The ties were thin, the newspapers were fat, the coke was abundant, the wars were tiny and distant and not very threatening, the girls had not yet gone wild, the hip hop wasn't all that great yet, there was no such thing as Starbucks unless you lived in Seattle, and the only way to ignore strangers in public was to pretend that the batteries on your Walkman had not run out three hours ago. Hey, everybody, meet the '80s!