Boomer Randomness

Role models for creative, fun aging are often hard to find. I am especially happy to see older people doing what they love, getting paid well for it and continuing well past the age most people expect. That’ll be me in thirty years. Two of my favorite current examples are actors David McCallum and Cheryl Ladd. McCallum came to fame in the U.S. in the 1960s TV show “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” playing Russian-born secret agent Illya Kuryakin. The 78-year-old actor is now well-known as “Ducky,” the Medical Examiner on NCIS. Cheryl Ladd got our attention (guys anyway) as Kris Monroe on Charlie’s Angels in the 1970s. The 60-year-old actress is going to show up on NCIS this season as Ducky’s “love interest.” You are never too old to do some version of whatever you want.

Duran Duran fans from the 1980s ... here they are now. They are playing in my part of the world in just over two weeks and I'm going to see them.

I spent last weekend in Las Vegas for the I Heart Radio Music Festival. I work for the company that put the whole thing together, produced the basic promos that ran on all our company’s country music radio stations and was “paid” with a trip to the event. Here are some random thoughts and observations about the event and Vegas: - The event was a music-lover’s dream: two nights, twenty or more well-known performers from numerous genres, all set in Las Vegas. Kenny Chesney - Music highlight: Kenny Chesney owned his part of the second night, even though he was sandwiched between high-energy, bass thumping, rap-based pop acts Nikki Menaj and Lady Gaga. And the screaming 20-year-old girls behind me who sang along with every Nikki and Gaga song also sang along with every Chesney song. People have their favorites but they are not limited. - Vegas is hedonism, opulence, sex, money, luxury, money, entertainment, money and money. - There is literally a “feel” in the town that you sen...

I had a very interesting weekend in Las Vegas.  Plenty to talk about, plenty to share, but I was tired when I got home Sunday night and had a very long, complicated day at work today and am still tired.  So, details coming soon.

I love to travel and I have re-discovered both the joys and the headaches of road trips. I like to see new places, re-visit familiar spots, meet people, observe cultures and feel the distance. I am travelling at least three times between now and the end of the year, so it’s on my mind tonight. Here are a few quotes relating to travel: I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full. ~Lord Dunsany Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe. ~Anatole France The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. ~St. Augustine A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~Lao Tzu The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. ~G.K. Chesterton And that's the wonderful thing about family travel: it prov...

I like this band.  Some of their musical influences are obvious yet they put a unique spin on every song.  This is the latest release from their CD. Fitz And The Tantrums - Top 20 Countdown - Don't Gotta Work It Out - Free Music Videos

I don't usually expect to find inspiration in a commercial.  Information, creativity, humor - maybe.  Advice or mildly profound observation?  No so much.  But this interesting statement is a line from a TV commercial advertising singer Marc Anthony's new clothing line at Kohl's Department Stores: Your passion chooses you.

What are inappropriate behaviors? That is my “loaded question” of the week. The Human Resources departments of many companies set guidelines on appropriate behavior in the workplace. I usually agree with and respect those policies. Behavior between male and female co-workers, in both words and actions, are regulated for good reasons. However the lines of appropriateness for men and women who know each other on a non-work social level are somewhat blurred. Some examples … - Can a single man and a married woman have lunch together, if at some point in their past they were in a relationship with each other? Back in the early 1990s my Mother was horrified that I was having lunch with an old girlfriend who was now married. I was not married. We had lunch. That’s all. My Mother thought that was inappropriate, although her words were more like “it’s not right.” What’s not right about that? Sleeping together could be considered “not right” but having a meal in a restaurant together? C’...

"Be good to yourselves, and it will just naturally follow that you'll be good to others." - J.P. Patches "Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall." - Fortune Cookie

I just read an article about space junk falling to earth. Really! NASA says a 6-ton satellite the size of a bus will fall out of orbit this week, breaking up into 26 pieces that will survive the burning re-entry. They’ve moved up their estimated target date to Friday, but have not said where they think this stuff will fall yet. I will be on an airplane on Friday. I already have some fear of flying and this isn’t helping. Statistically, flying is the safest form of travel. That does not comfort me. I have probably flown more than a hundred times and only once was there any obvious safety issue – a very bumpy landing in some tricky post-thunderstorm winds. I emphasize “obvious” in the last sentence. There are many unknowns relating to metal fatigue, inadequate inspections, inexperienced or drunk pilots. The terrorist attacks ten years didn’t help any. In fact, I did a radio interview with a psychologist about fear of flying just a month after 9 11 that year and he was very reassuring. ...

“Did. You. Get. The. Email?” Those are five words I hate to hear. Here are five more: “It is in the email.” And this one: “I sent you an email.” Or “Didn’t you read my email?” “Instructions are in the email.” “Everyone should have the email.” Email is a great tool but it is often also an electronic excuse or a substitute for real communication of an idea, a request or instructions. Here are fives words of a manager mantra: “Get it off my desk.” What I’m trying to say is that people in the workplace often assume that as soon as they hit send, their responsibility ends. They said what they had to say and they assume everyone who got the email will drop everything and do whatever they asked for in the email. That might just work if only one person was emailing only one or two others, but what happens when ten or twenty people email something to forty or a hundred people? “I sent out an email.” “Didn’t you read my email?” And we are now so used to texting, chatting and tweeting, th...

