So what's this about?

No one's actually asking that, yet, but in case this ever develops any readership, it might be courteous of me to explain the whole premise behind this.

Basically, I want you to feel old.  Very old. the passage of time demands recognition and observance.  Or, in the absence of such, an occasionally updated blog.  Being as I'm getting along in years, I have started to wonder---most often of course while at gas stations on our nation's lovely highways, wherein are posted rather prominently bright yellow stickers stating that one may not purchase alcohol unless born on today's date in such and such a year, which today at least is 1991---something along the lines of, "Oh dear god, that doesn't feel like so terribly long ago, anymore."  And so I began to wonder about things that happened that length of time ago---or, to put it differently, I started noticing things that were older than kids who were now allowed to drink.

A friend of mine tends bar and would sometimes entertain my fascination with the topic.  It's actually more accurate to say I forced this fascination upon her, but if she doesn't like it, she never should have given me her phone number, or at least not gotten a phone that receives text messages.  In any event, my friend---to whom I'll be kind enough to leave nameless---after many months of texts instructing her not to serve anyone younger than closed-captioned television---recommended, as politely as can be expected under such circumstances, that I just get the damn blog already and stop clogging her messaging inbox.

Horrified yet?  If not, consider the milestones that passed too early to be part of this blog.  Closed-caption t.v., by the way.  Yes, that's older than kids getting drunk tonight.  January 3rd of this year.  Blossom was 21 years old that same date.  "U Can't Touch This" was released twenty-one years ago last year.  Then there were those dates that marked something roughly nine months after the relevant benchmark.  Remember that song about that chick who sleeps with that dude just to get pregnant?  The first time that happened after that song came out, the resulting kid took his first legal drink last year, on December 14, 1990.  The first couple who did the humpty dance to "The Humpty Dance" could have toasted their kid's twenty-first on that same date, though if couldn't get the single and had to wait for the album version they would have waited two weeks, 'til midnight after Christmas.  The Exxon Valdez was in 1989.  I got going too late, or else missed them when they happened, to make them a part of this blog.  All my living days I shall have no greater regret.

The pseudonym's from the inventor of the Christmas Card, as I couldn't find any attribution of the birthday card to a single individual.  The title's from a merry little ditty by Steve Sondheim; actually, if you take nothing else from this endeavor (and I have an itching suspicion that you will), be sure to listen to this: