big talk: WHAT HAPPENED ON 13 OCT 1974

It's been about a month since my last birthday and I was suddenly reminiscing... (I know I sound like an old coot when I used the word "reminisce". But then again, I now got over 30 years to reminisce about. That means even if I am not an ol' coot, I'm well on my way to being one, that's for sure...)

Anyway, I was reminiscing and I thought... wouldn't it be great to learn more about what happened in the world around the time I was born by checking out what popular culture (well, popular American culture) had to write about at that time? So I did a lil homework.

And guess what... nothing really great happened. It was kinda a blah month really. I mean, they were trying to fight inflation, recession, Dolly Parton's was big then (celebrity status... I meant, celebrity status...) and the only thing people were probably talking about was how the special effects people on The Exorcist made lil Linda Blair barf so much...

I mean... there were so many cooler magazine covers around that time. Time had Nixon's pardon for the Watergate scandal, Mad had cool cover of a hand showing its middle finger, Rolling Stone had Lennon and Yoko bucknaked... (I said cool. I never said pretty...)

Anyway, I decided to fast-track to the present and see what these magazines had to write about on my birthday this year, seriously hoping that there would be cooler things happening now as compared to 32 years before. And this is what I got...