You Might Be Getting Older If...

...you've ever read a print edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Y'see, when I was a kid, I'd ask my parents about stuff, and they'd say, "I don't know, why don't we look it up?" They had a middle-of-the-line Swedish encyclopedia sitting in a bookshelf right next to the couch in the living room. I loved that encyclopedia, and since it had a lot of illustrations and long articles, it actually made for good casual reading. After a while, I'd read all the page-length articles -- hence my mad Jeopardy skillz.

In the late 90's mom and dad came into some money, and one of the first things they did was to upgrade the encyclopedia. Out went the now-outdated 80's glossy pages in favor of the Swedish equivalent of EB: the venerable Nationalencyklopedin. It was the French leather edition, too, with the covers embossed in fake gold. Absolutely beautiful set of books, and the 20 volumes take up several feet of shelf space. The company selling it was surprisingly on the ball for 1998, because you got a DVD and a subscription to their website with your purchase. Neither The Tome of All Knowledge nor The Oracle yet existed, and the DVD was certainly handier than fiddling around with books, so the vast majority of those pretty leather-bound books never even got cracked open.

Fast-forward to 2012. Nationalencyclopedin actually survives as a printed work, although it's hard to even find a place to buy it on their website -- they only advertise the web subscription. EB is officially no more. My grandfather's go-to reference on everything has admittedly been out of print since 1957, but it was one hell of a reference work in its day. Unfortunately it caused grandad to occasionally refer to "Indo-China" and "the Negroid race", so I guess there's something to be said for updates. If I ever have any kids, I assume I'll be teaching them Google-Fu on whatever the iPad looks like ten years from now. And I'll certainly be telling long, rambling stories about how much awesomer things were "back in my day."

Oh yeah, and I turned 30 and went to San Francisco. Check out the pictures, and then get off my lawn!