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<title>Weekly Whack: 
Two Years Ago
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Two Years Ago
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July 20, 1997
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<p><dd>Boy does time fly fast.  It's amazing.  It's like before you even  have enough time to grow tired of your calendar, it's already time to get  a new one.  It's tough to keep up.  I used to get those word-a-day daily  calendars where you get to learn a new word every day.  The only problem  was that I couldn't keep up with it.  I would still be trying to learn the  new word and the day would already be over.  I would start falling behind  a couple days, then weeks, months, and even years.  In fact, right now I'm  still trying to learn the word from March 23rd of 1993.  But anyway, my  whole point is can you believe that this week marks the two year  anniversary of Feff World being on-line?  I can't.  It seems like only  yesterday.  But it was two years ago, and although it feels like no time,  two years actually is a long time.  In fact I'm going to prove how long  two years actually is by discussing the world as it was two years ago, in  the year 1995.  You will see how distant 1995 is to us now, and realize  that the past is moving away from us at the same rapid rate that the  future is moving towards us.
<p><dd>For most of the year 1995, I was only seventeen years old.  That  seems so young to me now.  I just got my license, but I was still too  young to vote, buy lottery tickets, or worse yet, play bingo.  On the  positive side, I was too young to cut cold cuts legally yet.  So if you  think about it, the activities that take up the vast majority of my time  this summer (working at the deli, going to the track, playing bingo,  etc... ), I couldn't have done two years ago because I was too young.  So  wow, what I was possibly doing two years ago?  I must of had a lot of time  on my hands.  Well, what I was doing, was getting this Web page thing  started.  So thus it is much harder to maintain this Web page now, when I  have less time on my hand, than it was two years ago, when I had too much  time on my hands.  Hence I writing this Whack for last Sunday now at  11:30pm on Tuesday, while two years ago I would have had it done on  Saturday.
<p><dd>Well enough about me two years ago, lets talk more about how the  world was two years ago.  In 1995 the Republicans, headed by Newt  Gingrich, took control of Congress, sending a strong message of  disapproval to the President.  However, it wasn't long before they screwed  things up, and Clinton ended up getting reelected anyway.  Also the whole  O.J. Simpson trial opened that year.  In fact, the OJ Trial pretty much  swallowed up a vast majority of the year 1995 up whole.  From the opening  of the trial in January, to the stunning not-guilty verdict in October, to  the post-trial debate that still hasn't completely fizzled out, you  couldn't have gone very far in the year 1995 without bumping into the OJ  Trial.  But talking about people getting killed, Selena was murdered in  1995.  Personally, w who the hell she was before that.  It was almost as  if her murder was sort of a rebirth for her.  It took her death for people  to finally realize that she existed.  While we are on the subject of  people dying, the whole Oklahoma city bombing thing was two years ago.   That was big news since, as the press was quick to point out, it was the  first major act of terrorism on U.S. soil.  If you ask me though, I would  probably qualify all that shit that the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups  did to Blacks back during the Civil Rights movement and before as major  acts of terrorism.  In my book five little girls getting killed in a  church bombing is definitely a major act of terrorism, but I guess it  doesn't count.  Anyhoo, one last thing about death, 1995 was also the year  that Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was killed.  Unfortunately I  don't think the Israeli press could get away with calling that the first  major act of terrorism on their soil.
<p><dd>I think it's time we move away from all the bad stuff that  happened in 1995, and discuss some of the culture of that year.  In 1995,  the top rated regularly scheduled television program was E.R., and the top  rated syndicated television program was Wheel of Fortune.  The one is an  intelligent, powerful drama about life deep inside a hospital, and the  other is a corny game show for retards.  Damn, I definitely do not envy  network executives.  How do you decided what sort of programs to air when  you are sent those sort of mixed signals?  But anyway, the top grossing  movie of  1995 was Batman Forever.  I think I can proudly say that I had  absolutely nothing to do with it becoming the top grossing movie of that  year.  Not a single cent of my money went towards seeing that movie.   Moving out of the theater and to the old video store, The Shawshank  Redemption was the top rental of the year, and The Lion King made the most  for videocassette sales.  So people only wanted to rent the masterpiece  portrait of life in jail, but everybody wanted to buy the musical cartoon  about the talking lion.  Great choice people.  Moving away from movies and  towards music, Hootie and The Blowfish had the top album, Coolio had the  top single, and TLC was burning up the R&B charts.  However for me the top  album was once again Journey's Greatest Hits, for the ninth year in a row. 
 Finally in the world of books, John Grisham's The Rainmaker was the top  fiction book, while John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus  was the top non-fiction book.  Unfortunately, since neither of the two  books have Cliff Notes out for them yet, I have no clue what they are  about.
<p><dd>Well I think it is time to stop looking towards the past, and  return to gazing at the future, so to conclude the Whack for this week, I  really must have had no life before I could play bingo; a lot of people  died in 1995; and daytime TV just isn't the same anymore without the OJ  Trial.

<p><i>Now for this week's very special feature, Feff's top ten favorite Nobel  Prize winners of 1995:</i></p>

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<dd>10. Robert E. Lucas, Jr. (Economic Science)
<dd> 9. Eric F. Wieschaus (Physiology or Medicine)
<dd> 8. Edward B Lewis (Physiology or Medicine)
<dd> 7. Mario Molina (Chemistry)
<dd> 6. F. Sherwood Rowland (Chemistry)
<dd> 5. Frederick Reines (Physics)
<dd> 4. Martin L. Perl (Physics)
<dd> 3. Seamus Heaney (Literature)
<dd> 2. Joseph Rotblat (Peace)
<dd> 1. Noel Rogers (Entropy)
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