The History of Pop-Up

Then there was the pop-up toaster. And it thoroughly kicked ass. From bagels to English Muffins, you could get your breakfast grain product all nice and toasty brown.

Next came Pop-Up Videos on VH-1. It was pretty neat as well, especially when it started, but then came Jackson Day, and you had to watch that weird Jermaine song. And sure, every once in a while they play a killer song that you haven't heard in so long, you thought they burned all the copies in 1988. But then they play stuff like Rock Me Amadeus...All in all, though, pretty cool.

But then Bell Atlantic has to go and make a pop-up commercial. If you haven't seen it, it's a ridiculous style copy of Pop-Up Videos with a bunch of apparently-unrelated scenes with bad pop-up balloons. So this iteration of pop-up-itude is awful.

And now there's GeoCities' pop-up ads. More than likely when you loaded this page, some random banner appeared in another window, advertising some sponsor or some other pages on their server. For this I apologize. Because G'C is free, they can pretty much do what they want to us. Today it involves pop-up ads. Thus completing the evolution of the pop-up. It is clear that pop-up-ness must be destroyed before it mutates into something even more frightening.

(There is an option, but it's almost as annoying. Please visit my survey page to talk to me about it.)

(Hint -- if it's not too annoying or too much of a drain, leave the window open in the background. It prevents new pop-ups from, well, popping up.)