Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow….
Anyone else have military gaps in their pop culture knowledge?
Being married to a gal 12 years my junior always has some weird side-effects. There are a ton of references she makes that I totally don’t get. For instance, for the past 4 days she has been making Billy Madison references virtually non-stop. For some inexplicable reason, I have never seen that movie. When I googled it I found out it came out in 1995. I was vaguely aware of it’s existence, but I swear I must have spent 1995 in a black out. (Not inconceivable, since that was when I worked at the NRA and was in the reserves, and both tended to be good places to drink.)
So anyway, I grew up in a 2 channel TV household, and both of them were CBS (Channel 3 out of Hartford, and Channel 6 out of Albany.) So before 1988 I didn’t see it unless it was on CBS. On Saturday mornings I could occasionally get Davey and Goliath if all the atmospheric conditions were just right. Then I went to a military college with no TV until my Senior year, and the only time it was ever on was when I would put it on 90210 and let the Citadel Knobs come in to watch it. Mind you, while they watched it I was AWOL at a local pub (The Ark Lounge, a wretched hive of scum and villainy if there was any), and I made them clean my room as recompense.
Then I joined the Army and have been in and out ever since. Now, I bring this up because I’ve been listening to my XM, and fairly reliably they play the song “Brimful of Asha” by Cornershop every day, and I have become addicted to it. But, I swear to God I never heard that song until about a month ago. A quick google shows that it came out when I was in Bosnia with Brown Neck Gaitor.
So anyway, here is my question. Do any of you guys have these gaping areas in your pop culture knowledge from environmental isolation like deployments and basic training? To this day I have never seen any Molly Ringwald movie except Breakfast Club and guest appearances on Psych.
Category: Politics
Absolutely,
Mrs. BNJ is still amazed at the movies or shows I never saw because of the gaps.
BTW – I saw Pretty in Pink. Annie Potts was HOT in the movie.
Well, I missed all the hoo-ha over LiveEarth 2007 due to being somewhat occupied elsewhere.
Sometimes you win my accident. (smile)
Damn – gotta proofread better. Should be “by accident” above.
Yep, sure have. 🙂
I lost the 70s and 80s…if it wasn’t on AFRTS I never saw it. I quit watching football in Panama because we got the games a week late and we already knew the score. Can’t get interested anymore.
TSO–I missed a lot of stuff from my first boat tour and radcon (tender) tour in Hawaii and Guam from about 1988-94. Especially Guam. Talk about a time capsule. Got a little better when I was on my second boat, and being in San Diego helped.
But seriously, you don’t know Billy Madison? Christ, next thing you’ll tell me is you’ve never seen Army of Darkness either!
This…is my BOOMSTICK!
And I highly recommend Billy Madison, if for two things, the hawt love interest/crush of Sandler (Bridgette Wilson) and the oft quoted line from his nightmare:
“Mr. Madison, what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
I think that’s gonna be my standard reply to Joe from now on.
Jonn–same shit in Guam with football. MNF on Tuesday morning. And try being a hockey fan and the sports dickhead on KUAM saying, “And here’s some NHL scores, but nobody cares about those.”
That asshole.
My biggest problem with being on Westpac during the Super Bowl was the fact they never showed the commercials. Other than that, it was pretty cool going to the A-Club in Yokosuka at 7 am Monday morning, knowing you could get shitfaced because every command gave their people the day off. Yeah–like you’re gonna call them back after having slammed pitchers and shots until 11 am.
NHS, AFN still doesn’t show commercials, just some of the lamest PSAs I have ever seen. The PSAs at the end of the GI Joe cartoons when I was a kid were more informative.
GI Joe cartoons–as a kid?
Christ, I’m old. And I thought Cecil and Beanie was the shit back when I was a kid. Underdog and the original Scooby-Doo to boot, and that wascally wasis wabbit Bugs Bunny.
And TSO–try living in the middle of a damned cornfield in Nebraska where the ONLY station I could get (and sometimes not even that) was a PBS station out of North Platte.
Thank God we didn’t live there long.
