Jon Lowder

Pong

My kids think that their Nintendo 64 qualifies as an ancient gaming system.  Well kids, here's the first video game my generation had.  Welcome to the wonderful world of Pong:

Familianthropology

I'm adding a new category to this old blog: familianthropology.  The category is dedicated to things I find that might help explain to my children the world their parents and grandparents grew up in.  This inaugural post features an old advertisement for the "Card Callmaker" (picture to the left, found via Boing Boing) circa 1973.  Although my family didn't have one, and I seriously doubt Celeste's did either, this ad shows two pieces of technology my kids have not encountered: rotary dial phones and punch cards.  To be more accurate the kids have seen a rotary phone but whenever Celeste and I have tried to explain the old punch card computers the kids have looked at us like we have trees growing out of our ears.  Hopefully this will help.

Speaking of rotary phones, I was watching TNT's The Closer the other night and noticed that the Kyra Sedgwick character has a pink rotary phone in her room.  There's a scene where she's calling someone and it is absolutely torturous to watch her dial, waiting for the wheel to come back to zero before dialing the next number.  How did we ever tolerate such inconvenience?