Today, I am old

I guess it happens to everyone at some point - that moment where you feel like the world has leapfrogged you and all of a sudden you are on the other side of the impregnable wall between youth and adulthood. Now, I don't mean to say that we have to "act" old, or that we can't be youthful all the way into our elderly years. A lot of my friends have recently started complaining about how "old" we are. No, my 102 year-old grandmother is old. We, at most, are middle-aged (my contemporaries and I are in our mid-30s). But the other day I did have to confront the very real fact that popular culture may be passing me by. To wit: I subscribe via my RSS feed to Brosephus' twitter account. I don't have my own Twitter account, as the entire endeavor doesn't appeal to me, but I like knowing what my brother is up to. So, a couple days ago I see this:

much love to @jodaplumber*, the 1st person in the history of my twitterlife to #followfriday me. he will never be #unfollowfriday, not on my watch

To which I replied: "This must be what Dad feels like. Please translate." I had to confront the fact that my reaction to this media phenomenon to which millions upon millions of new people subscribe every day was really no different than the one my grandmother has to my iPhone. It was a bit disconcerting, but then I saw this clip below, and felt much better:



*not his real name

An open letter to Jerry Rivers

Dear Jerry,

We know that you're not aspiring to be Walter Cronkite.

We know what was in Al Capone's vault.

We know what happened to your nose back in the day.

We know that you made an ass of yourself in New Orleans and Afghanistan.

We know that you are on Fox News, after all.

But dude, come on. Running the video of the dead model's body? Even TMZ wouldn't do that...

Anyway, we hope you're having a good summer and The Hamptons, or wherever you're spending your holiday weekend, you crazy radical!

Regards,

Your Adoring Public

The Spur Posse ain't got shit on these gals!

Back in my day, the symbols for teen sex gone wrong were a group of dudes out in Lakewood, California that called themselves the Spur Posse. The group was comprised of about 20 guys that competed with one another to see who could have sex with the most girls. The champ claimed to have bedded a grand total of 66.

When asked to describe the girls that the Posse rounded up, a classmate described them as "not the prettiest", which was probably an understatement. I can't imagine that Client #66 was a study in high self esteem.

Speaking of high self esteem...

I've been thinking about the girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts that made a pact to have babies together. By now you've probably read about them. There are 17 expecting mothers, none over the age of 16. Sad.

One of them was impregnated by a 24 year old homeless man. Really sad.

How do you tell your friends that the baby daddy is the guy who lives behind the Grand Union? I mean, really? How does that go down? Do you actually tell them the truth, or do you just tell them that the dad is Steve Sanders?

In somewhat related news, mazel tov to Jamie Lynn Spears (who, at 17, is older than all 17 of the mothers-to-be in Gloucester) on the birth of her baby girl.

US Weekly vs. People Magazine: class versus trash?

I'm not embarrassed to admit that Brosephus and I grew up with People Magazine and Diet Coke (and television - lots and lots of television). Our mother loved Diet Coke and People Magazine, ergo, so did we. Before you call child services, you should know that for the first 8-10 years of our life, that Diet Coke would be consumed as "Soda Milk" - milk and soda mixed into one delicious beverage, the idea for which our mother may or may not have gotten from watching "Laverne and Shirley". I never actually bought a People subscription for myself (I don't have a desperate need to learn Al Roker's diet secrets or Roma Downey's cruelty-free make-up regimen), but I do happily flip through them anytime I'm back at the homestead. People really was the forerunner of the current crop of celebrity tabloids, but I never felt quite as disgusted as I do after reading a People as I do after reading, say, US Weekly. Some friends and I were discussing why this might be, and I suggested that it was because People balanced out all of their trashier celebrity tabloid pieces with a handful of human interest stories in every issue. For every article on Kate Hudson's latest romantic betrayal, there was one about a mom in Indiana who miraculously saved her toddler by lifting a 18-wheeler with her bare hands. You know, a little uplift to offset the depressing "downpull" of celebrity navel gazing. The wifey-to-be treats US Weekly like crack, and enjoys the sick thrill of a magazine completely bereft of human interest. I was trying to quantify how I felt about it all and came up with this: US Weekly is People's whorey little sister.

Seems pretty close to the mark.

Ich bein ein Soccer Mom...

My car is in the shop, so I'm driving a rental today. Perhaps because they knew that I had a bag full of orange slices and a thermos of iced tap water (do kids today bring thermoses of water to sporting activities, or has Smart/Vitamin Water claimed their innocence yet?), the good folks at Enterprise hooked me up with a pimptastic Mazda5. For the uninitiated, it is a mini-van.

See below to understand where I'm at right now:


I've never felt lamer.

The bottom of the barrel, part 86

Yet another reason to turn on off the television. If you don't want to waste your time with even the 3 minutes it takes to watch the teaser above, it's a preview of the new Beverly Hills, 90201. How is it that crappy television somehow transforms itself through the power of nostalgia? Well, on the upside, I have a lot more time to do the Sunday Times crossword.