Everybody smoked once. And once everybody smoked everywhere. There was something enveloping and convivial about it, almost as if it was part of the general social glue.
Yes, I know that not everyone smoked; but it sure seemed like it.
There was a satisfaction in sitting back at your desk when you were thinking about something and lighting up and taking that first draw that filled your mouth with taste. Since we all must have smelled like that, smokers and the few non-smokers alike, you didn't notice.
These days you get on an office elevator with someone just back from a smoke break and the smell will nearly nauseate you. It even did when I was still smoking, so I made a special effort to do a walk while having my break so that I didn't get my smoke and all the smoke of the others on break in the same spot. I hope it helped.
Though just recently quit for the third time in as many years, I have not smoked in the houses I have lived in since the early eighties, except for short periods when I was on my own. I have not smoked in an office for even a little longer. I have smoked in the cars, but even stopped that about three new cars ago, with only a break of an instance or two.
But we are old movie buffs and often get reminded of the ritual aspects of the habit: lighting up after a meal, or after sex. Been a long, long time since I have had a cigarette in bed under any circumstances, and with the women in my life since the early eighties all non-smokers, there have been no after sex smokes.
It's really too bad it is so unhealthy and so nasty. There was always something soothing and pleasurable about it: the texture of the smoke, the smell of fresh tobacco, the narcotic effects. I'd be lying if I said I never miss it.
For some of the time I smoked, I smoked a pipe. I still love the smell of pipe tobacco. My father had taken me to Erlich's in Boston on my seventeenth birthday to select a pipe. He claimed it would be better for me than cigarettes. Of course I've since heard the horror stories about tongue and throat cancer. His father smoked pipes.
The story goes that the only time he smoked cigarettes was when he was in formal wear--pipe smoking acoutrements take useable pockets--when he would tuck a bag of Bull Durham in his cummerbund and could roll cigarettes one-handed as if on horseback. The other hand was for the martini, not reins. Must have been the old Maine Guide in him. He also apparently trained the women who worked in his offices to fill his pipes so that he could just pick the next one up and light it. Chain smoking pipes strikes me as really crazy. BTW, learning how to properly fill a pipe isn't easy. Those women either had a lot of patience or really needed the work.
I remember the pipe I bought. It was what is called a lumberjack or Canadian. Basically a straight-walled plain bowl with a long straight briar stem and a very short hard rubber mouthpiece. It's a shape I favored for a long time.
I ended up smoking cigarettes more and more as smoking was more restricted. Pipes and cigars were the first things outlawed from restaurants and airplanes, even those with smoking sections. And pipe smoking is maybe even a little messier than cigarettes and inconvenient. You have to carry stuff--tobacco, cleaners, tampers, and good matches or a good lighter. A bic would not quite do. And you can't really just light up and have one the way you can with a cigarette. Pipe smoking is a more deliberate act and one that should be done sitting at leisure, with a good book or a nice port.
Almost as satisfying to think about it and write about it as to do it.
And it is satisfying to not be smoking now. Three months and counting.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Here's to Mr. T.
When I got out of the grand institution that deigned to welcome me "to the fellowship of educated men and women," I had to get a job. I was married, with a young son, and awash in debt. And my degree was, god help me, Cum Laude General Studies. [I did not cut the mustard in my senior thesis and orals so the committee declined to grant me the degree in American History & Literature--mox nix, same difference economically speaking.] Truth is I think we were all dilettantes at that bastion of higher learning. That's why most of my peers went on to grad school pretty much straight away. I went job hunting.
I did the dance with the recruiters in the career office, and even ended up making at least one trip to Babylon on Hudson to be interviewed for an executive training program, one of those hot house competitive high potential things that were fashionable at the time. The city was straight out of "Madmen" even then. High powered men mostly playing one up games on each other. Clearly not for me and me not for them.
I was finally down to working with a local employment agency, considered one of the better ones in town. These were the ones where you committed to paying them a percentage of your first year's salary, usually 20% or so, unless it was "fee paid." This was the same period when you could pay a company several thousand dollars, which they would kindly take on installment, and they would remake you into the upwardly mobile man in the gray flannel suit of the day.
As it happened a local trust company doing some other business with that agency was looking for someone who could write, was employable for not much money, and had a degree from one of the "right places." So I ended up being the assistant to the Director of Public Relations and Advertising for this very conservative financial institution. [Basically they defined their customer base as the 3,000 richest families in the state.] They were also beginning an ambitious strategy that would have them found what is now one of the country's premier management consulting firms, and stretch out into markets across the country and a little internationally by acquiring boutique investment firms.
Job was perfect in some ways, if underpaid. I had to write the customer newsletter--mostly fluff--and do various copy writing and editing chores for the bank and affiliates, and to work with the printer doing the production work, all under the gimlet eyed Mr. T, [insert Ivy] class of 1932, gentleman C's. He had been a newspaperman and then did PR work for Ford. "Edsel wasn't a mistake. the market for its competitors dried up, too." During the war he had served with Halsey and at one point got trapped in the ammunition hoist of a battleship. He always walked the nine floors to the top of our building when he had to go up there.
