BOOMERS ANONYMOUS -- Care or Quit?

Start here .   How many of us dozed off in the middle of high school English class whenever we had to read Shakespeare, or Milton, or especially, Dante?   Not me.   I knew that the Adam West Batman accessed the Batcave through Shakespeare. This week I'm focused on a particular line from the play Hamlet , where the protagonist Prince plots to avenge his Father's death at the hands of  Claudius, the terrible uncle who then married Hamlet's mother -- after killing Hamlet's dad!    Jerry Springer must have studied classical literature, ha ha. Interestingly, Hamlet's father's name is also Hamlet, but in the play, whenever he speaks he is called "Ghost."   Here's the full quote in context:  "Out of my weakness and melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds more relative than this. The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King [referring to Claudius]." What the he...

Start here .  I'm not lazy, dammit.  I'm efficient, and to some that looks lazy. Of course it doesn't help to be middle-aged and (slightly) overweight. Some stereotypes are justified. But even if 60 is the new 40, that doesn't affect my work.  I happen to think that stereotypes serve a comedic impulse. Unfortunately, when misused, they exacerbate improper discrimination. Clearly, a person's immutable physical attributes are an awfully unreliable predictor of their attitude. Fellow Boomers, my prevailing attitudes about life were shaped in a crucible of American military tradition.  Have you identified  your crucible? This week's comment (BTW, yours are welcome, too) deals with codes. No, not the millions of lines of mathematical computer codes that people smarter than me write in exotic languages like Python, Perl, Pascal, Forth, Frink, Erlang, Haskell, C, C+, C++ (D), Eiffel, Oberon, Occam, ChucK , or one of many scripting codes such as Beanshell or Mondrian ...

さとり the sea is parting. was Pandemic a real thing? payback coming soon *** ever write a poem? haiku can get you started neat quick and easy *** this Japanese style can sometimes get annoying but writing is fun *** this is what I do Nice Work If You Can Get It time to hit the course *** one more for the road words are cages for your thots I dislike spell check *** subscribe to my blog humor will lighten the load--- dad jokes for the win ***  seventh stanza here don't want to use too much Time another post Done *** fingers help me count the syllables i needed two finish this Peace *** /end fugue state  © 2022 Roy B. Santonil

Start here .  What a difference a dot makes. OK, Boomer, do you remember this MTV hit by the band Crowded House?  That song, "Don't Dream It's Over," used the same words as those in the title of this post. Because we are speaking and writing in English, spacing and punctuation rules are less strict than many other languages. Unless we practice writing in Far Eastern or Cyrillic characters, we don't have to bother much with diacritical marks, where, for example, the French circonflexe  (the little hat) means the difference between jeune (young) and jeûne (fast). More on foreign tongues later. For now, let's just agree there's a place in the world for old and slow . One dot, one period, one space bar, one programmer's keystroke, and POOF!, meaning changes. A glitch occurs in the matrix, and hordes of weasels begin to libel and slander your character. What's worse is they openly criticize your hair color and tan lines. Meaning is interpreted throu...

Start here .  I'm visiting the Golden State right now. So this message is pre-programmed. Singing starts at 2:10.  "Mexican Reggae" was a tentative description of the song before the Eagles settled on "Hotel California." Just so you know, there is no Hotel California. The building on the album cover is in fact the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.  I lived in Los Angeles from 1988 to 1991. All this to say growing old ain't for sissies. "Some of the wilder interpretations of that song have been amazing. It was really about the excesses of American culture and certain girls we knew. But it was also about the uneasy balance between art and commerce." -- Don Henley, 9/11/07 On a dark desert highway ,  Cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light. My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim. I had to stop for the night . There she stood in the d...

 OR . . . as the red-hatted hordes CHEERING for NASCAR driver bRANDON BROWN would say . . . "Right on, Q!" Start here .  Welcome back boomers (and kids) to another edition ... uh, addition, ... or is it merely a rendition?  OK, enough bull about Durham . . . So, a great French comedian once said,  "Zee timing, she eez evereething."    I Think, Therefore I Drink Based on that, I think once a week should be the proper dosage of this comic relief, plus or minus a paragraph or two. If you could just help me calibrate it . . . if you don't mind . . . that would be great. We are hunkered down in the Carolina Piedmont, stocked up with white bread, toilet paper, and almond milk. We got hit by a full inch of snow and sleet, just before MLK Day. Then we got hit again just this weekend.  And the NFL isn't rigged. Hmph. I can hear my Yankee friends laughing scornfully at the Southern facade, the genteel, neurotic, Prince of Tides machismo , panicked at the prosp...

Hello, Whitey. Start here .  Welcome to the nitty gritty.  Or the fucky-wucky. Or whatever idiomatic phrase that implies funtime is over, and where drilling down to real facts inevitablly means losing your audience. So much sex and violence, a mere mouse click away, makes it so reading legal jargon for cultural content just plain sucks. And it sucks more when the content herein suggests the world-as-we-know-it is crumbling. So we grind on.  Welcome to post #3 of my return  to blogging. For those of us at the "boomer" stage of life, I humbly suggest we maintain focus on a prime imperative. We should and quite often do care about what our generation hath wrought, yet growing old gracefully is a tough challenge. Being jaded is part of the deal, as is unrequited sentimentality. So, let's focus on facts, folks. Do with them (true facts) what you will, but remember there are many out there who weave wicked webs, and they practice to deceive the elderly. Think for yoursel...