Dinosaur Underpants

Just about everything I touched as I crawled into bed from 1994 to 96 was Jurassic Park related: from the bed sheets to my socks, my pillow cases and pajamas, and yes, even my underwear. They had dinosaurs, big "Caution" signs, and random shapes. I remember these bedsheets well. I remember learning how to spell "caution" by reading the words on this. At first I thought it said "cussion," which is gibberish, but to a kid like me still looked pretty badass in that stencil font. I friggin' loved these sheets.

But what's the big fascination with matching outfits and bedsheets as a kid, and what's more, underwear too? Who's cares about that? Don't those "DANGER!" signs take on a whole new meaning when you're wearing them down below? And I shouldn't have to tell you where the "Keep Out!" was. (I really hope I'm just joking about this, I don't remember that much detail.)

It's because they're the "underwear that's fun to wear." They're what you wear when you're seven years old and don't give a damn about dignity, you just want to be covered, head to toe, in Raptors and T-Rexes as you snuggle up between sheets of Raptors and T-Rexes. I had no idea that the bedsheets, pajamas, and underwear I had as a kid would eventually be termed "vintage" on Ebay, but now it makes me feel like the dinosaur.

"Naturally you might have dinosaurs on your...on your dinosaur bedspread?" 

Sticker Fever

Throughout elementary school I was a hoarder for stickers. I couldn't pass through the back aisle of a Staples without feeling the itch to clean out the racks. I got stickers for being good, got them with my birthday presents, at retail checkout lines, at the doctor's office (once they let me have the whole roll! Bless their ENABLER hearts!). It was a disease. I saw one that looked cool and just had to have it.

I craved all kinds... cars, smileys, balls, clouds, words, animals, signs, flags, planets, aliens, dinosaurs...etc, ones that smelled (scratch and sniff), ones that sparkled, ones that changed color in heat, were plastic and popped up, or had googly eyes, ...etc. For sure, I was sick on the stick.

My teacher used to plant stickers on our assignments with uplifting sayings like "Excellent!" and "A+" when we did a good job on something, and of course I asked about her source. She turned me on to this little outfit called Office Max, which for me became more like "Office Fix." The biggest stash was back with the teacher supplies, that's a pro-tip.

What did I do with my massive collection? I plastered every square inch of the lamp in my room (all around its shade), and covered the top of my dresser. I was forbidden from sticking them on car windows and the walls of my room, but I did anyways. It was a typical pastime similar to stamp collecting but without any hope of them being worth anything in the future. It also ruined a perfectly good lamp and dresser (until they were scraped off), but that's what kids are supposed to do with their furniture.

Apparently it's a real hobby too. It's called "sticker bombing," and you can find people who have covered their cars, walls, radios...etc., with stickers end to end. I didn't know this at the time. People make awesome collages with them, and it's even considered a type of "found art." For me, it gave me something to do as a kid, but when it was time to put that old lamp out to pasture, all those stickers unfortunately went with it. So now I'm about 16 years off the stick (to which I was stuck), and haven't looked back (until now).

Lego Creations

Here's a few pics of some cool Lego works by a cool 8 year old who most certainly isn't a dork. He has kindly submitted them to this blog (with the help of his dad) for all to check out. It looks like an X-wing from Star Wars, and some other ship from the newer movies. 

Great job, Kyle.

Flash, Crash, Rumble and Roll

If you need something to read while you ride out these April showers and scary thunderboomies (the ones I hear as I write this), the 8-year-old me provides you from his warped bookshelf Flash, Crash, Rumble and Roll. This was a book I must have read a hundred times before bed, whether it was raining or not, and it was one that taught me everything I know about thunderstorms and why they're too funny to be afraid of. Well, this, and the scientific fact that thunder is just the sky farting ("flash, crash, rumble, and roll"). That's just science.

