clear channel

Originally, a clear channel radio station was one that had somehow gotten the right to have a number on the dial with no other radio stations anywhere near it-- therefore, you could hear it for hundreds of miles, both because it had a very strong signal, and because there were no other radio stations with similar dial numbers competing with it.

35 years ago, you could hear WBZ (which was a clear channel radio station based in Boston) as far away as Ohio.

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Tuck Everlasting

A fantastic, fantastic book by Natalie Babbitt. Not a children's book if your association with children's books includes pictures, but a book with some cool concepts that middle schoolers or elementry school kids can really understand. It's about a family who drank from a hidden spring, and it caused them to live forever, without aging (though when they drank from it they had no idea it wasn't just an ordinay spring.) It probably sounds like a stupid, simple book, but it's great to get discussions going (or just make people think) about if you would really WANT to live forever, if given the opportunity. Especially these days when we're not sure what the future of the planet is, would you really want to be committed to living forever, no matter what? FOREVER?

Miss Alabama in 1994, when asked if she would want to live forever if it were possible: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever."

Tuck Everlasting was also a movie, but I did not see it, so I cannot comment on it.

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underdog

Maybe the underdog I know is based on the underdog from the 60's, but the one I'm familliar with was on Nickelodeon, and also spoke in rhymes. He was a cartoon dog, and I think he had a cape.

"There's no need to fear! Underdog is here!" - phrase from virtually every preview/ad for the show.

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graffiti board

A giant piece of paper on the wall whose sole purpose is to house graffiti. The comments, drawings, thoughts, quotes, song lyrics, and nonsense written on it is generally written in marker. When it gets so almost every inch of the paper is filled with something, it is time for a clean start with a new piece of paper.

The graffiti board we had in our 6th grade classroom was a conglomeration of really neat stuff and utter shit, such as "Lisa and Sidney and Stephanie are cool," which was scrawled over the board (by lisa, Stephanie, or Sidney) at least half a dozen times per page, so the total is probably a very high number. There was often a "not" inserted into the sentence by someone who got tired of reading that same shit every day, and this caused much uproar.

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horizontal surface disease

Someone who has trouble keeping horizontal surfaces neat. Desks become a place for papers and books to accumulate; couches become a breeding ground for coats, purses, and junk.

OMG, did you see her house?? She has a major case of horizontal surface disease.

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Glider Pro

If you haven't heard of the computer game Glider, you should read that definition before reading this one.

Glider Pro was what came after the original Glider, adding to it lots of new things, but it was essentially the same game. In Glider pro there are more room backgrounds.... you can link a switch to an object in another room.... there are LOTS more objects... etc., etc., etc. Makes building rooms/houses more fun because you have more options, but loses some of the charm of the original Glider. There is a Glider Pro for Mac OS X, but it doesn't have room editor. The one for OS 9, which does have a room editor, works on OS X machines that have a "classic" mode, but it freezes randomly for no reason.

note: Cassidy & Greene, the company that licensed Glider and Glider Pro, went bankrupt several years ago. The author, John Calhoun, has made Glider Pro available online for free, as shareware. Go to Google and search for Glider OS X, and you can download Glider Pro-- the OS X or the OS 9. As far as I know, Glider Pro is only available for the Mac.

I have spent HOURS playing Glider Pro, or Glidering.

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PEMDAS

The order of operations in math-- Parentheis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction

In 6th grade, we had a sign on the wall of our classroom that said PEMDAS, but when we asked what it meant, the teacher said it meant Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, and she would tell us more later.... needless to say, four months into the school year when she finally DID tell us, it was a letdown.

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