Month: April 2007

This pseudo-documentary, produced by KQED in San Francisco, is just another rehash of opinions, most of them negative, about Americans born between 1946 and 1964.
Being one of the notorious Boomers, it always fascinates me that retrospectives don’t talk about the impact of the following, which were certainly a bigger part of my youth and young adulthood than Haight-Ashbury:

• The over-competitiveness in schools and colleges after Sputnik that led to breakdowns and suicides;
• Mortgage interest rates in the double digits;
• Housing as a whopping percentage of take-home pay;
• The verbal cr*p that women had to put up with simply by walking to work;
• A law enforcement system that in many parts of the country never prosecuted criminals for rape;
• Racism of Caucasians against other Caucasians because of national origin.

I am not elegiac for those days and, for whatever it’s worth, I think in many respects, especially financial, the current times are even worse for our kids.
I don’t find the Boomer phenomenon fascinating, except for the bewildering fact that advertisers seem hell-bent on ignoring our substantial purchasing power: 50% more than the coveted 18-34 market.
I don’t know many, if any, Boomers who are selfish and self-absorbed, but I know plenty who are hard-working, civic-minded and generous to their kids and parents.
As for Botox and fear of growing old: I have one friend who’s had “work done”. One.
Has to be that most of the Boomer stereotypes live in San Francisco.

… of an Interface I ever heard:
“It knows what it wants to do, but you have to tell it how.”

I’m getting better at not inviting confrontation, but sometimes it makes itself impossible to ignore.
Last week, someone whom, shall we say, I don’t consider a friend contacted me out of the blue to see if I’d be willing to loan out some fairly expensive (about $300 worth) equipment.
What made this a strange request is that she was planning to pass my property along to someone else – and consistently refused to give me his name or contact information.
She was also not willing to arrange a time/place for the three of us to meet, throwing up numerous obstacles that made no sense, like “he works during the day”.
The whole thing smelled like a scam, and I called her on it, not accusing her of dishonesty, but presumption.
I haven’t heard back from her, and just as well if I don’t.

I’ve always had a problem with defendants who plead insanity, especially in murder trials.
This item from today’s Cape Cod Times made me feel a little better:
According to a study by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2003, an insanity defense is used in less than 1 percent of all homicide cases.
Of those cases in which an insanity defense is used, fewer than 12 percent result in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
12 percent of 1 percent is still too many, but thank goodness it isn’t more.