http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K9OKF8HX5Q

Via my friend Paul Maggio…

My immediate response was (and yes, I do talk out loud to my TV) Aqua Marine and then Aqua Man. The former answer came from my childhood fascination with birthstones and rocks (no Pokemon back then), the latter because my brother Greg spent most of his allowance money on comic books and action figures.

The top three answers on the board were very much of the era:

When my first Facebook friend posted “Velva,” I smacked my head (lightly, for the sake of drama). How could I have forgotten the Aqua Velva Man?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eAs7DM6u_Q

I mean, catchy melody, Pete Rose (even if the Cincinnati Reds were the Dodgers’ hated rivals), Mel from Alice?

Maybe it was because, as much as I loved sports back then, my dad used Gillette (“The best a man can get”), and my mom used Aqua Net. And even though it wasn’t the first thing that popped in my head, I still wish it had gotten the nod over Lung.

I wasn’t surprised at such perennial responses as “Mother,” or millennial ones as “Grey.” [2]

But I was nonplussed that not a single friend from childhood (or who happened to be in California in the 1970s) had posted what I thought was the clear “era” answer:

And it wasn’t because they were not participating. Out the nine unique friends who posted responses, seven of them fit the aforementioned category. [3]

So at 3:04 pm I posted this clue:

Hint: potato chips…

But the only response I got from that was:

Fried?

So I wrote:

California kids – you’ll be smacking your heads at the $250 answer…

Back in the mid–70s, at least in California, Granny Goose Potato Chips were neck and neck with Laura Scudders:

And to a lesser extent, Bell:

Lays were special-occasion chips, but I’m thinking they weren’t on sale very often. My mom usually chose the chips by their price.

And before they started showing cartoon PSAs on the USDA’s Basic Four Food Groups, such as this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGd_9UiMeBE

Potato chips played the central role in my “basic three” lunch food groups (cookies and to a lesser extent, the sandwich were the other two).

In any event, an elementary school friend finally came up with the desired response:

I was stumped, but thanks to Google (and no thanks to my awesome but flawed long term memory), I got the “Granny”.

I felt pretty full of myself – how could these people forget Granny Goose? – until a bit after I posted the answer photo at the end of the day:

Then another friend commented on the answers photo:

What is Granny’s secret? She-ee won’t say. How she makes her potato chips CRUNCH that way.

I don’t remember that jingle. At all. I didn’t even have a reaction of, “Oh, yeah, that’s right!” It’s nowhere to be found among the many jingles and catchphrases from that time period still extant, including:

Oscar Mayer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmPRHJd3uHI

Life Cereal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNnVGjru6lk

And, of course, Big Mac:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en4muUSIRT4

It’s possible that few others remember it for the same reasons I didn’t (possible reasons: regional brand that couldn’t afford as many TV spots, lack of strong melody, no surprise at the end of the 30-second clip), but there you go…

Potato chip bag photos courtesy of JasonLiebig on Flickr.

Check out Jason’s blog Collecting Candy – it’s great fun both for candy and nostalgia lovers!

Zenoss calls itself The Cloud Management Company, describing its offerings as such:

Zenoss was founded in 2005 to address the challenges of operating and assuring large-scale IT services…As enterprises and service providers drive aggressively towards the “IT-as-a-Service” model, the need for a new class of IT operations solution has become an urgent and obvious need.

The key principles that drove our initial offerings are even more relevant today as organizations drive towards the vision of automated operations and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

In other words, Zenoss is moving IT operations away from legacy vendors, freeing up companies to run dynamic infrastructures and free up development cycles, so that they can keep up and thrive in this real-time world we now live in.

I really enjoy writing for Zenoss. It’s well-run, has great people and they even invite me to the company picnics, which I’d attend if I lived a little closer to Austin…

Here are links to a few of the dozen or so posts I’ve written for Zenoss so far:

Is It Time to Redefine Ops?

Service Assurance Via the Cloud, Part 2: How Many 9’s Do You Need?

Automatic Provisioning: Why It’s So Important

Ideally, these posts are helping to make the “cloud” more accessible to the average reader. I’d love to hear your thoughts about these posts – or your thoughts on cloud computing in general – in the comments section.