Tom gets with it ...
.
I have recently been flooding my entries with lots of pictures of children. Beautiful kids and young people - that appeal even more to people of a ‘certain age’. At my age, we get to beam at and admire a new and better generation than our own.
But not all youthful traits meet with our admiration - for instance, wild rappers with iPods welded to their ears as they bop down the street with their flat-peaked hats turned sideways and their pants at the point of falling down. What makes them flood their vacuous brains with screaming music at max-volume?
Well, SHIT - now I’m beginning to understand! For my recent birthday, one of my sons gave me tickets for a 16-hour flight to Chile last month. The other son gave me a damn iPod Nano with 4 gigs of space for something like 1000 songs - presumably to while-away the airborne hours. Compounding the felony, one of my esteemed LJ (and ‘real’) friends, ‘shofarot’, presented me with another iPod - a ‘Shuffle’, with space for yet another 240 songs. Both of them can be used, I found out, for something called Podcasts - downloaded broadcasts of things from NPR and PBS news and commentaries, Charlie Rose, Gwen Ifill, Bill Moyers, Fareed Zakaria and other ‘good liberals’.
And, yes - music too! Not that rap-crap - but GOOD stuff, like Peter, Paul & Mary, Bruce, Josh Groban, Norah Jones - even John Denver and Cat Stevens. And some Oscar Peterson, Sidney Bechet - and a little Glenn Gould.
So, there I was, sitting in musical and intellectual ecstasy - all the way to South America and back - bobbing my head like some mindless teenager to the jazz, classical and folk greats of my time. And nodding in agreement as Moyers, Rose and other favourite sages trashed the Bush/Cheney regime.
But, never fear - I WILL NOT turn my hat sideways, nor wear pants suspended precariously low on my hips.
I have recently been flooding my entries with lots of pictures of children. Beautiful kids and young people - that appeal even more to people of a ‘certain age’. At my age, we get to beam at and admire a new and better generation than our own.
But not all youthful traits meet with our admiration - for instance, wild rappers with iPods welded to their ears as they bop down the street with their flat-peaked hats turned sideways and their pants at the point of falling down. What makes them flood their vacuous brains with screaming music at max-volume?
Well, SHIT - now I’m beginning to understand! For my recent birthday, one of my sons gave me tickets for a 16-hour flight to Chile last month. The other son gave me a damn iPod Nano with 4 gigs of space for something like 1000 songs - presumably to while-away the airborne hours. Compounding the felony, one of my esteemed LJ (and ‘real’) friends, ‘shofarot’, presented me with another iPod - a ‘Shuffle’, with space for yet another 240 songs. Both of them can be used, I found out, for something called Podcasts - downloaded broadcasts of things from NPR and PBS news and commentaries, Charlie Rose, Gwen Ifill, Bill Moyers, Fareed Zakaria and other ‘good liberals’.
And, yes - music too! Not that rap-crap - but GOOD stuff, like Peter, Paul & Mary, Bruce, Josh Groban, Norah Jones - even John Denver and Cat Stevens. And some Oscar Peterson, Sidney Bechet - and a little Glenn Gould.
So, there I was, sitting in musical and intellectual ecstasy - all the way to South America and back - bobbing my head like some mindless teenager to the jazz, classical and folk greats of my time. And nodding in agreement as Moyers, Rose and other favourite sages trashed the Bush/Cheney regime.
But, never fear - I WILL NOT turn my hat sideways, nor wear pants suspended precariously low on my hips.