Many a quasi-overnighter in the windowless campus paper basement office were spent tooling around on Heavy.com in between writing, editing, and placing layouts. Since graduating from said “dungeon” (and into a home office! Yay!), I haven’t gone back to Heavy much, so it was a kind of cool blast from the past when Julie from Heavy sent me a link to their “The Top 10 Everything Of The Decade” superlists. The dawn of 2010 is definitely a turning point in my life, and Heavy was random creative fuel for so many InDesign debugging sessions, that I just had to check out what cheeky fun was taking over their pages. Snippets from my favorite:

Top 10 Things We’ll Have Hard Time Explaing To Our Grandchild
(Title Case aside, at the moment I cannot wrap my head around the grammar of this heading.)

10. R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet

9. Paris Hilton

8. Dial-up Internet Access

7. Polar Bears – “There used to be this one kind of bear called a polar bear. They were white, and they lived at the North Pole. Where the ocean is now. All of that used to be ice. Don’t laugh at me, child, it did! We used to say Santy Claus lived up there… Yes, this was before he lived on the moon. It was all covered with ice, and there were these special bears that only lived up there and they were WHITE. And when all the ice melted, the bears all drowned, except the ones in zoos, and then they all died because they were old. There were people who lived up there too. Eskimos. I don’t know what happened to them, though.”

6. Autotune

5. The Bailouts – “So back in 2005 or so, everyone was buying houses. That was when your grandma and I bought our first house. We took out this loan and the terms were terrible. Your grandma was smart and good looking and she got it paid off, but a lot of people weren’t that smart and they lost everything. People lost their houses and then they couldn’t buy things or pay the banks and the banks and the stores were going broke, so the government gave the banks and the insurance companies and the car companies and everybody else a whole ton of money. Well, everybody except the people who actually lost their houses. I think they all died. Froze to death. Just terrible.”

4. Video Rental Stores – “When I was a little kid, movies came in these big black boxes called VCR Tapes. You’d go to a special store, and they’d have maybe a hundred or so VCR Tapes, and you’d pick the one you wanted, you would pay the person, and then you’d take it home. When you were done watching it, you’d go back to the store and return the VCR Tape and maybe get another one. Yes, they only had a hundred or so. VCR Tapes were pretty big, and the store was only so large. You could fit a dozen or so in a shoebox. Anyway, yes, you had to leave the house. You couldn’t just download things, because we didn’t have enough Internet back then to download!”

3. Ken Jennings

2. Jackass

1. Emperor Gorlok

In regards to No. 2, I’ve always said that if I had a choice between admitting to being Eminem’s mom or Johnny Knoxville’s, I’d claim Eminem first. And I’ll never discuss Emperor Gorlok with my grandchildren because I totally don’t get that reference.