The Baby Boomer Generation is a source for trends, research, comment and discussion of and by people born from 1946 - 1964.
Covering issues on the Boomer Generation including original content for Boomers, bulletin boards, user comments, Sixties and Seventies music, Baby Boomer culture, health and coverage of issues for "Aging Hipsters."
Many of you will remember that we lost our dog-friend, Max nearly two years ago. After a period of mourning and a rather lengthy time without a dog, we decided to "just see" if we could find another friend we could welcome into our home.
About a month ago we rescued a wonderful dog named Cole. He is everything we wanted in a dog - smart, active, affectionate and friendly. He's all that and more. Cole is a Whippet/Pointer mix and he has only the best characteristics of both breeds. He has no smell, is as fast as greased lightening and loves to lay round the house - mostly Whippet characteristics. As far as the pointer is concerned, he's tireless at checking the wind for game and will routinely point (with a leg up) to anything that moves.
The added benefit of Cole is his escapability - Max NEVER went through the electric fence. Cole on the other hand, is willing to take the hit provided there is sufficient distraction (read squirrel) on the other side. So he's gotten us up off the couch for three 30 minute walks a day.
We've really fallen for little Cole and a great big thank you to Keith and Stephanie of Rogers Rescue for their kind assistance.
One of the advantages to being an aging Baby Boomer is the enlightenment one achieves with age. This morning while reading a story on how some school districts have banned the playground game "tag" (sigh) I was trying to remember other "dangerous" games we played way back when.
Hide and seek came to mind and I began to wonder the origin of "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free" (yelled when the seeker finally gives up and everyone comes in for round two.) It seems the phrase is possibly a corruption of the German "Alle, alle auch sind frei", (literally, "Everyone, everyone also is free").
OK, so on to the next mystery - a song my mother used to sing to us - "Mairzy Doats And Dozy Doats and liddle lamzy divey A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?" I found out years ago that the literal translation is: "Mares eat oats And does eat oats And little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too, Wouldn't you?" (sigh) I liked my mother's version better.
Got any childhood phrase corruptions of your own? Discuss them in the link below.
You know, sometimes you look up and your life has become a Kodak commercial. (I love making these sort of references - it's a kind of generational inside joke). Turn around and there's hair growing in strange places. You can't remember the name of your first grade teacher and that girlfriend you swore you'd never forget is not even a chapter anymore - more like an italicized paragraph.
It's as if there's really only just so much room and the mind keeps truncating stuff to make room for new stuff. Not archiving, mind you. This is a really bad librarian who rather than putting things back in the stacks, files the jacket and throws away the book. Now frankly, I'd rather have a clearer recollection of what's-her-name than try to remember whether or not I put out the garbage on Wednesday night. Well, ok, I don't remember that either, but I do remember the perfume ol' so-and-so wore.
Perhaps it's just as well. Maybe my personal librarian isn't trying to erase the details - gory as they may be - as much as smooth out the edges. I think this is what they must mean by "experience".
What brings me to this tome is the fact that I couldn't remember the name of my favorite actor. I could remember scenes in vivid detail; lines verbatim and even movie titles. But I couldn't remember his name to save my life. What's
more, even after being reminded, I had forgotten his name the next day. As if this was a piece of information that had been deemed "archived" and there was nothing I could do to re-shuffle it to the front.
To add insult to injury, we cracked open the original Trivial Pursuit game the other night. If you haven't played this game in a few years, don't bother. Those questions were written in 1980 - the passing of twenty-some years has only added more rounded edges to little bits of crap you didn't want to remember even back then.
I wonder if I remember how to set up a backgammon board.
Edison was credited with saying "I never remember anything I can look up". Thank God they're installing high speed internet in retirement homes.
By the way - Her name was Gail, but I'm still struggling with Clint What's-his-name.
Yes, now apparently they're giving awards for the best underwear.
I blame Madonna - ever since she wore her bra on the outside and deleted the word "unmentionable" from our collective vocabularies.
Anyway, this underwear voting thing piqued my curiosity (or the voyuer in me) and I decided to get to the "bottom" of it.
I happen to know the woman behind the Undie Awards, Tomima Edmark- who, by the way, takes underwear very seriously. She told me that a recent study showed about 60% of American women are wearing the wrong size bra. Frankly, from a man's perspective it was probably more information than I needed to know - but 60% of anything is an incredible number statistically.
