technology crazed-- the cell phone for old people

Is this not the perfect phone for old people? I want to order one right now. I swear I would actually call my relatives and return phone calls if only I could dial them up. I had just begun to learn the cell phone and now there is the bluetooth. what is that-- an off color implant?

Last year I was at the rowing centre down by the lake and someone had left an old rotary phone for people to use in a Quonset hut. The women under thirty had no idea how to use it. They kept pressing the numbers under the plastic circular dial disc and finally said, "I guess it is broken." I showed them how to to dial (now an antiquated verb form). They stood there waiting for the dial to move for each number. I said you had to use your finger and put some muscle into it. It really did take a lot longer than I remembered. Before they got all the digits dialed they said "Forget it, this is like Pony Express!" and hung up.

So If you remember the dial phone you are old. If you remember when the phone only came in black you are really old. If you remember the party line you are ancient and if you remember when the phone was a wooden box on the wall you are barely breathing.

technical challenges remembering white out

I just loved this picture. When you find you are fixing your computer screen with white-out you know you are old. In fact if you are reading this and even know what white-out is then you are old. Remember that little bottle of correction fluid. Whenever you needed it to fix a typo (another archaic term) in a term paper the white out was always too thick. (It had a shelf life of five minutes) and you needed to go out in the middle of the night and get a new bottle. I eventually found you could add Cutex nail polish remover to it as a thinning solvent. Whenever I handed in my papers they smelled like a beauty parlor. If you remember WHITE-OUT let me know. Now there is a business I would not like to have inherited!

Tea and Bullets

ceramics

Have you ever noticed that old people love dishes. I am one of those people. They usually get it for their wedding. I am old but don't fit that demographic. I figured my mother-in-law would cause too much of a guffule at my wedding since I wasn't Jewish so we just went to city hall forty years ago and got married on our way to school for the day. ( Smartest thing I ever did but I didn't get dishes.) However, I am totally into ceramics. I have inherited several sets. I even read about it all the time. Did you know that Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood of the famous Wedgwood China family. It was the Wedgwood fortune that financed the Beagle voyage. Whenever I go to Ashley's, the biggest china store in Toronto, to look at China I only see old people in flea bitten minks looking for replacement pieces for their china. Now that gay people can marry I sometimes see gay men arguing over china patterns in the newlyweds registry section. I totally get why they feel strongly about a creamer or a sugar bowl. It takes a boring cup of tea into the realm of entertainment.

What I particularly like about the above picture of the china ( I think the blue and white pattern is Royal Copenhagen) is that it combines both of my favourite things. I love violence and china. I adore yelling at people and then threatening them. It is an old habit and old people have trouble breaking old habits. Now I can have a ceramic gun that is pretty and it can match my pattern. This is really old people heaven. Thank you Wedgwood, Spode and Royal Copenhagen for thinking of everything.

old people like penmanship

I used to work for a national magazine and write an advice column. I received hundreds of letters and I could always tell how old the person was by their penmanship. If they were over 75 they wrote in the Spencerian method. It is a cross between what we would call Cursive writing and calligraphy. If they were over 85 they would write in the Spencerian style with a little bit of a quiver in the letters. ( see picture above)

If the writer was between 65 and 45 they wrote in cursive writing of the Palmer school which is a slanted writing with specific style to each letter.

If they are under 40 they wrote with a smidgen of cursive style and a smattering of printing.

If they are under 30 they often wrote in cursive and when they became anxious or tired by the end of their four line letter they often fell into block letters.

If they are under 20 then the writing is usually block lettering and then becomes larger and more scrambled when they are expressing an emotional thought. It often looks like the writing of "Son of Sam",the paranoid schizophrenic who wrote to the newspapers in 1976. ( see printed letter above)

There are a lot of reasons for this decline in penmanship. We now have computers and the school system no longer sees the need to teach penmanship. Cursive writing is going the way of the Dodo bird. You can only get a job as a Dickensian scribe with good penmanship. Now schools stop teaching penmanship in grade two if they teach it at all. There is actually a lot to learn with proper cursive lettering in terms of motor coordination in the hand, wrist, and shoulder in order to form letters . You have to learn how to hold the pen, and how to glide across the page. Remember doing it with that pen that had that fat round bulb in the middle so your untrained hand wouldn't slip. It is no wonder that those in their 20's and 30's write like they are in first grade--that is when they stopped learning it.

It saddens me to read the letters I receive from these poor ill equipped young adults. They would often apologize for their lack of penmanship and grammatical savvy. Now people learn computer programs instead of penmanship. There are several problems with this shift in learning. Very often what you learn in the field of technology is outmoded before you even finish school. A perfect case in point was when I was in graduate school in the dark ages, I opted not to master French but another language--a computer language called FORTRAN that would be of use forever in my work on computers. It was the hardest course or language that I ever took and it was completely outmoded before the ink dried on my Phd. It disappeared within two years. I have no idea where it went but no one ever mentioned it. Whenever I say I know Fortran people say "Wow, are you old". Those that learned decent cursive writing are still plugging along. If I'd taken French, I could at least get a Mac Poulet in Montreal at McDonald's without having to repeat myself.

It is quite shocking to receive hundreds of letters from all age groups. Old people not only write legibly and as though they have some personal discipline, they also know how to compose a letter with a salutation, etc. Young people just dump out their feelings in a higgedy-piggedly style that is harder to decipher than the Rosetta Stone. Old people use compound sentences full of independent and dependent clauses accompanied by the right punctuation. Young people struggle to get their meaning across in simple sentences. I sense their frustration at not having been taught the tools of simple letter writing. The letters that have decent cursive writing also contain appropriate punctuation. The old people know exactly what they want to ask and never resort to the terminology of the undereducated young people. The young person says, "you know what I mean" or 'get it?' or 'whatever' instead of clearly explaining the problem. They count on my having experienced what they have experienced instead of explaining what is on their mind.

When I showed these letters to my husband, he commented on how sad it was that some of the young people have been to university while the older ones will often say they are from a farm in Saskatchewan and never went past grade eight. The correlation between decent writing, proper grammar and punctuation is positively correlated with age not educational level. What does that tell you?

Anyway at this point I am raving - but if you had to read the hundreds of letters that I have had to decipher for hours-- you'd rant as well.

Old people -- KEEP PUSHING THAT PEN!

fakewoman

There is so little written about older women in terms of 'erotica' I thought you might want to hear this little ditty on video.

bird watching

Old people really like watching birds. I know because I'm old and can do it for hours. On my old farm in Ontario I can rock on my front porch and watch the ruby throated hummingbirds come to the feeder that I fill every day. They are really into sugar water. Sometimes I have a coke while watching them and then I know we are having the same treat.

Did you know that hummingbirds are the evolutionary link between birds and bees? They eat nectar like bees, buzz like bees, but have wings and feathers like a bird. They are the only bird that can fly backwards. They also have really tiny feet. I love to discover one of their nests. As you watch this video remember that the whole nest is only the size of a walnut shell, yet holds the mother and the babies. Catch this video:


If you are not sure if you are old but are on the cusp -- say 50 to 55, then you can see if you are glazing over at this point in my hummingbird tale. If you can't take anymore and would rather shop or look at guys or girls then you are not really old. I think bird watching is an electric-kool-aid-acid test for old age. Or maybe like the hummingbird the birdwatcher is the link between the aging and the elderly.