Saturday, December 04, 2010

The decline and fall of baby boomers

Prairie Home Companion: "Today I broke my previous record for number of consecutive days being alive"
If you are thinking of retirement near an ivory tower...

Baby boomers cannot not be the center of attention, even when they cannot remember why.

Now, if you think you have had a senior moment too many, take comfort in the anecdotes about Norbert Wiener’s absentmindedness: the time he reported the theft of his car to the police, only to discover that he had driven it to Providence for a talk and taken the train back to Boston; the conversation in an MIT hallway he concluded by asking his interlocutor which way he had been heading when he stopped to chat, greeting the answer by saying, “Good! That means I’ve already had lunch.”

And here, a bleaker view, lucidly laid out.. And why doing a PhD is often a waste of time.

Do doctors improve with age, while physicists and mathematicians are dead meat past 30?

On the cheerful side, Mimi (no spring chicken herself) notes: You know what Oliver Wendell Holmes said when he was 96 and saw a pretty girl walking down the street. He said,"Oh to be 90 again".
Jim Morrison: "No one here gets out alive"
Nevertheless, I do solemnly promise to stretch out mu dotage at least until my quasi-godchild Oscar's luminous being materializes by my side. This is contingent upon a black lady with a tinted-glass SUV blabbing into her cell phone while checking her Gucci bag on the back seat not running me over before then. (February 1 2011 such lady from Turner Broadcasting ran me over while I was crossing a pedestrian crossing, and she was stationary. When I got over 2/3 of the crossing, she started the car and run me into the ground - there was no way of jumping of the bike, her front-left end of the bumper got my legs entangled. I was bleeding, the left leg turned purple, I hurt all over for weeks, the front wheel got bent out of shape, but she did not get me. She's lurking out there for the next chance.)

1 comment:

Mason said...

I could continue to live in Oxford after I retire, and then I could always experience the ivory tower (or at least the stone tower).