We spent FEB-AUG 1998 deployed to the North Atlantic. Of 178 days out of home port, 157 days were underway submerged. We got very little news. I arrived home to greet my wife and 2-month old son and found out we had “missed” the whole President Clinton impeachment hearings or whatever that was.
By the way, at my military college, we did not have TV’s in our rooms, or phones, or AC. Made the Virginia Spring and early fall in Lexington not too pleasant…:)
Bull- The lack of phones is what sent me to El Cid over VMI.
If my parents hadn’t gone to Greece after dropping me off, I would have been outta that place in a week.
Mainly sports. I’m from Michigan and missed UofM winning the Rose Bowl and football NCAA Championship in football and basketball in the same year. I was stationed at Ft. Hood Texas before the Minnesota North Stars became the Dallas Stars so watching NHL hockey was impossible….
….but dude, did you live in a bubble….no 16 candles?
“The donger says no more yanky my wanky”
As I get older and older my gaps in pop culture become more and more apparent. Each day I feel more and more like Abe Simpson…What ever IT is, is just scary and weird.
Brim full asha on a 45…
Crap now I have that song stuck in my head…
I missed the Carter Presidency while stationed in Germany and the ROK….Wait, maybe ‘suffered through’ would be a better descriptor than ‘missed’.
Jonn….AFRTS…mwahahaha…I remember a PSA that showed up…”Hi, my name is ….and I used to beat my wife. Thanks to the Army (fill in the blanks)!!”
I was young and my better half was not a wifebeater…and we thought it was a hoot. We got videotapes of Moonlighting and paid nearly five bucks on base to rent movies in 86…if you lost it, the price was a hefty $169.00 to replace!! Can you say Kino or no see ’em? 🙂
Yeah, real award winning commercials like this;
I love my pop culture, but if it happened between 2003-2004, 2004-2005, and 2009-2010, I have no idea. In Aghanistan, the only movie we had to watch was Anchorman, and in Iraq, that honor was given to the Hangover “Toooodaloooooo Muthafuckaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
God, THAT commercial! I have seen it like 5,000,000 times on AFN! Soo GHEY! And the millions of suicide prevention commercials that make you want to off yourself!
TSO….I’m going to issue a required “watch” list before you roll out with us. I can’t have my witty movie quotes blowing over your head.
According to AFN, we’re all drunk, suicidal and sex offenders.
HH6; And you waste energy, too.
Pretty much! The only thing AFN was good for was that it got me addicted to reruns of Bones, and I could watch all the UFC fights for free
I spent my youth outside and rarely got TV time. My friends talk about things they watched as kids and I just go blank.
SSG Boettcher (God bless his soul) destroyed my care for pop culture while I was in Bosnia. He brought an entire footlocker of old war movies. We watched Das Boot probably 30 times. I don’t think I saw anything that was made after 1975 for seven months.
If I am interested in a movie or show now, I will DVR the whole season and watch it altogether or I will buy the box set. It is probably the only reason I still pay for NetFlix.
I am terminally pop-culture challenged. I didn’t get an mp3 player til about a year and a half ago (and only because I got tired of lugging around a cd player when I walked/ran, hearing it skip as I dragged my sorry sordid carcass through the development here). Just put a radio in my truck that will allow me to use the player to play stuff back. The latest CD I have is the new one by the Black Keys. Everything else is classic rock/blues/jazz. Wouldn’t be able to tell you who Adele is, if it weren’t for the newspapers.
My cultural “black hole” while on active duty was while aboard USS Iwo Jima (LPH-2) with MWSS-274/4th MEB during the first Gulf sandbox games. We shipped out August 23 and didn’t come back til April 15. No satellite tv on that tub, the only TV news we got was CNN when we could get close enough to Dubai to get a UHF signal, the ship’s PAO (reading stuff in the evening over the ship’s TV system that we’d already seen on that morning’s message boards), or BBC radio at night (that was more informative than anything else we were getting). Hell, we didn’t even know the war had started (air or ground) till the morning after each commenced. The only exception to all that was when we were tied up in Bahrain for 60 days after a steam line blew, killing 10 sailors, and we were tied up for the investigation and repairs. Other’n that, we were the proverbial ‘mushrooms.’