Mr. T., a self-declared "anti comma man," was brutal with a blue pencil, but he suffered me the time to sit down and go over the copy with me explaining why he had made the changes and being willing to listen to why I had written it the way I did in the first place. As time went on, the way I saw it was that I began to win more of the arguments. Probably what was much more likely is that under his demanding tutelage I was getting better. The first time I got a piece of copy by him without a change I was ecstatic.
At the time I think I hated him. I was friends with his secretary. Good way to get things done. She let me know on two occasions when he rescinded raises that he had put in for me. Once when I had let him know I was on the waitlist for business school (so much for being honest with your boss) and the second when another group in the bank had asked if I could be transferred to them. He was among other things a stingy s.o.b.
My most amusing memory was of my last year with him. I was, at my own suggestion, honchoing a project to do the annual report. The previous year we had hired a top tier firm who had designed a product with an ink and paper combination that the color would come off on your hands. The whole run had to be done again with a special lacquer treatment applied to the tune of tens or thousands not to mention the $50,000 the firm had cost (and not returned). I had helped managed site selections for the local photographs and handled those logistics. Kind of a line producer role.
The following year, I had suggested that we get a local person from one of the fine arts schools in town, a student. We would put out an RFP and ask for submissions of ideas, pick one and do the production with our regular printer. We selected a grad student from the museum school and pretty quickly had a design which featured our holding company's logo silhouette on a background made of ascii paper tape--just the hole punch patterns. The point was that we were doing a lot of work in using technology for investment research and wanted to showcase that. The same paper tape patterns ran down the edges of the inside pages. Technology at the time involved communicating to computers using teletype terminals that punched and read paper tape.
Mr. T., bless him, approved, but there was one more thing. I had to provide him with the decoding of what all of the tape used in the publication actually said. To my what must have been incredulous look he gravelly intoned through the cigarette smoke swirling about his crew cut head, "It takes a dirty-minded editor to get out a clean newspaper."
I did the dance with the recruiters in the career office, and even ended up making at least one trip to Babylon on Hudson to be interviewed for an executive training program, one of those hot house competitive high potential things that were fashionable at the time. The city was straight out of "Madmen" even then. High powered men mostly playing one up games on each other. Clearly not for me and me not for them.
I was finally down to working with a local employment agency, considered one of the better ones in town. These were the ones where you committed to paying them a percentage of your first year's salary, usually 20% or so, unless it was "fee paid." This was the same period when you could pay a company several thousand dollars, which they would kindly take on installment, and they would remake you into the upwardly mobile man in the gray flannel suit of the day.
As it happened a local trust company doing some other business with that agency was looking for someone who could write, was employable for not much money, and had a degree from one of the "right places." So I ended up being the assistant to the Director of Public Relations and Advertising for this very conservative financial institution. [Basically they defined their customer base as the 3,000 richest families in the state.] They were also beginning an ambitious strategy that would have them found what is now one of the country's premier management consulting firms, and stretch out into markets across the country and a little internationally by acquiring boutique investment firms.
Job was perfect in some ways, if underpaid. I had to write the customer newsletter--mostly fluff--and do various copy writing and editing chores for the bank and affiliates, and to work with the printer doing the production work, all under the gimlet eyed Mr. T, [insert Ivy] class of 1932, gentleman C's. He had been a newspaperman and then did PR work for Ford. "Edsel wasn't a mistake. the market for its competitors dried up, too." During the war he had served with Halsey and at one point got trapped in the ammunition hoist of a battleship. He always walked the nine floors to the top of our building when he had to go up there.
Mr. T., a self-declared "anti comma man," was brutal with a blue pencil, but he suffered me the time to sit down and go over the copy with me explaining why he had made the changes and being willing to listen to why I had written it the way I did in the first place. As time went on, the way I saw it was that I began to win more of the arguments. Probably what was much more likely is that under his demanding tutelage I was getting better. The first time I got a piece of copy by him without a change I was ecstatic.
At the time I think I hated him. I was friends with his secretary. Good way to get things done. She let me know on two occasions when he rescinded raises that he had put in for me. Once when I had let him know I was on the waitlist for business school (so much for being honest with your boss) and the second when another group in the bank had asked if I could be transferred to them. He was among other things a stingy s.o.b.
My most amusing memory was of my last year with him. I was, at my own suggestion, honchoing a project to do the annual report. The previous year we had hired a top tier firm who had designed a product with an ink and paper combination that the color would come off on your hands. The whole run had to be done again with a special lacquer treatment applied to the tune of tens or thousands not to mention the $50,000 the firm had cost (and not returned). I had helped managed site selections for the local photographs and handled those logistics. Kind of a line producer role.
