You know you are getting old when:

[belfastboy]

...and she's still being blamed for breaking up the Beatles!



Macca would be an interesting recruit for the Stones full time. He composed a few decent songs with the Beatles, but gifted musicians as they were, they were never close to the performers that The Stones were. At least, not after they dropped the leather and the real rock and roll of the Cavern days.... (but then I'm one of those old farts who thinks the Beatles would have been much better if Stu Sutcliffe had still been taking the lead....).

If it is true that Yoko was responsible for breaking up the Beatles it is quite likely the best work she has ever done!!!

 

[GHT]

At least being old makes me rich! Silver in my hair, gold in my teeth, crystals in the kidneys, sugar in the blood, Lead in the butt, Iron in the arteries and an inexhaustible supply of natural gas!

 

[GHT]

 

[tonyb]

… you post photos of the groovy 1963-vintage Frigidaire Flair range you recently acquired, a “mod” era piece if ever there was one, and the most common comments are along the lines of “there was one like that in my grandmother’s house!”

 

[belfastboy]

I had a young fellow from Lithuainia staying with me for a week as he learned hatting. His girlfriend was there as well and we sat around the dinner table discussing the differences between our countries, sharing travel stories etc etc. It seemed so normal and the age gap not really present. It wasn't until he mentioned his parents were barely 50 that it hit us that we were old enough to be his parents parents and they our grandchildren and they were old enough to have kids so theoretically we could be great grandparents. Sobering, sobering thought.

 

[belfastboy]

I had a young fellow from Lithuainia staying with me for a week as he learned hatting. His girlfriend was there as well and we sat around the dinner table discussing the differences between our countries, sharing travel stories etc etc. It seemed so normal and the age gap not really present. It wasn't until he mentioned his parents were barely 50 that it hit us that we were old enough to be his parents parents and they our grandchildren and they were old enough to have kids so theoretically we could be great grandparents. Sobering, sobering thought.

Not that I wanted to sober up!

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
An old girlfriend of mine has been a great-grandmother for a few years now. She’s maybe three years my senior.

 

[Turnip]

…you pick up some meds at a pharmacy and the PT at the counter wordlessly puts a free copy of the weekly pensioner‘s digest along your shoppings into your bag.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Those were also a mainstay of American gas station snack bars, right along side the "Red Hot" pickled sausages and the hot dogs revolving slowly on aluminum rollers. There would always be one or two left in the jar, floating in the murky water, and you wondered who ate the rest of them.

Did the gas stations back then had some pipe tobacco sortiment?

 

[LizzieMaine]

At our station we had a big display board of pipes that sat on the top of the Coke machine. My uncle had bought it off a traveling salesman, and one by one bought all the pipes himself. No tobacco though, just a cigarette machine in the corner.

 

[tonyb]

…

you take a picture of the instructions on a can of spray paint with your iPhone so that you can enlarge the image enough to read it.

 

[Rmccamey]

…

you take a picture of the instructions on a can of spray paint with your iPhone so that you can enlarge the image enough for read it.

Next to every pair of glasses in the house, you have a magnifying glass.

 

[Zombie_61]

 

[Trenchfriend]

When you wanted to post a really good one from Youtube in the "Clean Jokes" thread and you forgot it the same day and can't remember, what it was.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
I attribute that to having too much information so readily accessible. There are always at least a couple-three things about which I am sufficiently curious to bother looking up, but at least one of those items is forgotten by the time I get around to it, only to reappear when I’m about to drift off for the night.

 

[Turnip]

…you lay in the chill-out room of your local indoor pools, notice a couple having nookie two benches in front of you and your only emotion is amusement……of course I spent some courteous applause once the show was over…

 

[Edward]

That's Leigh Bowery's 'no-make-up' selfie -

^^^^^^
I attribute that to having too much information so readily accessible. There are always at least a couple-three things about which I am sufficiently curious to bother looking up, but at least one of those items is forgotten by the time I get around to it, only to reappear when I’m about to drift off for the night.

Research has been done that indicates memory retention is getting worse among people who never commit anything to memory because they can just look it up. I suspect this is where being the sort of hobbyist who obsesses over details of... something.... and does commit them to memory is an advantage. One of a number of reasons I intend, now our university post-pandemic regulations are finally evolving, to go back to a traditional, closed- book exam. So, so many of my students now, doubtless because they don't have to commit anything to memory for open-book tests, don't bother - to the point where I'll ask a question in a tutorial, and there will be a long silence while they all frantically CTRL+F for their notes.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
Yeah, but on the other hand, a person can’t retain information s/he never acquired in the first place.

The problem (or, more accurately, my problem, and a problem I strongly suspect afflicts many others) is that the information that matters can get all but lost in that pile of stuff that matters little.

I get daily emails from a couple of outfits introducing me to obscure vocabulary. It’s gotten to where I delete most of them without hesitation. I don’t object to them, really (I haven’t unsubscribed, after all), but I can’t imagine the circumstances under which I would ever use most of those words, leastwise not without coming off like an insufferable pedant.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The other problem, to me, is that the Internet makes all information equal. For too many people, some jackass posting a hot take on Reddit is on an absolute par with a vetted and nuanced analysis published on a "legacy media" site. To put it in pre-Internet terms, it's like saying the ethanol-scented mumblings of some guy at the far end of the bar should be given weight equal to the statements of a credentialed authority. But I won't go so far as to say this is a "digital native" problem -- if anything my own generation is far more guilty of this than younger people. I think kids understand that 99 percent of everybody on the internet is full of crap, but too many of my own contemporaries do not.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^
“Confirmation bias” may have entered the popular lexicon only recently, but there’s nothing new in the phenomenon.

What is new is the ready access to “information” in support of whatever crockpot notion the crackpot holds dear.

What’s all the worse is what appears to be an increasing disregard for objective truth or untruth. We’d rather be entertained than informed.