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My Past Comes Back To Haunt Me

I try to avoid reprinting comments except on special occasions, but I have a special fondness for comments about “qualifications” (what makes you think you’re qualified to write about X), so I was really entertained by this one from a few days ago:

I attended high school with the author of this article (Nepean High School, Class of 1994), and I can safely say that he is the absolute last person I can think of that should be qualified to pass judgment on what is and isn’t “cool” within the realm of popular culture, or within any other domain for that matter.

Well, nothing he says is factually untrue. I can only consider myself lucky that I don’t have a paper trail from high school, unless my old term papers show up somewhere. When someone shows up in comments with quotes from my old newsgroup posts, I’ll really be in trouble.

But we’ve seen this story before. It’s the story of an ex-classmate, Tom Hanks, who shows up after 15+ years and decides to show everybody that his now-respectable arch-nemesis (Henry Winkler) is totally uncool. The end result? Mr. Miyagi’s place of business gets trashed. Of course I am unworthy of comparison to even the Linda Purl-era Arthur Fonzarelli, but the lesson we can all learn here is, don’t dwell on what happened in school. And see Shane and The Searchers.

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