The following year, I had suggested that we get a local person from one of the fine arts schools in town, a student. We would put out an RFP and ask for submissions of ideas, pick one and do the production with our regular printer. We selected a grad student from the museum school and pretty quickly had a design which featured our holding company's logo silhouette on a background made of ascii paper tape--just the hole punch patterns. The point was that we were doing a lot of work in using technology for investment research and wanted to showcase that. The same paper tape patterns ran down the edges of the inside pages. Technology at the time involved communicating to computers using teletype terminals that punched and read paper tape.
Mr. T., bless him, approved, but there was one more thing. I had to provide him with the decoding of what all of the tape used in the publication actually said. To my what must have been incredulous look he gravelly intoned through the cigarette smoke swirling about his crew cut head, "It takes a dirty-minded editor to get out a clean newspaper."
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Feeding the Birds
I know that eastern burbs feature lots of animal denizens, but out here in the west our cities are host to quite the assortment of wildlife.
I'm about 5 minutes from downtown. There's at least one racoon in the neighborhood that I see pretty often. a few years ago walking the dog in a school playfield one early morning I peered into a garbage can standing at the end of some bleacher seats and was greeted by the ratlike face of an opossum. He or she was rather upset being unable to get out of the can. I tipped it sideways.
I've seen coyotes inside the city limits. There are a lot of bald eagles nesting in various locations around town. Nothing like what we can see in the cabin we stay at in Montana, but it seems to me a lot more than cities back east.
The birds are coming back now, and with the trees still bare it is easy to see them. We've got robins now and a scrub jay. We've had hummingbirds all winter. We set up a feeder last year and attracted a pair of Annas we dubbed Bill and Hillary. There's a new batch this year--at least four or five different ones. Fun to watch. I've been on the deck using the grill and had one feeding two feet away.
Last year when the feeder froze one night, in the morning Hillary perched on top of it and seemed to be scolding me. I got with the program very quickly and thawed it out.
It's our second time with bird feeding. The last one we stopped after one of our cats proved unusually adept at snagging birds from the deck rail.
Then there was one weekend winter day when we heard thunks from our window and discovered that a group of grosbeaks were busy getting drunk on berries in the tree by the window and then flying into it. Went on for quite a while.
This year the orcas are back in the sound early. The weather has been much milder than normal, more days to see Rainier as I drive back toward the house. We are thinking about taking our "yacht" (the ferry) out to one of the local islands this weekend. It does not promise to be sunny but it should be mild.
Something special when you live where the mountains and the sea come together, and where eagles nest in the city. I'm really glad the accidents of life brought me here.
I'm about 5 minutes from downtown. There's at least one racoon in the neighborhood that I see pretty often. a few years ago walking the dog in a school playfield one early morning I peered into a garbage can standing at the end of some bleacher seats and was greeted by the ratlike face of an opossum. He or she was rather upset being unable to get out of the can. I tipped it sideways.
I've seen coyotes inside the city limits. There are a lot of bald eagles nesting in various locations around town. Nothing like what we can see in the cabin we stay at in Montana, but it seems to me a lot more than cities back east.
The birds are coming back now, and with the trees still bare it is easy to see them. We've got robins now and a scrub jay. We've had hummingbirds all winter. We set up a feeder last year and attracted a pair of Annas we dubbed Bill and Hillary. There's a new batch this year--at least four or five different ones. Fun to watch. I've been on the deck using the grill and had one feeding two feet away.
Last year when the feeder froze one night, in the morning Hillary perched on top of it and seemed to be scolding me. I got with the program very quickly and thawed it out.
It's our second time with bird feeding. The last one we stopped after one of our cats proved unusually adept at snagging birds from the deck rail.
Then there was one weekend winter day when we heard thunks from our window and discovered that a group of grosbeaks were busy getting drunk on berries in the tree by the window and then flying into it. Went on for quite a while.
This year the orcas are back in the sound early. The weather has been much milder than normal, more days to see Rainier as I drive back toward the house. We are thinking about taking our "yacht" (the ferry) out to one of the local islands this weekend. It does not promise to be sunny but it should be mild.
Something special when you live where the mountains and the sea come together, and where eagles nest in the city. I'm really glad the accidents of life brought me here.
Friday, February 17, 2012
The Artist's Way
Two friends have pushed me to read the book and undertake the process. Both of them are in recovery from brain injuries, so they have something to say about bringing oneself back from the verge and rehabilitating mind and body.
I'll be honest. I have resisted.
I have never been good at a disciplined practice. My wife can tell you I have a hard time handling twice daily teeth brushing, and if it were not for her setting vitamins and daily aspirin up in pill containers, I wouldn't do that. I still usually forget to take them at least one day a week.
The only habit I had that was reliable was an addiction--smoking. So now I'm off that and there is nothing. My see-him-when-I-need-to therapist was wanting me to take up meditation. I have to tell you that everytime I have tried, there was no way I could quiet my mind and I ended up squirmy and with a hopeless sense of failure.