Look at that cover (the old one I remember). Every page told a funny little story like that. Mom waits at the door of their 20-square-foot abode (attached to a lighthouse!) for blondie and pop who're racing in from a fishing trip gone wrong (everyone gets caught off guard in this book... no Weather Channel apps in those days). Clouds are always these menacing BLACK (not grey... BLACK) lumpy toasted marshmallows, and usually a dog or cat factors in somewhere too. The illustrations always told a story because there wasn't one (other than a storm blowing in, people running from it, and then going out). It was one of those 'educational books' about thunderstorms, as it taught you what to do and especially, what not to do, during one.

Did you know that lightning bolts can be over a mile long? Or that they may come from clouds that are ten miles high? Storms can be scary, but not if you know what causes them. Before the next thunderstorm, grab this book by veteran science team Franklyn Branley and True Kelley and learn what causes the flash, crash, rumble, and roll of thunderstorms!

Let's see, what did I learn? Lesson one, don't take a shower in a thunderstorm, lest you absorb any of those little lightning bolts on the medal shower head and handles. Lesson two, don't sit under a tree, lest lightning strikes it and sends it crashing down on top of you. Pretty dark right? Lesson three, cars are the safest place to be (it's not because of the rubber tires by the way). Lesson four, if you're on a bus coming back from camp during a storm, sing "Found a Peanut." Most importantly though, and I can't stress this enough, after you see a lightning flash, count the seconds until you hear the thunder (to find out how far away it is)... and if there is no time between flash and BOOM, then don't sit near the window and look for flashes!

Grand Theft Lunchbox

I was not one of those kids who did the school lunch deal, which is probably why I've lasted this long. Thinking back, my heart goes out to all those kids forced to eat that stale cheese (with pizza built somewhere into it), meat nuggets of mystery, and the ever-nefarious "brownie" that all seemed to invariably land wrapped in Styrofoam. In many ways though, being a lunchbox kid was worse socially than it was gastro-intestinally. On the mean streets of the lunch room, a war was brewing between the trayers and the baggers, and you did not want to be on the wrong side of that table.

In my day, we didn't have no fancy Vitamin Water to take to school, we had a juice box, and if we didn't have a box, we had a a device known as a thermos that took up all the room in your bag and crushed your sandwich. Opening this juice box was a piece of work, and involved a process similar to poking a baseball bat through a sheet of Saran Wrap. If you poked too soft, it'd never go through. If you poked too hard, you'd have a geyser of punch in your face. With a Thermos though, once you dropped the straw inside, that was it for your ability to extract liquid unless you took the top off and guzzled it like a loser... (guilty as charged). I had a traumatic experience asking a teacher to get my straw out of a thermos... I don't want to talk about it.

I also don't want to talk about the traumatic time I learned what a boy is not allowed to bring to school plastered all over his lunchbox and thermos. See, I was not all that bright, and my mom used to send me to school with this... I don't know... Snoopy or Sesame Street thermos or whatnot... (I know right?). Well I wasn't really aware that such a thing was frowned upon in them thar parts... by the other boys. (I know... I'm sorry, ignorance is no excuse, I should've known better...). Well, you can be sure they LET ME KNOW... and it was... well, let's just say, therapy has been good for me. I BEGGED my mom for something... ANYTHING "cooler" than Big Bird... and holy shit! She got me this red plastic lunchbox that came with F'KIN AWESOME futuristic car stickers you could plaster all over it! It even had a helicopter for good measure! I was set for life. 

Well almost, because you see, you pull up with your new, shiny, badass, cool kid lunchbox and rev its engine in the wrong parts of the cafeteria, and you find out you suddenly have all new problems on your hands. Suddenly they're all asking about it. And then the only thing you got to worry about is, the thing getting STOLEN. (Which luckily never happened to me, but I swear... they asked... and they tried... but I was vigilant.) I had to watch it like a hawk! But that didn't mean I still didn't get jacked. 

