It was also a plot point in Gibson & Sterling's "The Difference Engine" about an alternative Victorian era where Babbage's mechanical computers were built and started the Information Age a century or so early.

The problem was the script. Rather than Chris Rock's comedian dying and taking over the body of a murdered businessman, it should have been about Chris Rock getting murdered for his crimes against humor and having his body taken over by a businessman and actually becoming an actual comedian in the process. Except I…

I think part of it is that schools (like everything else) have become yet more economically divided. Kids from wealthy and upper middle class homes always wanted to get good grades because they've been indoctrinated that getting into a good university is essential. It was the working class that was obsessed about…

Teen pregnancy peaked in 1991 and has been dropping since. Kids certainly were getting it on the 1980s. We just weren't great examples (I was a virgin until *grad school*)

Arkady just cultural attaché. Not spy. Why you think he know anything illegal?

Well, sort of. But as someone who was there (I think I'm more or less exactly Henry's contemporary), the 1980s weren't *that* different from now. It wasn't the 1950s or something.

And even into the 1990s. The LucasArts adventure game "The Dig" got a novelization by ADF as well.

Exactly. They sued. Early Mcdonaldland really had that psychedelic hippie vibe like their H.R. Pufnstuf.

Here's what I don't get. I get that they don't call them quarter pounders because they don't use pounds. But they don't have royalty either! Shouldn't it be a Premier with cheese?

Oh yeah. Hotel bathrooms. With cloth towels!

Interestingly enough, many of the ghost writers who wrote for the Hardy Boys series also wrote for Nancy Drew.

Does that mean future generations will revere them like we do Charles Dickens? I hope not.

Me too. In fact I think it was within this decade that I learned that they weren't.

But is it a nice hardcover? I used to belong to the Science Fiction Book Club in the 1980s and the hardcover books they sold had the cheapest, thinnest covers possible. Granted, they were better than paperback but were sold at roughly paperback prices.

Does anyone remember the truly awful 1981 Andy Kaufman "comedy" Heartbeeps? About robots that fell in love? I'm not even sure they bothered to put it out on DVD. Anyway, for some reason I have a novelization of it.

And typical people didn't really get benefits either, so there's that. Sure, people didn't have income tax, but they didn't have Social Security, unemployment benefits, and welfare either. The people who complain about "Big Government" and its "theft" are people who by accident of birth never were in need.

But it is interesting that 1988's "Oliver and Company" is considered a pre-Renaissance failure (and is nearly forgotten today) despite basically being a forerunner for the Disney movie as animated Broadway show strategy.

The whole point of the story is that trying to be something you're not will lead to tragedy. Not that it will lead to happiness (if being married at 16 to somebody you don't know and who only liked you for your looks because you couldn't talk can really be said to be happy).

Seriously? I'm not a fan of later Killers (Battle Born in particular), but Sam's Town is probably their best album and the only one I still listen to.

So's the Soviet Union in Archer's universe.