Floaty boogers: gone for good?

Dear Hipster:

Is it possible to predict what current pop culture trends will someday be the target of a revival, either ironic or genuine? Perhaps history suggests a pattern as to what captures future imaginations, and what will be consigned to a footnote of history. In case you were wondering, I have this idea that I could save myself a lot of time, effort, and perhaps most importantly, dollars if I selectively retain my present possessions that may fall out of fashion only so long as it takes them to once again be in vogue.

— Stella

Could you ever have guessed 1980s people growing Chia Pets could foresee the meteoric rise to power of chia seed pudding in the early Twenty-Teens as the anytime snack of the uber-trendy? Can we really hypothesize that engineers working at Yamaha in the 1970s designed the XS650 motorcycle with an eye towards future generations of hipsters who might “discover” the suitability of vintage Yamaha’s for conversion into impracticable metric choppers, thus driving the price of pristine, unaltered models somewhere north of the middle stratosphere?

How about all those people who saved their vinyl collections when everybody started buying 8-tracks; and kept saving them when everybody started buying cassette tapes; and saved them even when everybody started buying CDs; and still didn’t let them go when iPods let you store your entire collection in your pocket; and didn’t even trash their vinyl when cloud-based streaming services put the entire world of all music at your fingertips? You know none of those people looked at hundreds of pounds of thrice-obsolete media and thought, “This is definitely making a comeback someday.” Of course they didn’t. They may have had a hard time letting stuff go, but they weren’t psychics.

On the flip side, some things seem immune to comeback, no matter how deserving. Why not bring back Orbitz, the slimy soda with little floating boogers in it? You know the one I mean, the one that has had its legend eclipsed by a discount travel company! We are waiting. We are ready. We are thirsty for those little floaty boogers.

I can’t promise people in 2037 will rediscover those shoes with toes that got really popular a few years ago for a hot minute, but I also can’t say it definitely won’t happen. Anything is possible in this life, and the future can never be predicted.

Dear Hipster:

Why are waffles cooler than pancakes?

— Dan

I never thought of this before you mentioned it, but now that it’s been said, I can’t unhear it. Waffles are somehow cooler than pancakes. I don’t think they’re more delicious, but they have a kind of edgy coolness that pancakes will never have. Maybe it’s because waffles are something you ironically promise to make for “dinner” when you need to amuse a date who is way hotter than you are but you can’t cook; whereas pancakes are what couples end up eating for dinner when they’re in the kind of situation where one person is like, “You want to get dressed and go out for dinner tonight” and the other one is like, “Nah, let’s just eat pancakes on the couch and watch reruns of Two and a Half Men till we fall asleep in a puddle of syrup,” and then they do.