Food was another story, because if you came in with something good, all the trayers wanted a piece of it. I swear, opening that lunchbox on any given day was like driving a Viper through a real seedy part of town. If you got up to get a napkin, you could only expect that someone has jacked your chunky peanut butter sandwich. And you know that if they went for the sandwich, it was only because someone else had already taken the DUNKAROOS! I'm telling ya, it was a tough boy-eat-banana-world, devoid of mercy or respect, but to us elementary schoolers, it was a place we called the cafeteria.

Of all the years I spent fighting in the war, only one battle turned out me: 1, bully: 0. Every day I came in, this other kid would take my lunch. If I came in with any sort of candy, it was his. If I came in with a granola bar, it was his. If I came in with nothing but a sandwich, he'd take it and pull out the meat. Every day I had to surrender something. So one day, I decided to get even. My mom (bless her heart) gave me confectioner's chocolate to bring in... the real nasty 90% pure ground cocoa kind. Sure enough, the moment he saw chocolate he snatched it up and took a bite. This kid practically puked! His face went sour and he spit it out in a napkin. "Sick! What kind of chocolate you eating man?" I don't ever remember him stealing my lunch again.

I love you mom. 

You Got a Butt For a Face!

The second grade was full of confused anatomical insults and other factually inaccurate taunts. It's the best you can do when you're eight. But the best thing about being a boy is that if the other guys are putting you down one year, they're probably going to be your friends sooner or later, especially if you can too can dish out whatever they're serving. The fact is, we boys just don't take things all that seriously because with insults like "Oh yeah? Well you got a BUTT for a FACE!" how can you take that seriously? At least when girls insulted you, they'd just say things like "you're ugly" or "you smell" or "boys are dumb." You know, things that are true. We say things like "hey buttface!" And it's seriously a case of, yeah, that's the best we've got. Psh! No big deal. "You're a buttface times infinity!" And there you go, friends for life. I rest my case.

I knew me my share of buttfaces in my day, because most kids in the 90s were butts... hot shot little shits always trying to prove something. That's all we were. Advertising was very good at turning us against each other in the competition of coolness, but there really wasn't any difference between any of us back then. In any case, if you were cool, then anyone else who wasn't you was a dork, a little above the worm in the hierarchy of life. If you were a dork though, like me, then all those "cool kids" were nothing but buttfaces. I don't know why "butts" were our metaphor of choice to describe "the other," but maybe because it was more ad-friendly than calling each other assholes.

In any case, the buttfaces I knew in the 2nd grade happened to consist of that same "flannel gang" of "cool kids" that I described in detail earlier on, and before I made my epic journey to become cool in their eyes, I was assuredly a dork. Once in gym class, we were doing one of those 90's New Age type "exercises" (they just couldn't let us play something that involved winning and losing or else we'd cry) when this battle of wits played out almost poetically. We were split into groups of three, and one had to be the leader and the other two had to mimic his every move. I happened to be the leader that time, and I thought it was kind of cool, being paired with two of the flannel jerks and being "in charge" of them. It was a pure "mwahaha!" moment.

But I quickly undid whatever was cool about it.  In my quest to make them look like idiots, I way overshot the runway. I started out doing these Russian-type kicks on the gym floor, and then got the wise idea to go down flat and do a "snake-like" slither. It was in the middle of my slither that I realized both my little minions were following my lead exactly, hurling light Russian-style kicks at my face! It was a reminder of just what I was up against.

The teasing became more verbal after that, with both of them finding ways to poke fun at my so-called puke-pooling ugliness. It was a time in life where one could get away hurling insults like the old "stare and avert your eyes" jab. One of them, who I naturally ended up becoming friends with a year later, even said after looking at my face for a second, and I quote, "Ah! I'm being blinded by the evil thing!" This happened quite a few times, but I was quite sharp, and retorted the same jab back. It wasn't so much an insult to me as it was just a funny thing to hear and say--that and the old, "Oh my God!" (mouth-dropped, eyes bugged)... which might have prompted me to go "what?" in all seriousness, and to which the reply invariably was, "You got a butt for a face!" How do you respond to a claim like that? You can't. Even if you say "no I don't!" you still look like a real "heinous anus" for even just debating the subject of your butt face.
 
