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FAIRBANKS -- While purchasing school supplies for Forrest a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Mead corporation is still attempting to peddle the Pee-Chee All-Season Portfolio to today’s school children.

Like 99 percent of local parents, I put off buying school supplies until the night before school started, which means I was out there with the rest of you en masse navigating the narrow aisles of our favorite one-stop shopping center desperately trying to fulfill the ginormous list of supplies that the schools insisted our child needed. And forget trying to go the frugal route. While it might have been tempting to opt for the cheaper No. 0 pencil as opposed to the required No. 2, we were all plagued by the thought of our child showing up the next day with a crate full of generic branded products that would lead to a public stoning by classmates and administrators alike. The fact is that despite its important-sounding name, President’s Choice products don’t hold a candle to Crayola or Elmer.

(Side note from something I learned a previous year: If you completely forget to buy school supplies altogether and decide to just swing by JustAStore or Holiday on the way to taking your kid to school the next day, you are not going to have much luck, unless the list of supplies includes Slim Jims.)

Anyway, while combing through near empty shelves searching for Forrest’s supplies for fourth grade, I came across a mass quantity of the aforementioned Pee-Chee. I am not sure why Mead is still trying to market this product, since it lacks an important quality that today’s youth are looking for in their school supplies, and by “important quality” I mean “the ability to download the latest Black Eyed Peas song off of iTunes.”

I blame the young ones for not having a better imagination and not realizing how much potential there is in a Pee-Chee All Season Portfolio. The inside of the portfolio, in my mind, is completely useless. The conversion table on the left has some value if you are a drug dealer, but the tables on the right are meaningless to pretty much everyone. I don’t recall any time during my public schooling that I needed to know squat about the table of Troy weight, the table of Apothecaries’ weight, or the table of Avoirdupois weight. Someone at the Mead corporation (my guess it was Walter) thought that this WAS important, so it was included. Right underneath the multiplication table.

Herein lies one of the complexities of the Pee-Chee All Season Portfolio, and that is understanding what the target market is for this product. It stands to reason that if a student is tackling complex mathematical issues that involve knowing the table of Apothecaries’ weight that they probably know what 2 times 2 is. So why include the multiplication table directly under the heading “Useful Information?” That’s a rather misleading heading given the hodgepodge of information underneath, so for the next reprint, Mead might want to consider replacing “Useful Information” with “Information, That, Depending On You Age, is a Bunch of Crap.”

But as anyone who grew up with the Pee-Chee knows, the Pee-Chee is not about the information on the inside but the ability to deface the images on the outside. Again, another marketing complexity. One assumes that the Pee-Chee is intended for students still in the K-12 school system, yet the basketball player on the back (still sporting the 1970s short-shorts) has a mustache while two of the track athletes on the front have receding hairlines. I haven’t seen more unbelievable depictions of high school students since a 50-year-old Stockard Channing tried to pass herself as Rizzo in the movie “Grease.”

Like I said, the fun with the Pee-Chee was adding some personal creative touches to these images, and the further removed you were from the whole athletic scene that enveloped the Pee-Chee, the more creative and often times horrific those touches were. Who didn’t enjoy, for instance, adding a lit fuse to the baton in the hands of one of the runners? A personal favorite of mine was to turn the basketball that was in the hands of the aforementioned 30-year-old player into a dismembered human head. It was also quite easy to impale the flying football player with a spear of some sort, and as far as the female tennis player in the short skirt, well, it’s quite possible those particular doodlings could have led to an expulsion.

I ended up buying myself a Pee-Chee while getting Forrest’s school supplies. I’ve kept it out where he can see it, and from time to time he picks it up and inspects it with curiosity, much in the same way an anthropologist would inspect an unearthed ancient urn. He had no desire to take it to school, which was fine by me. Turns out that the numbers in the table of Avoirdrpois weight is actually a code, and if you send it in to iTunes you can download the new Black Eyed Peas album for free.

Scott McCrea is a local freelance writer who has been writing for the News-Miner for more than a decade. He will happily take your comments at scmccrea@gmail.com.