My Wife's Seventh Graders

[luke]

So am I gonna see you on Conan? Did whacky plant in the audience sit by you? Did you hit on ndy's old lady?

[rockysigman]

This was on Tuesday that I went to that taping, and it aired that night. My seats weren't anywhere that would get on camera (in fact, my friend actually was sitting right behind the camera for much of the show, so that sort of sucked).

[Galactus]

But you did hit on ndy's ladyfriend?

[rockysigman]

Um...yes?

[luke]

Another "generation gap" type thing. My wife sees this kid with an Apple sticker on her notebook and says, "You have a Mac?" and the kid goes, "What's that? No, this is the iPod symbol."

[dolly]

Geesh, Mac? Get with it Mrs Ekul!

That's cute that your wife's kids stick Apple logos on their books. I found an assortment of Dr Dre lyrics, gang symbols and marijuana leaves all over my year 10 groups the other week - little Eminem wannabes who don't realise that the black kids are laughing at them thinking they're all 'G'.

I made the skinny little white boy (who had previously been suspended for stealing a laptop from my room) cover his. I'm cool with the Dre lyrics. Might even ignore the pot leaves if one of the same class hadn't been discovered to be dealing to some Year 7s the other month. Seems my 'Business Enterprise' has been successful - if only I'd been able to give them a few crim law pointers in time too.....

[Kensterberg]

luke said:

Another "generation gap" type thing. My wife sees this kid with an Apple sticker on her notebook and says, "You have a Mac?" and the kid goes, "What's that? No, this is the iPod symbol."

I feel so old ... I was in the first freshman class at my high school to have a "computer lab" ... filled with Apple II computers w/green screens. We were so excited b/c these computers would have 16K of memory instead of the 8K that the demo we were shown had. Just think what you could do with 16 kilobytes of memory to work in!

Obviously, that was back in the days when the Apple logo had a few more colors in it, and a "notebook" was spiral bound and you wrote in it. Laptops were for cats or kids ... and a net was something used for fishing, or chasing butterflies!

OK, I guess after that last post I don't just feel old, I AM OLD!

[Galactus]

I remember reading about how awesome 32 bit graphics would be. They were too.

[chrisfan]

Ken, you forgot the neat little boxes we all got to carry around with our discs ... the ones that computers would not work until we inserted and re-booted. The big discs that actually were floppy.

[Galactus]

MS-DOS ruled!

[Galactus]

DOS discs made me feel like a hacker because you had to type C:/DIR and stuff. It was awesome.

[Kensterberg]

ded said:

I remember reading about how awesome 32 bit graphics would be. They were too.

[Grampa Simpson rant]

32 bit graphics? When I was a kid, we didn't even have 32 COLORS on our computers. We just had two colors: green, and NOT green, also known as black! Didn't have any of those fancy grey-scales either, just GREEN and BLACK, and we LIKED IT that way. Yep, two colors, that was all you needed to play Space Invaders and Defender ... or at least the Apple II ports of those.

[/Grampa Simpson rant]

[luke]

What's sad is I can remember using those floppy discs with the Apples you had to reboot all the way up to high school, way past their expiration date. Now schools are equipped with all kinds of top of the line stuff that just came out...

[luke]

Christy

I described this girl over on Family and Friends in a rant on overly developed young teens. One of my wife’s favorite students, one of the more intelligent and art oriented ones.

Girl’s favorite band is Nirvana, and she’s probably a bit of an indie kid in training. She asked my wife to burn her a CD of stuff “not on the radio”, so I’m probably going to do the job. My wife burned some little punk rock girl a CD of favorites last year, but scared the girl off a bit with a mix full of Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Social D, etc. That was kind of the point, though.

This kid is into all the Cobain conspiracy stuff some of us were into back in those days, and wrote in some “if you could go back in time…” writing assignment that she’d go back to 1995 and “tell Kurt Cobain that Courtney Love was going to kill him.” Wife wrote on her paper, “You’d be a little late there, Christy.”

So I’m burning this girl a double album of Old School and New School. It’ll start where rock began- with the Talking Heads or the Clash, one or the other- and end with something maybe as recent as a catchier tune off the new Built to Spill or some Pipettes or something.

My rules here are: no sex references, no cussing, and just about everything has to be as catchy as possible to please the ear of a 13 year-old girl.

I’m going to throw some stuff on there to keep her in her comfort zone- some Soundgarden, some STP- but she’s also going to get tested with some Joy Division, some Smiths. I figure with all that She Wants Revenge they’ve been putting on the radio, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” won’t be TOO big of a leap.

Also keep in mind that this girl was seven years old at the turn of the millennium, so yes, a band like Radiohead is indeed going on the Old School disc. Most everything on the New School disc will be post-2000.

She’s getting hit with all of Cobain’s contemporaries and some influences, but only catchy stuff- she’s getting some Pixies, but I’m not going to bother with the Melvins. There’ll be some Pavement, some Lemonheads, some Sonic Youth (something off Dirty), some JaMC (probably something off of Automatic, which, despite what anyone says, I still find to be their most accessible to the modern ear), some personal favorites like Sloan and Local H.

Probably going to start on it tonight.

(btw, just wanna let you guys know I'm changing most of these names, not being THAT open with stuff on here...)

[luke]

Making a DVD for my wife last night, and saw Hollister Boy. He looks just like I'd imagine, but not quite as gay.