I could be the acid tongue myself though. A kid came to class with a prescription bottle once and had it propped on the desk in front of him. Someone else asked, "what are those pills for?"  It was the age of Ritalin back then, so just picture three different prescription bottles instead of one for the modern equivalent. He got angry at this and huffed, "They're pills you put in your head to make you stupid!" Now I have to admit, he walked himself right into this one, and I couldn't resist taking him the rest of the way: "Oh? Then you must take a lot of those!"

So I did my share of serving and being served. For example, who could forget the classic bus-ride questionnaires.. "So, have you been PT?" "What's PT?" "Yes or no, have you ever been it?" You'd be tempted to say no, as I was, because it didn't sound good if you were to say yes, but then you'd be mistaken. "No," I said. To which he shot back, "Ew! You've never been potty trained?" You just never knew whether to say yes or no to those things. And who could forget the grand old "open your mouth and close your eyes and I'll give you a big surprise!" Or the "do you know what I think about that?" Prompting a "what?" followed by a rectal explosion of some kind and a smell so bad it could peal the paint off the walls! "Ah... that's what!" he'd say.

Surprisingly enough, afterwards this kid became my best friend in the 3rd grade, and I guess you could say we both became "puke-pooling butt-faced booger-brained fart smellers with flies on the side" for a while. It tends to rub off on others.

90's Nick, Where Kids Rule!

I like my butt. I especially like sitting on it. And that's exactly what Nickelodeon made me do to it in the 90s. So sit right down and take a trip through the weirdest blacktop spin LSD roller coaster of a television lineup in history, because that was Nick in the 90s. Don't get me wrong, there were some turds in that laced punch bowl of a "children's entertainment network," but it was all good. Trust me. If Nick Reboot is any guide, not every show was as great as those we remember, but still, it was damn good punch, even with the turds. And if it wasn't all great, that's what Cartoon Network was for! (But seriously, only as a last resort... don't bring that evil in here.) 

I recently heard someone criticizing shows like iCarly for all the perversity, and it got me thinking, "when wasn't Nickelodeon perverse?" You're talking about a network that got its start with dumping green slime onto unsuspecting kids who said "I don't know." This is the network that has brought us the surreal, sick depravity of Ren and Stimpy and Invader Zim, the gross-out splashes of Double Dare and You Can't Do That On Television, the trippy postmodernist double-entendres of Rocko's Modern Life and Adventures of Pete and Pete, the subversive goofyness of Salute Your Shorts and All That, all that bizarre claymation, the existence of puppets of any kind, and those other assorted surreal clips, shorts, and bumpers where giant orange balls leveled cities and boys turned inside out. Plus, a whole lot of Marc Summers working through his germaphobia... and perhaps truly enjoying the process of putting kid contestants through the rigors of "Harvey's Wild Oats" on national television and still not letting them go home with the Garfield telephone.  

My childhood Nickelodeon fanboy obsession probably began when I used to watch Eureka's Castle (don't ask, I just remember the castle), Maya the Bee, and Fraggle Rock... but I was so young then my memory of some of those shows bleeds into the commercial breaks, so if you ask me, Fraggle Rock involved the board game "Knock Out" and for some reason I remember seeing a traffic light with about 10 multicolored lights on it inside David the Gnome. Also, the less said about Weinerville the better, especially in these times (I'd need substances and maybe therapy to deal with it), although I have to admire Nickelodeon for giving what I can only assume was a homeless street performer ("puppeteer?") they found outside the studio his own kids' show. Did the gamble pay off? Well... all I remember is the Halloween one where he asked what the kid in the zombie costume was eating and the kid says, "a hand." Some of it seems to seep up from my subconscious to this day, but some of it may just be a fever dream. I did watch a lot of Pete and Pete and Wild and Crazy Kids in the heat of the summer, so I was quite literally in a fever dream half the time. 

