With the rainy days coming up, I bought some caulk to seal up the door that leaks when the outside drain backs up. Mission accomplished, door sealed. I think I’ll stay dry.

Applying the caulk reminded me of a skit on SNL, filled with sexual innuendos. One of them was something about “filling the crack with caulk”. When I should have been doing one of twenty other things, I started searching for a copy of this skit, so I could re-live the raunchy laughs. Instead, I found the even funnier NPR Schweaty Balls skit. Ah SNL, I remember the days when you used to always be this funny. Now it’s a rarity. What happened?

I was talking to Melanie to see if she remembered the caulk skit. She didn’t, and it took her 6 hours to get the joke (no, seriously). She said the only reason she even knew the word caulk was from playing The Oregon Trail back in grade school.

Then I had a revelation. I’d seen the You Have Died of Dysentery shirts all over the place recently– at least 3 in the past week. I knew the reference from reading books for my TC classes, but I’d never played the game or even heard of it in my own grade school days. I thought it was an obscure reference.

Melanie’s matter-of-fact-ness about the game made me realize it’s not really that obscure. It’s just obscure to me. The reason? Well, we didn’t have computers in my schools. All the way up to 12th grade the only time I saw a computer in school was in the “rotation class” in junior high — that 1 hour class where 1/4 of the year we studied computers, 1/4 of the year was home economics, 1/4 of the year was wood and metal working (aka shop), and 1/4 of the year we tried to memorize where all the keys were on a state-of-the-art IBM Selectric typewriter.

Of course, burning chocolate chip cookies was much more fun than reading about ENIAC, so I never felt shortchanged.