What they don't know

Except for suits and other bespoke apparel, I get all of my clothing from the good people over at Eddie Bauer (shirts) or LL Bean (jeans and pants), so I don't know from American Apparel. I certainly don't believe they'd have the sort of retired-guy-casual clothing that I favored long before becoming an actual retired guy, and it would be like repeating my Zumiez experience if I were to ankle into one of their stores.  I needed to purchase a gift card for a young friend of ours once, and entered a Zumiez store, only to be regarded like a cheeseburger in a punchbowl at a high-class party.  The kids working there, in speaking to me, managed to lower one eyebrow while raising the other, no mean feat.

But this weekend, AmAp made a BooBoo that you need to be aware of in case you need an excuse for not knowin' stuff. To salute the Fourth of July, they ran a picture on Tumblr of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion, with a red sky as background, and hashtags “#smoke” and “#clouds.”

Of course, as anyone with 1/2 an education knows, this is the picture that shows the Challenger being blown to bits, taking seven brave souls with it.  It was in all the papers and everything, but this person with a position of importance in this company did not know that.  The company hastened to blame it all on his/her youth:

So, while we take a moment to shake our heads at just what these smarty-pants kids DON'T know and don't seem to care about not knowing, it now looks like you can be blissfully unaware of the following events, if they took place before you assumed your place among the quick:

The Magna Carta, Marco Polo's travels, the Renaissance, the bubonic plague, the Canterbury Tales, the Gutenberg Bible, Columbus's voyage to the New World, Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, the Gregorian Calendar, the construction of the Taj Mahal, the Industrial Revolution, Mozart, Beethoven, the US Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the Revolutionary War, Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," the telephone, the electric light, the airplane, the theory of relativity, World War I, the birth control movement, the Bolshevik Revolution, the “Spanish flu” epidemic, television, the U.S. stock market crash, World War II, Atomic bombs, the electronic computer, the discovery of DNA's structure, and Brown Vs. Board of Education. 

Ain't it fun, not knowin' nuttin'?