In the BBC series "Ashes to Ashes," a police detective gets shot and wakes up in the '80s. The series is a sequel to "Life on Mars," in which a police detective gets hit by a car and wakes up in the '70s.

I'm beginning to wonder if something similar hasn't happened to me. If Chrysler is in trouble and Ed McMahon and Jack Kemp are in the news, I may be lying in a coma somewhere, hallucinating.

How else can you explain the resurgence of swine flu? There's a name we haven't heard since Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin were making jokes about it on "Weekend Update."

There's nothing funny about a flu epidemic, and the '70s swine flu scare came from the wonderful pigs who brought us the 1918-19 pandemic that almost surely knocked someone out of your family tree.

The U.S. government's response was also not funny: President Gerald Ford decided that all 220 million of us needed to get vaccinated, but the program was suspended when people started coming down with neurological disorders and, as in the case of a couple of elderly folks here in Pittsburgh, death.

Swine flu itself killed only one person and never really caught on as an epidemic, unlike disco.

But it did cast a shadow over the career of Miss Piggy, and her relationship with Kermit the Frog was never quite the same.

Here's something else that fell off my radar right about the time I discovered boys: MAD Magazine.

The venerable monthly simultaneously put out its 500th issue and dropped to quarterly publication last week. That's particularly bad news considering that satire doesn't keep well. How can you do movie parodies quarterly, when even successful movies come and go like ripe pears?

The gateway drug to "The Daily Show" was, for many of us, our first inkling that mockery could get wittier than "I know you are, but what am I?"

I didn't know any other girls who had a crush on Alfred E. Neuman, but MAD's circulation peaked in the millions in the '70s, so I can't have been the only one.

This is a sad state of affairs. Adults can't hog all the satire for themselves. Children who aren't exposed to smart-aleck comedy grow up to be humorless adults who think Stephen Colbert is serious and are impervious to ironies like surveillance for freedom or moral triumph through torture -- and don't even get me started about teabagging for independence.

Roger Kaputnik, we hardly knew ye.

I've been hearing so much about pay disparity and discrimination that I half expect to find myself at an ERA march.

There was an Equal Pay Day Rally Downtown last week, and Dan Onorato wants to find and fix all the wage and job classification disparities in county operations.

"People performing the same work should receive the same pay," he said, which is a line I think he ripped off from Shirley Chisholm. Or Gloria Steinem. Or somebody who wore really big glasses.

At least I know what to wear to an equal-pay rally. Stores are conveniently full of maxi-length tie-dye sundresses, owlish white-rimmed sunglasses and thong sandals.

If you don't pay us adequately, men, you know what's next. You're going to be in polyester leisure suits and tight plaid pants quick as a Cuisinart. Don't make us get the platform shoes.

If you doubt the time warp, consider this: Hasn't it crossed your mind that you might want to rush out and buy a Pontiac? A little wistful for that Firebird Trans Am? And the mustache that went with it?

Maybe we're all hallucinating. I certainly don't feel terribly well. I didn't enjoy the '70s much the first time. If I just take a couple of Tylenol ...

Oh, God -- what am I saying?