It's just statistics. If 20% of children go on to lead tragic lives, then there's a 0.8% chance that any group of three children will go on to all lead tragic lives. Now multiply those odds by all the television shows in the 1980s that featured at least three child actors, and it was basically inevitable that one of those shows would produce a trifecta. Diff'rent Strokes was that show.

Has anyone ever actually heard Maine referred to as "the tailpipe of the nation"?

The potato bacon beer wheels are incredibly addictive.

What are you even referring to with the balanced budget thing? Can you link an article or… Anything?

Asterisks on either side of what you want to italicize.

The 1990s were great in retrospect. The problem is that the good bits only lasted about six years, which is really nothing while it's happening. The decade started with the worst crime rate that anyone had ever experienced, a recession, and the lingering belief that we would all die of a nuclear war any second.

Clinton got elected in 1992 and things started to get better, but not fast or dramatically enough that many people noticed. Meanwhile, the media ("Y2K!" "Violent Video Games!") and the Republicans ("Lewinsky!" "Travelgate!" "Whitewater!") managed to convince half the country that everything absolutely sucked and was things were going to get worse. By the end of the decade, Clinton had been impeached, the tech bubble had burst, and 9/11 was right around the corner. If you blinked, you missed the good parts or never really felt them anyway.

I am 50 years old, and I can’t think of a single time in my life that wasn’t characterized by “economic uncertainty and social upheaval.”