistoric...