The Nostalgia Machine

From the brilliant xkcd.com  His cartoons all carry an Easter egg, visible when you mouse over them; the one on this chart says: "An American tradition is anything that happened to a Baby-Boomer twice."

Regardless of what I may have said in recent posts, I really do enjoy the holiday season.  I even enjoy some of the more commercial aspects of it, especially the yearly ritual of bemoaning the commercialism of the season while simultaneously wallowing in it.  In large part, though, my enjoyment is based in nostalgia of the purest kind, and my nostalgia is triggered by cynical advertising ploys, bent on producing exactly the kind of reaction xkcd's referring to with the above chart.  Why is our Christmas celebration rooted so very firmly in the past?  If I remove the baby-boom signifiers from the season - the Red-Rider Air Rifle kind of stuff - I'm left with yet another layer of images from a vanished past, namely the Victorian era, when people actually rode around in sleighs, and Dickens was the hot new thing.

Is Robin Hood a Socialist?





There's was a piece the other day on the New York Times' website about the growing movement - particularly in Europe - in favor of a so-called "Robin Hood tax".  These are tiny taxes on certain financial transactions, particularly the risky ones that generate large sums of money, seemingly out of thin air.  The proceeds of the taxes, as the name suggests, are then used to support social programs.  The idea has some high-profile supporters, such as Bill Gates and Angela Merkel, and not surprisingly, some powerful opponents in the US and UK.

I made the decision not to talk too much about current events on this blog, because every post would quickly become an incoherent rant, but this presents an opportunity to talk about a Disney movie, which is one of the things I said I was going to do (check out my read on The Little Mermaid here).  It raised the question in my mind: is the Robin Hood we were presented as children, the fox in the green hat, a Socialist?

My First List - Things were better when...

Is there anything more susceptible to parody than the image of the old man lecturing a kid about how different things were "when I was your age" (I mean besides the Kardashian sisters)?  And is there anything more cliched in internet-land than lists (I mean besides bad grammar and pictures of kittens)?

When the idea for this post occurred to me, at first I rejected it.  It seemed like painting a picture of a canned ham in a cornfield, on black velvet.  But I needed something to post, and sometimes you just can't avoid the black velvet painting moments in life, so here it goes...

Stuff that was better when we were kids