@smokey Yes! All memory triggers for me.

@smokey The signature Paul Simon harmonies are so evident in “Red Rubber Ball.” I’ve always loved the electric organ, too.

Sending a quiet wish of serenity your way.

@vasta I feel like I heard “One” far more than the other two growing up (I suppose on account of Three Dog Night’s general greater success), but I have much affection for the other two, too.

@schuth I hadn’t realized that Simon had co-written it until I went to get the link, but then things fell into place.

And thank you.

@macgenie For sure. Thankfully, you posted those Grace Slick/“White Rabbit” videos, which are very good at drowning out everything else.

@smokey Great songs. I’d forgotten about Red Rubber Ball, which I really loved.

@smokey After “Red Rubber Ball,” “Never My Love,” another song I’ve always liked, came up.

@smokey @schuth @richnewman The penny drops.

I totally missed the overarching theme. They all belong to the soundtrack of roller rink afternoons of my childhood, but so does this one.

And I didn't know about Paul Simon writing RRB, or Harry Nilsson writing One. The things you learn on Micro.blog!

@macgenie Oh my god! Roller rinks! That, for me, mostly a summer camp memory, but yes.

@richnewman The YouTube algorithm doing something useful, for once! “Red Rubber Ball” was one of those odd songs that didn’t get much play (a one-hit wonder, IIRC) but which I enjoyed from a very young age, first for the ball and then later for the rest of the lyrics.

@macgenie That seems like a strange playlist for roller rinks, or were they the preferred location for teenage heartbreak in that era?

We used to have “skate nights” at my first elementary school, and I went several times, but I cannot recall anything beyond those two facts at this point.

@smokey I wasn't even a teenager in that roller rink period. I don't know--Miami kids were more emo in that era? Roller rinks were the all-ages club in 1960s/early 70s? We also had one ice rink. 🤣🌴

@macgenie 🤣

(I did see you said “childhood” and wasn’t sure if you would have any idea or not, but it was an interesting question in search of an answer 😉 )

@smokey I've actually been pleasantly surprised by what the YouTube algorithm shows me in terms of older songs. I don't go there to discover new and interesting things, but I really like that it shows me a lot of different live performances of songs that I have loved for a very long time.

On another, unrelated note, I realize that the conversation about roller skating rinks has split into a couple of different branches: Is there hidden somewhere a "reply all" function on Micro.blog when there are more than one person in a conversation, or do you have to type in the @ for each person you want to include?

@richnewman I did notice that the first or second suggestion seemed useful/related, in comparison to the completely random stuff YouTube will suggest with other videos (mostly gardening, or something someone here has linked).

@richnewman On the other subject, there’s no reply all in the platform; I think Manton mentioned earlier this year that his thinking is that by defaulting to singular replies, we avoid the mindless “glom everyone together on every reply as it winds it way away from the original topics” and that we should exercise our judgement on when and whom to add. (In this case, I probably should have added you, at least via a trailing @-mention, since you had already replied to Jean on the roller rinks subject.)

I’m not sure, but one of the third-party iOS client apps might have a reply-all function in it; for the official iOS app, Manton recently added username autocompletion, which makes it easier to add other conversants to a reply without automatically glomming every participant in a given Conversation into it, in keeping with his thoughts.

@smokey Thanks. I wasn’t necessarily thinking I needed "reply all,” just wanting to make sure I hadn't missed something that was already there. The auto-fill for @-mentions, which I discovered on my own just before I read your reply does make this easier, and Manton's reasoning kind of makes sense, at least for now, but suppose, for example, a group of people wanted to engage in the poem exchange/discussion that @juliansummerhayes suggested in this conversation. If that group grew to be large enough, even the auto-fill would become unwieldy. Or maybe those kinds of groups wouldn’t really fit in to Micro.blog--and that, too, makes a kind of sense to me.

@richnewman I don’t think I recall seeing a conversation that’s had more than about six people on a single branch, so we really haven’t yet tested the limits of what’s sensible and what needs to find another medium.