So how did so many women go wrong? Tomima claims there are a lot of reasons - not the least of which is department store bra "fitters" putting women into sizes they have in stock. And, apparently, lots of women have one breast larger than the other. I swear, I've never done any independent research into this fact, so I'm taking her word for it.
She also claims women don't measure themselves often enough - yet another fact I can't substantiate - and she proceeded to explain some sort of algebraic equation for finding the right size bra. No wonder so many women are in the wrong bra - it's a math thing! Start recruiting girls into math and science programs and we'll whip this thing in a generation.
Take note Boomer women - measure thyself once a year.
So why an award program for underwear? According Tomima - when women find something that fits comfortably, they get down right evangelical about it. This is apparently what women talk about when we cavemen are snoozing between football games. TheUndies.com is an attempt to allow women to vote for, and wax poetic about their favorite undies. I'm sure I don't understand this. I'm trying to picture my Thursday night poker crowd comparing underwear brands. It just ain't happinin'.
Tomima invited me to vote, which I did; I have never felt so lost in my life, although the first voting page was a lot of fun (I'm a 141). Guys, you can skip this, but at least 60% of the women reading this should give it a whirl... coffee, little sandwiches with no crust and Milano cookies are all virtual.
Does that plastic-headed Burger King creep anyone else out, or is it just me?
Is banning plastic grocery bags in San Francisco a good start or a fart in the wind?
Does watching those Peter Max/Inna-Godda-Divida retirement commercials make you want to fire up a doobie and curl up in the fetal position, or is it just me?
Does anyone else want to see Karl Rove sweat like a Sumo wrestler as he testifies about why a prosecutor was fired to make room for his own "protege," or is it just me? (My dream scenario has Rove answering questions posed by Sam Ervin - pipe dreams, both)
OK - I admit I'm one of those over 50-somethings that hits the bed at 9pm (or sooner) and a built-in clock that says "hey - you had 8 hours of sleep, get the heck up." So there I was at 4 AM Saturday looking for something to do. As usual, I came here looking for yet another doo-dad (see the "print" icon under the articles) to make this place just that much better. By 8am I started uploading files and rebuilding content - but for some reason the site was as slow as molassas in um, February.
Then I spotted it - a comment that said "I just saw this on TV..."
I felt a little like Navin Johnson when the new phone books came out - we're somebody.
Years ago - 1995 I believe- I happened to stumble on the feeding frenzy that was the launch of Windows 95. I was aware of the midnight launch and it raised anxiety because it represented something I already knew - Microsoft had ripped off my beloved Mac UI. In fact I wondered, how long would it take before I too was absorbed into the borg that is Microsoft.
But along the way, something funny happened. Apple didn't disappear. The Mac OS was radically redesigned and today OS X stands as the premier operating system - bar none. I can still hear my mother say "if everyone jumped off the bridge would you too?" I didn't and I'm glad.
Fortunately for those of you in lock step with Microsoft, you can get your first look at the Mac operating system in the form of Vista. How wonderful that you only had to wait six years to see what the the "rest of us" already knew back in 2000.
Actually, I'm thinking about taking a couple of steps backward into the future. I'm going to trash my Mac, and iPod in favor of Vista and a Zune. They're exactly the same, right?
I give it three weeks before I'm doing things like searching for drivers (whatever those are) and asking questions in Vista forums about the latest greatest DLL (Dirty Little Lies?). And boy, won't I look stylish with that big 'ol brown Zune strapped to my hip (it's a geek thing).
I've always felt Microsoft was really designed just to keep IT assholes employed. After-all, if we all had Mac reliability and ease of use, the cult of IT would no longer exist - no one would put up with the peevish personalities this whole windoze thing has foisted on us. We'd gleefully send them back the the dark hole they came from.
How much you wanna bet that within a couple of days some hacker finds a security hole the size of a Buick in Vista. Ahhh, job security!
Finally, I just need to remind you all what VISTA really stands for:
Stumble Upon has made my long strange trip into the Internet even stranger yet. Give it a try and see what you can find - like the ASCII-0-Matic which turns a photo into cool artwork in a matter of seconds.
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If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and a rock concert experience. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.
I know some of you Baby Boomers out there share my secret desire to pillage and burn as a pirate on the open seas... but alas, the mortgage needs to be paid and the kids are in college.
