When I was in high school, kids wore Led Zep shirts. I didn't, because I was a self-righteous little snot of a hardcore kid who thought Led Zep was tired bullshit. To me, the Bron-yr-aur Stomp reeked of thick-headed jocks in suburban backyard parties, a red plastic cup of Bud in their hands.

It would take me some years to come around to the popular music of my day and see the artistry in, say, U2's Unforgettable Fire, to say nothing of side one of Led Zep IV.

And but so when I was a freshman in high school, Led Zeppelin was about twenty years out of date. So the metalheads in my class who gave me grief and called me "thrasher" were wearing a t-shirt for a band that was formed before they were born. A band whose best albums came out when they were still gestating within their respective mothers' wombs or twinkling in their fathers' respective eyes.

I would go to hardcore shows and buy t-shirts of bands I'd see whose members were basically my age, so buying the t-shirt of a twenty-year-old band just seemed weird. It seemed cookie cutter and bland and empty of spirit. Book your own fucking life and all that. Disclaimer: I get it now. I'm not knocking Led Zeppelin. There's nothing wrong with teenagers liking them. Houses of the Holy rules. I like hobbits. They're great.

So now, two decades and change later, high school and/or teenagers/young people still occasionally wear Led Zeppelin shirts. Maybe not to the extent they did in the early 90's, but it happens. So Led Zeppelin is now forty-six years old. What I wonder is how do young people think about a wearing the t-shirt of a band that is forty-six years old? It would be like if, in my high school days, some kid was proudly wearing a Hoagy Carmichael t-shirt.

Does the modern young person wearing a Led Zep shirt feel about Led Zep the way an imaginary 1991 high schooler might have thought about Hoagy Carmichael or Bing Crosby or some other antique singer from another age? Or is that 1960's cultural bridge so pronounced that those of us on one side of it will always share a kinship not imaginable with the art and ideas on the far side of it? Or is it just that the consumption of media has so thoroughly changed in the digital age that there really is no difference between Led Zeppelin and Hoagy Carmichael? Or more precisely, is the difference between Hoagy Carmichael and Led Zeppelin like the difference between Beethoven and Bach, just two flavors of the same mildewed rainbow?

As far as the best research can uncover, in 1971, Gordon Henry Jakes (pictured above), a junior lab technician at Kozar Semiconductors in Modesto, California became the very first person to humorously type 5318008 into a digital calculator’s display screen, which as any third grader from 1982 can tell you, when turned upside down, spells the digital approximation of “boobies.”

“You know, they say the average human male thinks about sex every seven seconds or thereabouts, and I guess, back then, I was no different,” remembers Mr. Jakes. “If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been somebody else--I just happened to record it in our annual joke book the gang in Lab C did every year for the company picnic. So the paper trail is there. History’s gaze falls on me, oddly enough. Sort of like how they say language most likely arose independently in three distinct areas in the world, there were probably a legion of calculator users like me typing “boobies” and giggling all through the seventies. What’s really interesting, is the limited window of this joke. Who uses calculators anymore, really? At least not in the way they were used back in my day. Do grade schoolers still have a Texas Instruments calculator in their book bag? Or even if they do, they also probably have a web-enabled device that, if their parents aren’t careful, will let them access real boobies at any moment of the day. 5318008 can’t compete against that. I wonder if there were similar gags with similarly short windows of historical relevance. Was there some euphemistic pun made about phonograph needles, or butter churners, that made eight year olds of their own day snort milk through their nose as they tried to stifle a guffaw? I’m just glad I got to add my bit to the conversation.”