Well, Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way," is a discipline, if nothing else; or at least a practice, and it is a kind of meditation. I started the day after Valentines with my first "morning pages" with great trepidation. We will just have to see what happens... one day at a time, as it were.
Thanks SB and MG, I think.
I'll be honest. I have resisted.
I have never been good at a disciplined practice. My wife can tell you I have a hard time handling twice daily teeth brushing, and if it were not for her setting vitamins and daily aspirin up in pill containers, I wouldn't do that. I still usually forget to take them at least one day a week.
The only habit I had that was reliable was an addiction--smoking. So now I'm off that and there is nothing. My see-him-when-I-need-to therapist was wanting me to take up meditation. I have to tell you that everytime I have tried, there was no way I could quiet my mind and I ended up squirmy and with a hopeless sense of failure.
Well, Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way," is a discipline, if nothing else; or at least a practice, and it is a kind of meditation. I started the day after Valentines with my first "morning pages" with great trepidation. We will just have to see what happens... one day at a time, as it were.
Thanks SB and MG, I think.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
I'm the Cook
Time to lighten up.
Part of the way we divvy the chores is that I usually do the grocery shopping, after a little consultative menu planning some of the time. Whoever cooks doesn't have to do the dishes. We pretty much split breakfast duties on the mornings we don't go to the gym. Those days the starter is sharing a banana and having a latte (at home--we have this great machine).
Dinner is mostly mine to do, but on weekends she has started doing slow cook dishes, and training me to eat leftovers for those nights when we have been a little busy.
I'm a fairly decent cook. Not a great one. I'm a recipe cook and what I think is being a really good cook is the ability the create something good without a recipe, preferably from found ingredients. But we do cook. We don't use packaged foods with a couple of exceptions. We also don't have a microwave. The new house didn't have one installed and we decided to try doing without. Works just fine. Takes a little planning to thaw things from the freezer, and we have a couple of different vegetable steamers.
With help I do most of the company cooking. She will set up a salad or hors d'oeuvres and sometimes do some baking for a dessert. She makes a great pie crust.
For Christmas we used a cookbook put together by a local restaurant owner/chef, "Tom Douglas' Big Dinners." The meal featured eggs poached in wine, roast duck, mushroom and rustic bread stuffing, apple & radicchio salad with maple molasses pecans, finishing with a persimmon pudding with Calvados hard sauce and pear sauce, garnished with sugared cranberries and mint leaves. Douglas did a great job of spelling out what could be done ahead so the effort was spread over 3 days. It turned out great.
Oddly what made me feel best was something I invented this week. I was in the store and saw golden beets and it occurred to me I could roast them. Then I wondered what could go with them. The dish I ended up with was a roasted beets and fennel bulb salad garnished with sauteed pine nuts and crumbled pancetta. I actually invented something I hadn't ever had or seen a recipe for, It's quite good. You dice the beets and fennel, put them in a roasting pan--I used a glass one--toss them with olive oil--I use the light version that can take more heat--add some salt and pepper and roast at 450 for 45 minutes or so, stirring about halfway through. Sprinkle with a dash of white wine vinegar before serving.
If your timing is off you can just turn the oven off after 45 minutes and the dish will hold.
Made me feel like a "real" cook.
Part of the way we divvy the chores is that I usually do the grocery shopping, after a little consultative menu planning some of the time. Whoever cooks doesn't have to do the dishes. We pretty much split breakfast duties on the mornings we don't go to the gym. Those days the starter is sharing a banana and having a latte (at home--we have this great machine).
Dinner is mostly mine to do, but on weekends she has started doing slow cook dishes, and training me to eat leftovers for those nights when we have been a little busy.
I'm a fairly decent cook. Not a great one. I'm a recipe cook and what I think is being a really good cook is the ability the create something good without a recipe, preferably from found ingredients. But we do cook. We don't use packaged foods with a couple of exceptions. We also don't have a microwave. The new house didn't have one installed and we decided to try doing without. Works just fine. Takes a little planning to thaw things from the freezer, and we have a couple of different vegetable steamers.
With help I do most of the company cooking. She will set up a salad or hors d'oeuvres and sometimes do some baking for a dessert. She makes a great pie crust.
For Christmas we used a cookbook put together by a local restaurant owner/chef, "Tom Douglas' Big Dinners." The meal featured eggs poached in wine, roast duck, mushroom and rustic bread stuffing, apple & radicchio salad with maple molasses pecans, finishing with a persimmon pudding with Calvados hard sauce and pear sauce, garnished with sugared cranberries and mint leaves. Douglas did a great job of spelling out what could be done ahead so the effort was spread over 3 days. It turned out great.