Speaking of Wild and Crazy Kids, that show used to get me downright dizzy, and not just for the opening montage. You couldn't watch any second of that show where all these kids would be outdoors doing fun competitions and not turn your head, see a bright beautiful sunny day outside waiting for you, and then turn back to the kids having fun on TV and go... "haha... they got messy!" I distinctly remember watching one in the middle of the blazing hot August sun one day from the couch where the dads had to place their foreheads on the end of a baseball bat and spin in circles until they were dizzy, and then try to play baseball with their kids or something while in the state of delirium. And I distinctly remember the exact combination of my sedentary dehydration, the overstimulation of my eyes, the under-utilization of my brain, the dry heat in the middle of the day, and the repetitive motion of the guys spinning around dizzy, actually making me want to blow CHUNKS. Not to mention it was fun watching the kid from Roseanne get stuck to the Velcro wall and left to die in one very strange cross-promo. 

This is to say nothing about Salute Your Shorts, which actually had the nerve to acknowledge FARTS (celebrated in song no less, and at the start of every episode!), along with the titular underwear hoisted from the mast... and yeah, also mullet punks named Budnick and fatties named Donkeylips who were regular gassholes... plus Zeke the Plumber and Ugg's Nose giving you trauma to this day... and everything else that allegedly happens at summer camps (and no, for the last time, I Am Not Sponge... although that would make a good title for my autobiography). But we are only getting warmed up, because then there was Nick Arcade, which looked like actual freakin' magic as far as I was concerned back then (and not just a kid in front of a green screen) when they somehow managed to actually transport kids INTO video games! Don't even get me started on which Game Wizzard I wanted to go up against in the Video Zone (of course it was Scorchia... give me some good ole clean FEM-DOM any day! Come on baby light my FIRE!). But no, I have no desire to "control Mikey"... just saying. 

"Dun-dun-dun, da-dun dun dun, da-dun dun dun, da-DUN!" (Slowly watching the host lose his mind to that tune day after day MADE the show!) 

URRRRRPLet's see... what else? Seriously Rocko and Pete and Pete are deserving of their own posts. There is just too much to cover. Legends of the Hidden Temple? Own post. GUTS? Own post. What Would You Do? Own post. Nicktoons? Own post. I mean, let's focus on the Arcana of Nickelodeon, the dark underbelly of the orange beast... and by that I mean, the only show that probably was conjuring demons, Are You Afraid of the Dark? To which the reply by me was usually "yesss..." if it was past my bedtime, and especially YES if it was the CLOWN ONE, the ALIEN ONE, the MIRROR ONE, or the "I'm cold..." one! (Fun fact that "only 90s kids know TM" but the Harry Potter actually got his start in Are You Afraid of the Dork. Yeah. He played the dork. And if you don't know what I'm talking about then you probably didn't watch the show.) 

But let's really have a debate about just what slime tastes like for the millionth time. You know they probably changed the recipe often because sometimes it was practically water and other times it was like green cottage cheese. Now I have no idea what Nick Slime tastes like (some say corn starch), but being a booger-eating boy, I manufactured my own slime and I gotta tell ya, it probably had nothing on me. One thing they had that I didn't though were pools, canons, fountains, and explosive taps full of the stuff, literally gushing, splashing, and raining the green ooze from the fucking sky down upon children. THIS was glorious schadenfreude that still gives me a buzz. Nothing beats watching kids get hit with slime, especially GIRLS (and really annoying boys)... so yeah, basically the entire cast of You Can't Do That On Television. This was Nickelodeon Studios... and it was (probably) better than Disneyland. I mean, you can have snot rain down upon you at Nickelodeon studios. You can't even SAY the WORD "fart" in the Lion King. So there!

