Hoppin' on the meme train

Where was I...

1. When John F. Kennedy was shot (11/22/1963)

Not born yet. You’re not pinning this one on me!

2. When Mt. St. Helens blew (5/18/1980)

Odds are a northwesterner came up this list, probably a Seattleite. Who else would choose the Mt. St. Helens eruption over the Reagan shooting (30 Mar 1981) or the Lennon assassination (8 Dec 1980)? That last was a major defining event for a lot of people worldwide. I barely even remember the eruption; if you’d asked me I couldn’t have given you the year it took place without googling for it. I was in 8th grade at the time.

3. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded (1/28/1986)

The first item I remember clearly. I was standing in the lounge of my college (RIT) dorm, probably chatting, while some other folks were watching TV. The show was interrupted for the shuttle launch (remember when they used to do that?), and I got to see it live. The shuttle exploded, and I was suddenly sitting in the couch I’d just been standing behind. I’m pretty sure I didn’t go around the couch to get there.

4. When the 7.1 earthquake hit San Francisco (10/7/1989)

I’d have been back living with my parents (having transferred to SVA) at this point. I don’t remember where I was when I heard the news. I do remember worrying about my friend Lisa at UCLA, because I hadn’t quite gotten a concrete feel for California geography.

5. When the Berlin Wall fell (11/7/1989)

This doesn’t stand out in my mind as much as the attempted coup that August, which I think I first heard about on GEnie (a BBS General Electric ran to make money off its computer systems during nights and weekends). I was up in my room, late at night. Folks listening to Soviet radio via shortwave said that all the stations had gone over to nothing but classical music, a sure sign of trouble.

6. When the Gulf War began (1/16/1991)

Again, no clear memories of this.

7. When OJ Simpson was chased in his White Bronco (6/17/1994)

I was at home, in the Brooklyn apartment Chris and I had moved into about a year earlier. There was something on TV I wanted to watch, but I don’t remember what. Preempted, of course.

8. When the building in Oklahoma City was bombed (4/19/1995)

I don’t remember this either. I was probably at work; this would have been two or three months before I quite my job at the Sir Speedy printshop.

9. When Princess Di was killed (8/31/1997)

I was at Valentine Castle, the home of my friends Arthur, Kevin, and Bernadette. I came downstairs after waking up and everyone was watching the coverage on TV. “No one messes with MI6,” quipped Kevin.

10. When Bush was first announced President (11/7/2000)

This isn’t when Bush was announced President, by any reasonable account of the proceedings. I remember Election Day — I was at work at Unplugged Games, probably coding Word Trader, and I had the CNN/AllPolitics site up in a window that I’d refresh in between bursts of coding. When I finally caught a cab home around 2 or 3 AM, the results still weren’t final.

My memory tells me that I found out about the final Bush v. Gore decision while Chris and I were walking in Brooklyn, and saw a copy of the Times. But that can’t be right — 12 Dec 2000 was a Tuesday, and I’d have been at work, and there’s no plausible way I could have missed hearing about the news over the net before seeing it in a paper. Unless our net connection had been down, as sometimes happened.

11. When the 6.8 earthquake hit Nisqually, WA (2/28/2001)

Definitely a Seattleite wrote this! I was at work, reading Usenet.

12. When terrorists knocked over the World Trade Center (9/11/2001)

There was a gap of over an hour between when the planes hit and when the towers fell; some folks I know were in different places for the different events. I was at home, and I’ve written about this before.

"The shame of the Gamera family"

I just realized — broadband means I can start reading Megatokyo again! I liked yesterday’s strip a lot, though I think Alan Moore did the same joke better in Top Ten.

Speaking of obsessions, Greg Costikyan (in his new weblog) writes about Snood (“the 9th most played game in the world”), asking why simple puzzle games like this and Tetris get no respect in the game design community, though they’re very popular and very addictive. I know I used to play Snood pretty obsessively, giving it up only when I switched over to OSX fulltime (’cause I hate having to launch the Classic environment). And Tetris, hoy, I used to play that over and over till my hand ached. I once deleted it from my hard drive to keep myself from playing it; an hour later I decided that the undelete software I’d installed a few days previous needed testing....