Oddly what made me feel best was something I invented this week. I was in the store and saw golden beets and it occurred to me I could roast them. Then I wondered what could go with them. The dish I ended up with was a roasted beets and fennel bulb salad garnished with sauteed pine nuts and crumbled pancetta. I actually invented something I hadn't ever had or seen a recipe for, It's quite good. You dice the beets and fennel, put them in a roasting pan--I used a glass one--toss them with olive oil--I use the light version that can take more heat--add some salt and pepper and roast at 450 for 45 minutes or so, stirring about halfway through. Sprinkle with a dash of white wine vinegar before serving.
If your timing is off you can just turn the oven off after 45 minutes and the dish will hold.
Made me feel like a "real" cook.
Monday, February 13, 2012
I Give Up
I have tried to soft pedal stuff that could slide into partisan politics, but it is almost impossible to avoid. The web is already full of extremist rantings that reflect what is going on in the political arena. I don't intend this to add to that, but it is possible that someone reading this might take issue with some of what I have to say. So the caveat is that this is just my view and you are entitled to yours. It probably isn't necessary to degenerate into brick throwing.
So here's the deal as I see it.
The last three Republican candidates standing are members of a religion that once ruled the known world or of one with ambitions to rule it. Both of these institutions routinely weigh in on issues of interest to and decisions about things made by people who are not part of their churches.
So basically they are trying to impose their doctrine on non-believers. [Before you start screaming about Sharia, yes, fundamentalist Muslims do it too.]
Get this straight. These people want to take away the religious freedom of non-believers all in the name of "freedom of religion." Am I missing something here? I think not, but correct me if I am. The intersection of doctrine and public policy is an ugly zone, getting uglier by the minute. My only hope is that it gets so ugly that people will see how screwed up it is and walk away from the yahoos.
A couple of observations. One of the candidates "defending traditional marriage" has had three wives (and he's not the Mormon one) and ended each of the first two while he carried on an affair with the next. He should have taken a page from Joseph Smith who rewrote doctrine handed down from on high to justify his own baser desires to have relationships outside of his marriage, His church still spawns sects that encourage old men to take teenage wives and drive young men out of their supposedly loving families.
My guess is that the Catholic Church probably spent more money to defeat same sex marriage in California than it spent world-wide trying to root out the institutionalized abuse of children that went on behind its walls.
Can you spell hypocrisy?
This is getting personal for me. Washington State has a death with dignity law that protects people's right to decline treatment and even to obtain palliative termination if there is nothing facing them except months of deterioration and pain.
I have a medical directive that no "heroic measures" be taken. I make sure I have a copy with me on the few occasions I have been treated at a hospital. I want no instances of "we didn't have it in the file." Just recently my health care system acquired another one in a merger. The new one is Catholic Church affiliated. There have already been stories of how people have been denied information about their rights because it conflicts with religious doctrine.
So what the [bleep] about MY religious freedom?
Screw the rest of us as long as you can use visceral religious issues to mobilize the base to get that uppity [insert racist epithet] out of the White House.
Sigh....
So here's the deal as I see it.
The last three Republican candidates standing are members of a religion that once ruled the known world or of one with ambitions to rule it. Both of these institutions routinely weigh in on issues of interest to and decisions about things made by people who are not part of their churches.
So basically they are trying to impose their doctrine on non-believers. [Before you start screaming about Sharia, yes, fundamentalist Muslims do it too.]
Get this straight. These people want to take away the religious freedom of non-believers all in the name of "freedom of religion." Am I missing something here? I think not, but correct me if I am. The intersection of doctrine and public policy is an ugly zone, getting uglier by the minute. My only hope is that it gets so ugly that people will see how screwed up it is and walk away from the yahoos.
A couple of observations. One of the candidates "defending traditional marriage" has had three wives (and he's not the Mormon one) and ended each of the first two while he carried on an affair with the next. He should have taken a page from Joseph Smith who rewrote doctrine handed down from on high to justify his own baser desires to have relationships outside of his marriage, His church still spawns sects that encourage old men to take teenage wives and drive young men out of their supposedly loving families.
My guess is that the Catholic Church probably spent more money to defeat same sex marriage in California than it spent world-wide trying to root out the institutionalized abuse of children that went on behind its walls.
Can you spell hypocrisy?
This is getting personal for me. Washington State has a death with dignity law that protects people's right to decline treatment and even to obtain palliative termination if there is nothing facing them except months of deterioration and pain.
I have a medical directive that no "heroic measures" be taken. I make sure I have a copy with me on the few occasions I have been treated at a hospital. I want no instances of "we didn't have it in the file." Just recently my health care system acquired another one in a merger. The new one is Catholic Church affiliated. There have already been stories of how people have been denied information about their rights because it conflicts with religious doctrine.
So what the [bleep] about MY religious freedom?
Screw the rest of us as long as you can use visceral religious issues to mobilize the base to get that uppity [insert racist epithet] out of the White House.
Sigh....
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Plus Ça Change but Not Plus la Même Chose???