Fear not pirate wannabes - even if sailing about the Caribbean hunting booty is a little bit of a stretch, you can still get your very own, official Pirate name!
My pirate name is:
Captain Morty Rackham
Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!
Some of you may have noticed that the Baby Boomer Homepage disappeared for a few days. Class, write this down: do not forget to renew your domain name before its expiration date. A good and cheap place to buy domain names, by the way, is godaddy.
No, Mrs. Vander(something) is not to blame. I adored her, but somewhere around 5th grade I stopped paying attention to the proper use of punctuation. Today in my world, commas are like breaths and semicolons don't actually exist.
For what it's worth, I gave up after "apostrophe," I just couldn't bear to go on to commas, much less semicolons. When you are sufficiently humiliated, try some additional self abuse with the grammar test.
After visiting this site, my brain (because it has a mind of its own) has seen fit to endlessly repeat the theme from "Popeye." Sometimes jogging the old Boomer memory bank is a bad thing, but in this case (aside from the looping tune) it's a lot of fun.
We're not sure this is what the original promoters had in mind when they dreamed up Woodstock back in 1969, but apparently, the sweet tooth that we had back then can be relived at this web site.
See if you remember any of the yummie retro candies available. Get me a carton of those candy cigarettes. I can't light them up, but at least I can flaunt them in a Bar in New York City.
A friend/associate of mine operates a very successful sales training business. I credit his success to the creative and insightful way he communicates complex material. Recently, I received his monthly newsletter that had this interesting bit of information...
""DON'T SPILL YOUR CANDY IN THE LOBBY"
"Imagine - you spend five dollars today on a box of candy at the movies! You can't wait until you get in, so you fumble to open the box and spill most of the candy on the lobby floor before you even get through the doors to your seat. It ends up that you have only a few pieces of candy left to get you through the picture.î Don't you just hate it?"
OK, compelling enough to get my attention and make me keep reading, but what about the 5-second rule? It appears to be my day for dispelling/proving myths (see this post from earlier today) and I found this interesting article which apparently proves that in many instances, the 5-second rule is not a myth but has some grain of truth. Frankly, it looks like a job for Mythbusters
Unfortunately, I think the rule should be applied with descretion... 'cuz, if I drop something on the theater floor, it's going to be there a heck of a lot longer than 5 seconds... which in fact, seems to explain where that primordial goo comes from on cinema floors.
"A lot of people have discovered that they can make a little extra money by auctioning off on the internet those extra knick-knacks they have lying around. After all, as the saying goes, one person's trash is another's treasure.
But sometimes, trash is just trash.
This site is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy."
For you Baby Boomers out there who have been "around" a while, you might find this site interesting enough to waste a few minutes. Create a map of the US (or other countries) with the states you've visited (mine is below). I think I'm going to have to jump in the BoomerMobile and figure out why I haven't been to either Alabama or Mississippi. Then again, perhaps not.
James Brown 70 (not a Baby Boomer) and his wife Tomi Rae, 33 (not a Baby Boomer) got into a scuffle the other day and the self-proclaimed "Godfather of Rock 'n Roll" was rolled back into jail. Brown, a musical icon to many Baby Boomers, has been there before on similar charges.
We're tempted to say here that it was a clash of generations, but judging from the photo, we say Tomi Rae tripped over the luggage trying to get away from James the Horrible... at least that's what Brown will claim.
Technology and cosmetic rejuvenation converge in a new alternative called ThermaCool. Personally, I'd rather look like a Shar Pei than be ThermaCooled , but for those who are hesitant to nip and tuck, this combination of cyrogenics and virtually microwaving the skin might be just the ticket.
Beam me up, Scotty! Stifle yourself, Dingbat! Yabba, dabba, doo! My wife...I think I'll keep her. What a spicy meatball! The next stop is the Twilight Zone. Clap for the Wolfman. Does she or doesn't she? I'm not a crook. Dy-no-mite! If he kissed you once, will he kiss you again?
OK, that's a good start... post a comment and add your favorite; here's mine:
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Captain Morty Rackham
James Brown 70 (not a Baby Boomer) and his wife Tomi Rae, 33 (not a Baby Boomer) got into a scuffle the other day and the self-proclaimed "Godfather of Rock 'n Roll" was rolled back into jail. Brown, a musical icon to many Baby Boomers, has been there before on similar charges.