But let's just discuss KaBlam! for a second. If Nickelodeon in general was a fever dream, this show was its own fever dream inside of that one, containing the stop-motion bumbling stupor-heroes Action League Now, which was just Robot Chicken before Seth Green decided to blow up his childhood... Life With Loopy, which was an acid trip of cardboard cutouts about a kid who somehow manages to be even more insane than his actually insane sister just by being so blase about what clearly is a problem, Promethius and Bob ("an alien's attempts to educate a caveman"), which just proves there never has been intelligent life on Earth, and a whole other universe of whatever bizarre shit they could cram into that animated comic book of theirs. But perhaps more awesome than anything was just getting to see Henry and June open the show with some rather on-point dance moves... well, not as awesome as watching Henry get hit in every episode! Boys are great as punching bags, girls... just sayin. Have at it. (Jk!) 

Damn, I have not even scratched the surface. I mean, All That had a freakin' Giant CORN for some reason they toted around through the sky attached to airplanes and we got to watch Mary Beth and her very real love-affair for the thing blossom over several seasons of SNickL (see what I did there?). She gave us endless "vital information" words of wisdom we've all benefitted from ("All's fair in love and war, all's smelly in a closet full of baboons"), while Keenan Thomson just loved chocolate and bathtub French lessons. Both of these sagas were truly a better love story than Twilight. Clarissa was not always clueless and the Pink Ranger was, well... The Pink Ranger... but the undying love I had for Harriet the Spy and Alex Mack... no human tongue could tell. Heck my love for Larisa Oleynik continued into Third Rock from the Sun and beyond (hell, even now)... and when it comes to Harriet the Spy (Michelle Trachtenberg), what can I say? She was my first love, my soulmate, my flame... I'm sorry, it's just that I always liked girls. Especially powerful ones who could beat me in a fight (I'd see to that) and would definitely beat me in a battle of wits (...I'm gonna go cry now). 

Anyway, speaking of GIRLS... it certainly seems these days Nickelodeon has gone to the teenage girls, but at one time, it was known as the television network for kids that kids actually liked to watch... all the dirt, guts, butts, and grass stains included. If the 80's showed us a Nick that was more about kids watching the world of adults through the travels of a pinball, in shows like Lights Camera Action and Mr. Wizard, mixed in with kiddy sock-puppet shows, the 90's showed us a Nick of slimy, grimy, kooky craziness where kids ruled and adults could take a hike. And you know what? Both still sound awesome. And it wasn't so cut out like that, because the 80's had the early beginnings of what would be the 90's in You Can't Do That on Television, and the 90's had lingering traits of the 80's in shows like Nick News... Oh damn, Nick News could clear a playroom faster than a ... ahhh who am I kidding? I even watched Nick News! 

The only period where Nick could have been classed as "not perverse" (at least not overtly) would be the late 80's and early 90's when all those foreign cartoons were filling up the morning slots, like the Lit'l Bits, Maya the Bee, and David the Gnome, and they were great too. At one time, Nick had something for everyone: the kiddies who liked the soft-lined musical sweetening of the foreign cartoons and puppetry weirdness, the older kids who liked the subversive guts-filled, surreal, anti-PC "kid's rule" middle-finger at the yawn-fest of "social graces," and the teens who were just into looking cool and getting their way past their clueless parents (Clarissa Explains it All). Girls were always tough and smart, boys were always goofy and slick, little brothers were dorks, big brothers were buttheads, and sisters were just evil and proud of it.

It was an age where the silly gelled pretty easy with the crazy, the absurd, the downright nasty, and even (at times) the educational, but it was always perverse... because a half hour before the archeology fun of Legends of the Hidden Temple, it'd be Wild and Crazy Kids, where kids were sure to be competing to fill a bucket with slime after sitting in a pool of it with a sponge strapped to their butts. 

Speaking of which, I think mine's gone numb.