Funny... I'm sitting here at my kitchen counter typing this on a "laptop" that is more powerful than early mainframes, not using any phone line or minute charges. I'm not wired to anything except AC--laptops still eat batteries.
I spent a good part of a career, as did my siblings, in an industry that did not even exist when I was in grade school, and now has gone through multiple generations. I've owned almost as many computers as I have cars, going from 16K of RAM to the monster I have now, for which I cannot find a bag to fit. Screen is nice though--bigger than the little screen on the Philco TV the old man got in 1950. Damn thing was always breaking down.
I remember carbon paper and a world without copying machines.
Cars, brand new cars used to cost 1/100th of what they do now. Not all of that is due to the change in the value of the dollar. Compare what you are buying. The average low-end car today has far more features standard than the best ones of even four or five decades ago.
We have a lot of stuff. We have a lot of stuff that is better. We have Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio, and what's more you can send text messages on it.
[We have some other stuff that comes with that. Yesterday I watched in my rearview as the man behind me was obviously texting as he drove eight city blocks. Whenever he was stopped he was looking down at his lap and his hands were not visible on the wheel, and when traffic started he stayed stopped until he noticed the cars around him moving.]
And what is with the disappearing children? Did we just not know about that or pretend it didn't happen?
As kids we used to leave the house and be gone for hours. "Where did you go?" "Out." "What did you did you do?" "Nothing." There were few organized sports outside of school. I played baseball in sandlot pickup games until Little League came to town. Then I stopped because I could not afford a uniform and glove even if I had been selected, which I would not have been. The parents quickly made it about winning rather than playing. I still hate parents like that.
I was in Denver attending a week-long seminar when Columbine happened. The facilitator invited people to talk about the event, to express their feelings. We got to one man, probably about my age, who started to pontificate about how things used to be better when we had communities and traditional values. I was not very nice about it when I pointed out that in his perfect gone-by-world, the abuse and alcoholism and child rapes happened behind the white picket fences and he was naive to think otherwise.
I don't know how much better or worse things are. They are different in some ways and not in others. Some quite substantively. My parents never went to Europe. For half of their lives they would have had to take a boat. I've been eight times I think, though it took me a long time to make my first trip. My mother had been to Havana, something I could not have done if I wanted to.
It is no longer necessary or meet to deal with your psychological dilemmas in years of analysis. Freud was the big thing in the fifties and sixties, big to the point of regular New Yorker cartoons about analyst-less Augusts in the city. Drugs are big now, but there are also a lot of other "talking cure" modalities as well, and all those self-development workshops.
We live in a world where one of the world's oldest institutions has to have its local branches sued into near bankruptcy in order to stop hiding its career pederasts, and where an eighteen year-old high school student can end up having to broadcast his status as a "level three sex offender" for the rest of his life for having had sex with the sixteen year-old he is now married too.
Corporations are people again. Historical note: after the Civil War the 14th amendment was interpreted by the Court to apply to corporations rather than the freed slaves it was intended for. But then we knew some of the current Justices were throwbacks, didn't we?
When my father moved from Ohio to Boston in 1959 he brought with him a large wooden shipping crate that was full of albums of classical music on 78s! We had the changer to play them that was also able to play 33s. Last year one of my projects was to convert my 300 plus vinyl albums to MP3 files. I didn't do the world's best job, but my ears aren't what they used to be and now at least I have the music in a form I can play. The wife hated hearing the noise that even the best treated vinyl could get.
You tell me what has gotten better or worse.
For myself, I'm not sure I'd want to be born now or coming of college age. I have this nagging feeling that the world is about to really go to shit, despite or because of all the technology (take your pick). College is becoming more and more unaffordable. I was lucky to have gotten a lot of help from the schools I went to and even then I was paying off loans twenty years afterwards.
This has been a pastiche, maybe even a little pointless, but interesting for me to muse about anyway.
I spent a good part of a career, as did my siblings, in an industry that did not even exist when I was in grade school, and now has gone through multiple generations. I've owned almost as many computers as I have cars, going from 16K of RAM to the monster I have now, for which I cannot find a bag to fit. Screen is nice though--bigger than the little screen on the Philco TV the old man got in 1950. Damn thing was always breaking down.
I remember carbon paper and a world without copying machines.
Cars, brand new cars used to cost 1/100th of what they do now. Not all of that is due to the change in the value of the dollar. Compare what you are buying. The average low-end car today has far more features standard than the best ones of even four or five decades ago.
We have a lot of stuff. We have a lot of stuff that is better. We have Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio, and what's more you can send text messages on it.
[We have some other stuff that comes with that. Yesterday I watched in my rearview as the man behind me was obviously texting as he drove eight city blocks. Whenever he was stopped he was looking down at his lap and his hands were not visible on the wheel, and when traffic started he stayed stopped until he noticed the cars around him moving.]
And what is with the disappearing children? Did we just not know about that or pretend it didn't happen?