A Facebook friend posted this tonight.  I don't know the original source, but I think it's good advice, or at least something wise to consider: "Risk more than others think is safe. Care more than others think is wise. Dream more than others think is practical. Expect more than others think is possible. "

I want to write a song one day. If I ever succeed, I think it will be like this one. Just a kiss on your lips in the moonlight Just a touch of the fire burning so bright I don’t want to mess this thing up I don’t want to push too far Just a shot in the dark that you just might Be the one I’ve been waiting for my whole life Baby I’m alright With just a kiss goodnight. And here is the whole song:

Sometimes the main thing we 'feel' in our busy lives is stress. I have watched some of the 9 11 specials today so I can feel a full range of other emotions - fear, panic, sadness, outrage, patriotism, connection and love. Early in the afternoon I watched as much as I could before reaching an emotional wall. I turned the TV off, took a shower, met a friend for a media-related event, drinks, dinner and music. I got some control of my emotions and had some fun. When I got back to a TV this evening, I turned on the History Channel and began to watch more of the minute-by-minute special, with footage shot by news photographers, free-lancers and video camera enthusiasts. It seemed that I had steeled myself a bit, didn't cry, wasn't as affected. Then I saw a scene shot minutes after the second tower fell ... a little girl looks at her mother's camera and says "It's gone. The building isn't there any more." Tears, my tears. OK, enough. I turned off...

There is so much I want to say every year on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC, but at the moment I am writing this I am talked out. The media is saturated with remembrances, specials, replays of events timed to coincide with the moments those things happened. I am in the media and produced some of those audio pieces that are running on my radio stations this morning, including a moment of silence for each plane that crashed. Ten year anniversaries always get more attention than other years; it’s that zero-year I thing I’ve often written about. Some people cope with grief by remembering details and some cope by ignoring them. I am in the “remembering” camp. I want to and do remember that day ten years ago in great detail … where I was, how I felt as each new piece of information came out, how I reacted. I retell the stories at every opportunity. I am probably annoying as hell when I do that. But I have repeated my stories and listened to others so...

I don't know the source of this (other than I copied it from a Facebook friend's post), but I do like the idea: Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish it.

So my choice last night was to either watch the GOP debate or floss my teeth. I chose floss. At this point in the campaign circus it’s all posturing, a big phony ploy to show who hates Obama the most. It’s all bullshit. To be fair, I said the same thing about both sides four years ago. The Republicans think the issue right now is to see who can beat Obama next year. The real issue, in my opinion, is to see who can fix the mess Bush left us four years ago. The choice will come down to either giving Obama four more years to fix it or giving a Republican the chance to try and fix the mess Bush left us. This implies that the President, any President, can actually fix this mess, which also implies that it is previous President Bush’s fault that we’re in the economic mess we’re in. True, a President can lead but it is never one person’s fault. I blame Bush partly because he is largely responsible for the outrageously expensive wars we started during his administration. One of th...

So here is an interesting perspective on children of the Boomer era, borrowed from a boomer friend on Facebook. It might explain a few things. Me, behave? Seriously? As a child I saw Tarzan almost naked, Cinderella arrived home after midnight, Pinocchio told lies, Aladdin was a thief, Batman drove over 200 miles an hour, Snow White lived in a house with 7 men, Popeye smoked a pipe and had tattoos, Pac Man ran around to digital music while eating pills that enhanced his performance, and Shaggy and Scooby were mystery solving hippies that always had the munchies. The fault is not mine!

I'm always looking for new sounds.  I found this song and group while searching a website with out-of-the-mainstream music, although I think this could be a hit.  Maybe it is.  I usually listen to country music and hit music stations so I'm not sure what's popular outside of the top twenty or thirty. Anyway, here is a song I like listening to.  Not sure if I like the video or not.  What do you think?

Do you like a good mystery? Here’s one for you: why wasn’t Jerry Lewis on what used to be known as the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon? Comedian/actor/entertainer Jerry Lewis began hosting telethons to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association in 1952 and took it nationwide as an annual Labor Day Weekend event in the late 1960s. Jerry was well-known and popular then; muscular dystrophy was not. He combined the idea of a marathon, a long endurance event, with televised entertainment and virtually invented a now-popular fund-raising form known as a telethon (or radiothon). He brought awareness for a medical condition and ultimately has raised more than $2.5 billion to help find a cure. Children living with the variety of muscular diseases under the MDA umbrella became known as Jerry’s Kids. Watching the Jerry Lewis Telethon was an annual Labor Day Weekend tradition for many families, including mine. In the event’s early years most cities had only three or four television stations, not the ...

Over the past ten years I have intentionally focused on the present and concentrated on not living in or dwelling on the past. Sometimes, however, little pieces of past peek out from dark hiding places in my mind, daring me to look. Yesterday morning an image of my first wife popped into my head. With one exception I have had no contact with her in more than thirty years. We were young and foolish back then, especially me, and we should never have been married. I knew some of how her life turned out since then because my mother used to read the daily newspaper cover to cover and would occasionally find a birth notice, award announcement or obituary relating in some way to people my sister and I knew and she would tell us about it. So I knew my first wife had remarried a few years after our divorce, had at least two kids and had lived in various towns near New Orleans and in Florida. Also in the past ten years, I started looking up people from my past, to see how they turned out...

Do you ever have a random thought that you suddenly want to share with someone and you almost take a step toward the phone or a keyboard when you remember that particular someone is dead? That doesn’t happen to me very often but it did happen this afternoon. I do not recall what piece of information or story I wanted to share but I do remember the person was my Mom, who died six years ago today. She was a storyteller with a serious sense of curiosity. Those are two of my dominant personality traits and I know I got that from her. Her vision and hearing were both bad in her later years, limiting phone and writing contact, so the storytelling mostly happened during my visits to see her in New Orleans. She often asked about technology in an effort to understand things that were totally alien to her. She asked about my job, my town and my current and past wives. She gave me “that look” when referencing the wives (yes that’s wives with an “s”). She was judgmental but also tolerant and fo...