What pisses you off or what's different about life in 2006?

[rbeemer]

I remember playing baseball or football in the street and not getting honked at or yelled by car drivers because you did not move fast enough to get out of their way.

[Leon]

I remember not having to lock the house, and you could drive in your car without worrying about the possibility of being shot if you drove in the wrong place. When I'd go home on leave I would hitch from whatever airbase I could get a ride into. Now hitching a ride is the most dangerous way to travel.

[M B Hamilton]

Ira,

Today, someone can walk into most any big box store or convenience store and buy a reasonably accurate, digital watch for about $10.00... maybe even for half that price.

When I was a kid (born in 1946), there was a company named Spiedel that made so much money just sell watch bands that they could afford to advertise their product, and only that product, on tv.

I don't know that this pisses me off, but it's different.

[lanego]

Moms who read to you from books that weren't labeled with suggested age groups. Mine read Kipling and Byron to us from the start and we played games with the dictionary and encyclopedia for kicks. (My tv has no cable, one rabbit ear and one channel - I'm not missing a thing!) And The Secret Garden - best kid book ever. Oooo, and my favorites: drive-in movies with playgrounds and a sucker for each kid and drive-in A&W's where you were allowed the kid's mug and split a hotdog and felt it was a great treat, the Riverdale Dairy, a real dairyhouse, where the concrete always smell of raw milk and you brought your glass bottles back in a wire basket, 28 flavors of ice cream on a rotating basis. Sigh....
Playing Tarzan in the swamp and swinging out over the quickmud, sneaking down to the spring-fed pond which sucked down more than one kid and might or might not spit them up further down the underground stream. Good times...

[asianflava]

Ever since we got a DVR, I hardly ever watch commercials. It's gotten to the point where we won't watch a show "Live". We don't start watching it till about 15-20min after it starts, after fast forwarding the commercials, we finish the show at the same time it normally does.

[Ira]

after fast forwarding the commercials

Yeah, but if you do that, how the hell will you know what to buy?

[Joseph]

I really miss living in a free country. Oh, it's still the best one going, but between political correctness, entitlement via litigation and the ever-expanding nanny state, I'm getting claustrophobic...

Joseph

[asianflava]

Not just 2006 but it has been becoming more and more common:

If something happens be it accident, force of nature, etc. SOMEBODY'S GETTING SUED.

There are some law suits that I just shock me.

[TRAIL-OF-TEARS]

Ever since we got a DVR, I hardly ever watch commercials. It's gotten to the point where we won't watch a show "Live". We don't start watching it till about 15-20min after it starts, after fast forwarding the commercials, we finish the show at the same time it normally does.

I actually like the comercials. They don't bother me.
When the wife and I first got married in 1997 we got dish network, she never had cable before. She could not understand why there were comercials on the TV stations we were paying for. At the time I thought it was funny but now It makes me think.

[b.bodemer]

When I was a kid my parents would send me to the liquor store to buy booze and the deli to buy smokes for them.

They gave me a note saying it was ok with them to sell me this stuff. I'd put the bottles and smokes in the basket of my bike and stop off at 7 Eleven to get a pack a Reeses using the leftover change.

Barb

[Leon]

....Oooo, and my favorites: drive-in movies with playgrounds.....

There are still a few drive-ins left, was lucky enough to take my niece to a drive-in in my 54 Chevy. She still remembers that as one of her favorite things growing up. I have some speakers I set out at car shows and it is funny when the parents try to explain to their kids what they are for. The kids can't figure out how you see the movie if you stay in the car

[Sam I am]

When folks my age (57) turned sixteen, we learned to drive in cars with no seat belts, airbags, antilock brakes, crumple zones and we didn't die! I drove many a mile with my girlfriend sitting in the middle of the front bench seat, my right arm around her, and my left arm turning the non-power steering wheel, and my foot working the non-power drum brakes. Today we would probably get arrested for driving like that!
And you could actually work on those cars. Pop the hood and there was room to get to just about anything that needed to be repaired or replaced. Today's cars are better in many ways, but I miss the simplicity of the old iron, and indeed the simplicity of life in general!

[Elumia]

Cartoons were on Saturday, not a network.

[len19070]

It got me thinking about a character that a local NJ TV personality in the 70s, Uncle Floyd, did about an old guy complaining about everything nowadays. This character was basically later stolen by Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live, but since Uncle Floyd was so small and local, no one noticed.

I remember Uncle Floyd, Floyd Vivino...and Netto and Mugsey and Wee-Zee and OOgie, the pictures on the wall Looney Skip Rooney And the Ramones were always on, because they lived in the same town in NJ where Uncle Floyd was filmed. I remember my 5-6 year old daughter drawing a crayon drawing of an electric fan with a caption "Were Fans of Floyd"

I think the character you were refering to was "Mr. Pelacutis"

Happy Trails

Len

[cherokeegeorge]

When I was a kid we used to walk to school in the snow, barefooted, uphill, both ways. oh no wait that was my dad.