Memory Lane Monday: Pogs

Continuing with our popular Monday feature, I'll be low-lighting Pogs this week. (Special thanks to Carlos for helping me decide between Pogs or the origin of those oven baked cheese potatoes from a magical 5 years ago in high school. I hope graduate school is as cool as it looks on TV.)

Pogs. What else can I tell you that you didn't already read on retrojunk.com? Well, for starters, your older brother/sister were assholes and didn't tell you how gay you looked playing with them. If they did, make sure you go the extra distance this Christmas and get them that iPod case they don't want to spend $32.99 on. They were looking out for you. My older sister was not.

Do you remember wondering what the whole deal was with Pokemon a few years ago? You looked exactly like that. Except in place of a rare Manaphy (thank you, wikipedia) card you were holding something called a slammer with the word "Poison" on it.

Hopefully you lived in an area like mine where ice cream men patrolled your lazy street and capitalized on your stupidy.

Instead of buying that extra Ninja Turtles iced cream pop with bubble gum eyes, you spent your money on circular pieces of cardboard. They sold you tens, maybe hundreds (Daniel), of them. Maybe some were the fake, cheap ones. Maybe some were official. It didn't matter: you were going to take down Joey Lopez or Armando Duran and win the covetted Goosebumps pog with the dummy on it.

If you need someone to blame your subsequent gambling addiction on like me, you can trace this mess back to Blossom Galbiso, a school teacher in that fake U.S.A. known as Hawaii who used pogs to help teach kids math in the early 1990s. Thanks Ms. (safe to assume unmarried) Galbiso for making me look like a tool. It wasn't enough that I was wearing tie dye slip-ons and counterfeit Adidas shorts, now I'm playing with Pogs!

Leave it to The Simpsons to immortalize this craze and frame my generation's biggest embarrassment. Milhouse, the gayest character in the history of television, was beside himself when he got his new pogs featuring that mischievous alien. "Remember Alf? He's back. In pog form." How this game inspired tournaments is mind boggling.

In any case, I had a healthy addiction to sports cards and nintendo games that allowed me to give up on the game before joining any professional clubs or tournaments.

For those of you who were not so lucky, I'll continue praying for your soul.