As kids we used to leave the house and be gone for hours. "Where did you go?" "Out." "What did you did you do?" "Nothing." There were few organized sports outside of school. I played baseball in sandlot pickup games until Little League came to town. Then I stopped because I could not afford a uniform and glove even if I had been selected, which I would not have been. The parents quickly made it about winning rather than playing. I still hate parents like that.
I was in Denver attending a week-long seminar when Columbine happened. The facilitator invited people to talk about the event, to express their feelings. We got to one man, probably about my age, who started to pontificate about how things used to be better when we had communities and traditional values. I was not very nice about it when I pointed out that in his perfect gone-by-world, the abuse and alcoholism and child rapes happened behind the white picket fences and he was naive to think otherwise.
I don't know how much better or worse things are. They are different in some ways and not in others. Some quite substantively. My parents never went to Europe. For half of their lives they would have had to take a boat. I've been eight times I think, though it took me a long time to make my first trip. My mother had been to Havana, something I could not have done if I wanted to.
It is no longer necessary or meet to deal with your psychological dilemmas in years of analysis. Freud was the big thing in the fifties and sixties, big to the point of regular New Yorker cartoons about analyst-less Augusts in the city. Drugs are big now, but there are also a lot of other "talking cure" modalities as well, and all those self-development workshops.
We live in a world where one of the world's oldest institutions has to have its local branches sued into near bankruptcy in order to stop hiding its career pederasts, and where an eighteen year-old high school student can end up having to broadcast his status as a "level three sex offender" for the rest of his life for having had sex with the sixteen year-old he is now married too.
Corporations are people again. Historical note: after the Civil War the 14th amendment was interpreted by the Court to apply to corporations rather than the freed slaves it was intended for. But then we knew some of the current Justices were throwbacks, didn't we?
When my father moved from Ohio to Boston in 1959 he brought with him a large wooden shipping crate that was full of albums of classical music on 78s! We had the changer to play them that was also able to play 33s. Last year one of my projects was to convert my 300 plus vinyl albums to MP3 files. I didn't do the world's best job, but my ears aren't what they used to be and now at least I have the music in a form I can play. The wife hated hearing the noise that even the best treated vinyl could get.
You tell me what has gotten better or worse.
For myself, I'm not sure I'd want to be born now or coming of college age. I have this nagging feeling that the world is about to really go to shit, despite or because of all the technology (take your pick). College is becoming more and more unaffordable. I was lucky to have gotten a lot of help from the schools I went to and even then I was paying off loans twenty years afterwards.
This has been a pastiche, maybe even a little pointless, but interesting for me to muse about anyway.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Are You a "Boomer?"
The Baby Boom generation is technically defined as postwar--starting in 1945. If you look it up you will find there are two Baby Boom cohorts, the second starting around 1955 is sometimes called Generation Jones.
If you look at the bulge in the birth rate over time, what you will see is that the rise in birthrate began sometime before 1945, and in some other countries Boomers are considered to include people from earlier years.
The next previous cohort is known as "the Silent Generation," and as children of the Depression.
I was born in 1942. While growing up my mother had always referred to me as being part of the Baby Boom generation, and so that is how I have always thought of myself. I now struggle a little with the idea that I am not a "Boomer," and I certainly don't feel like or see myself as a Depression-born Silent Generationer. I guess you might say that I am really on the cusp, between cohorts.
But consider this. Here is the list of memorable events for the first Baby Boom cohort (born between 1945 and 1955) from the Wikepedia entry:
Memorable events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., political unrest, walk on the moon, risk of the draft into the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, sexual freedom, drug experimentation, civil rights movement, environmental movement, women's movement, protests and riots, Woodstock.
The comparable list for the Jonesers is:
Memorable events: Watergate, Nixon resigns, the Cold War, lowered drinking age in many states 1970-1976 (followed by raising), the oil embargo, raging inflation, gasoline shortages, Jimmy Carter's imposition of registration for the draft, Ronald Reagan, Live Aid.
The first list is for me my coming of age experience. Most of the second list feels less salient to me.
I was married a couple of weeks before JFK was assassinated. I was just starting college during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam and the protests against it was the context for that period for me. The year that seems most memorable to me was 1968 which saw the decision of LBJ not to run, RFKs and MLK, Jr.s murders, the Chicago riots, and the return of Tricky Dicky--supposedly the "New Nixon," but as it later turned out, just as tricky as ever.
So 1942 or not. I'm really a Boomer.
If you look at the bulge in the birth rate over time, what you will see is that the rise in birthrate began sometime before 1945, and in some other countries Boomers are considered to include people from earlier years.
The next previous cohort is known as "the Silent Generation," and as children of the Depression.
I was born in 1942. While growing up my mother had always referred to me as being part of the Baby Boom generation, and so that is how I have always thought of myself. I now struggle a little with the idea that I am not a "Boomer," and I certainly don't feel like or see myself as a Depression-born Silent Generationer. I guess you might say that I am really on the cusp, between cohorts.