1975-76 while in Iwakuni and Camp Butler, Okinawa were also rather dry, pop culture-wise. AFRTS sucked (polka music? Really? Ugh) and Stars and Stripes were about it for 13 months. IIRC correctly, the PXs were well behind the times when it came to anything resembling current music for sale.
Read about Bork in an old newspaper on the mess decks of SSBN-659 in Holy Loch, and came home once to friends telling me about this great new show called Twin Peaks, but, since I’d missed most of it, I would never understand it. There are still movies that came out between 1986 and 1990 that I have no idea exist.
My wife is seven years younger than me and grew up in a town that still doesn’t have cable, so any reference to movies before 1990 or TV shows that wouldn’t be popular in Mississippi are beyond her.
Oh yeah…turn off your lights. Don’t speed……and Adleweiss lodge looks nice.
Old Tanker…
(raises a Victor Arm…) Hail to the colors that float in the light…Hurrah for the Yellow and Blue…
In-laws went to the Rose Bowl that year, and the next day we opened a bottle of Dom when they got back…we’re on the rise again with Brady in Charge.
…and I take my son every night to swim practice at the Canham Natatorium…about 100 yards from the Big House.
….and my wife STILL doesn’t know the references to the Godfather series, or Bridge Too Far.
The 90s are pretty much lost to me. Serving in one of 3 deployable combat rescue units when 2 were required for Iraq no fly zones, and being stationed in Iceland kind of left it all blank. I think “Saving Private Ryan” had been out for 3 years before I ever saw it. To this day people leave me wondering what the hell they are talking about. YOu never catch up.
I’m with a woman 14 years younger than me (I’m 50, she’s 36)…I retired from the Navy in ’08, then decided to work in Saudi Arabia for 2 1/2 years (a cultural Hellhole). She’s “educating” me to the various adult toys that are sold on a website named after two famous characters in the Bible…one toy in particular that is for “him and her”. I knew I was in trouble when she told me “It’s now half price…and it comes in red!” Sounded like we were shopping for her a new dress…
My wife and I have a 90’s trivia pursuit edition. Never fails, when i don’t know the answer, it’s usually 95-96, when i was deployed in Bosnia.
SFC BLizz
Bullnav, small world yet again…..you know I only live 30 minutes from there and wouldn’t you know….I’m a swim coach too!
When I see Weezer’s “Memories” video(Last Jackass movie ending song) I feel incredibly old and contemplative at the same time. I have no idea what that one you used is/was.
When Billy Madison first came out I didn’t see it for a few years either, I was a teenager though. I didn’t comprehend what a classic that movie is. Years later, maybe because the characters in that movie are now my age. Its one of those movies like “Caddie Shack” that compels you, at least for a minute or two to watch. Is it wrong to watch a thirty-something slam a dodgeball at kindergardeners with intensity? I think not.
Then again I didn’t listen to REO Speed Wagon like you in High School TSO.
As for the pop culture gaps, I have been in that zone for the last 5 or 10 years but its mostly by choice.
#6″But seriously, you don’t know Billy Madison? Christ, next thing you’ll tell me is you’ve never seen Army of Darkness either” Another classic, that was a VHS I beat to death. Bruce Campbell is still my favorit B-movie actor.
Yeah, missed most of the 90’s.
Alibi: Pretty sure Davy and Goliath was on Sunday morning…right after The Modern Farmer. As I recall, Channel 11, WPIX, NYC……Channel 5 on Sunday was the Sonny Fox Show followed by an all-time fave….The East Side Kids with David Gorcey and Huntz Hall.
Don’t ask me what I did on Monday, however.
Oh, god, yes. And it’s embarrassing, because I hang out with people who love pop culture and proclaim it loudly.
I’m not as bad with movies, thanks to the wonder of rentals and amazon, but I’m terrible with TV shows and especially music that was everywhere on the radio I never heard.
OT, we have not talked in a while. I did not know you were a swim coach, too. Nice. He swims with Club Wolverine, so we hope that helps him out.
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