Fads you can’t forget (but what were we thinking?)

Every generation is stamped with indelible imprimaturs, which forever mark its milestones in the annals of history. But CrazyFads.com isn’t interested -- the website is more concerned with America’s lowbrow culture, its whims and passing fancies. We’re talking Pet Rocks here, people.

Nearly 50,000 visitors a month take a sometimes wince-inducing stroll down memory lane. The site breaks fads down by decade, beginning with the 1920s. No era is beyond reproach. (Raise your hand if you had the Rachel haircut or an interactive pet Furby.)

Sock hops and poodle skirts are inextricably linked to the 1950s, but the decade also ushered in the use of “virgin pins,” which, according to the site, were supposedly really big in Cleveland. “Girls wore them pinned on their right upper blouse/sweater front to proudly advertise that they were the coveted virginal ‘good girl’ material, highly prized in that era.”

And long before street illusionist David Blaine chewed up martini glasses in crowded New York bars (as seen on his most recent television special), former Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Tim Rossovich ate beer mugs and light bulbs for fun in the 1970s. A few Harvard students copied his antics (obviously not the brightest on the Cambridge campus), but thankfully the fad was short-lived.

Eric A. Borgos, 37, of Wakefield, R.I., launched CrazyFads.comin 2003 as a way for “younger people to gain some historical perspective on what they consider to be hot and trendy today,” he writes in an e-mail. “Also, for older people, my site is a fun way to look back nostalgically at fads they were into when they were younger.”

Borgos, a Web mogul who owns more than 300 websites and 10,000 domain names, cops to following a few fads in his youth: playing tetherball, figuring out the Rubik’s Cube and owning a “Happy Days” lunchbox.

We can relate. Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, kids with the Fonz on their lunch kettles were so much cooler than those with the “Joanie Loves Chachi” ones -- or those back-of-the-cafeteria brown-baggers.

-- CHRISTINE N. ZIEMBA