But consider this. Here is the list of memorable events for the first Baby Boom cohort (born between 1945 and 1955) from the Wikepedia entry:
Memorable events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., political unrest, walk on the moon, risk of the draft into the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, sexual freedom, drug experimentation, civil rights movement, environmental movement, women's movement, protests and riots, Woodstock.
The comparable list for the Jonesers is:
Memorable events: Watergate, Nixon resigns, the Cold War, lowered drinking age in many states 1970-1976 (followed by raising), the oil embargo, raging inflation, gasoline shortages, Jimmy Carter's imposition of registration for the draft, Ronald Reagan, Live Aid.
The first list is for me my coming of age experience. Most of the second list feels less salient to me.
I was married a couple of weeks before JFK was assassinated. I was just starting college during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam and the protests against it was the context for that period for me. The year that seems most memorable to me was 1968 which saw the decision of LBJ not to run, RFKs and MLK, Jr.s murders, the Chicago riots, and the return of Tricky Dicky--supposedly the "New Nixon," but as it later turned out, just as tricky as ever.
So 1942 or not. I'm really a Boomer.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Organizations that Lose Their Purpose...
Yes, they are broken, too.
We have had a graphic example of that in the last few days.
[I know I said I wasn't going to get into politics, but somehow it seems almost unavoidable.]
The Susan G. Komen Foundation, the "Race for the Cure" people who promote pink all over the place about breast cancer, decided to defund Planned Parenthood supposedly because that organization was being investigated by Congress. The uproar that has followed has, I think, been much to the benefit of Planned Parenthood, and has given Komen a black eye. And while appearing to reverse its decision after two days, the Foundation has been decidedly ungracious and dishonest about it.
Some context:
First, Planned Parenthood has taken the place of ACORN in this election cycle as the sound bite used by extreme conservative candidates to "mobilize the base." Despite having less than 3% of its budget involved in the termination of pregnancies, Planned Parenthood is routinely condemned by the Newts and Michelles and Ricks as the "largest abortion provider in the country" with nary a mention of the other 97% of the services they provide to people, many of them those poor who "we don't need to worry about" according to Mitt.
So a career politico who has long had her sights on Planned Parenthood joins Komen and shortly thereafter Komen promulgates a policy to defund grantees "under investigation."
Just for the record any yahoo lamebrain who happens to be a Congressman can call for an investigation of anything.
Also just for the record, the only grantee defunded by Koman was Planned Parenthood.
Do the Komen people admit that allowing their charity to be co-opted for a political agenda was a mistake and they are sorry? Nope. They deny that their decision was political and actually decry those who question their actions for being "political" including a particularly offensive tweet from the executive whose idea this was.
You can be pro-life. Fine. You can say abortion is a bad thing, and mostly I will agree with you.
But the kind of outright lying and distortion involved in running this particular agenda stinks. Anyone with any sense of decency knows it stinks.
Sad because Komen made good things happen. Now their name is trash because someone had an agenda that was nowhere near the organization's purpose and decided it was worth breaking Komen to feed her politics. Shame!
We have had a graphic example of that in the last few days.
[I know I said I wasn't going to get into politics, but somehow it seems almost unavoidable.]
The Susan G. Komen Foundation, the "Race for the Cure" people who promote pink all over the place about breast cancer, decided to defund Planned Parenthood supposedly because that organization was being investigated by Congress. The uproar that has followed has, I think, been much to the benefit of Planned Parenthood, and has given Komen a black eye. And while appearing to reverse its decision after two days, the Foundation has been decidedly ungracious and dishonest about it.
Some context:
First, Planned Parenthood has taken the place of ACORN in this election cycle as the sound bite used by extreme conservative candidates to "mobilize the base." Despite having less than 3% of its budget involved in the termination of pregnancies, Planned Parenthood is routinely condemned by the Newts and Michelles and Ricks as the "largest abortion provider in the country" with nary a mention of the other 97% of the services they provide to people, many of them those poor who "we don't need to worry about" according to Mitt.
So a career politico who has long had her sights on Planned Parenthood joins Komen and shortly thereafter Komen promulgates a policy to defund grantees "under investigation."
Just for the record any yahoo lamebrain who happens to be a Congressman can call for an investigation of anything.
Also just for the record, the only grantee defunded by Koman was Planned Parenthood.
Do the Komen people admit that allowing their charity to be co-opted for a political agenda was a mistake and they are sorry? Nope. They deny that their decision was political and actually decry those who question their actions for being "political" including a particularly offensive tweet from the executive whose idea this was.
You can be pro-life. Fine. You can say abortion is a bad thing, and mostly I will agree with you.
But the kind of outright lying and distortion involved in running this particular agenda stinks. Anyone with any sense of decency knows it stinks.
Sad because Komen made good things happen. Now their name is trash because someone had an agenda that was nowhere near the organization's purpose and decided it was worth breaking Komen to feed her politics. Shame!
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