Introduction

I turned 63 last month. Most people schedule their age related revelations for numbers ending in zero, but I have always had a contrarian view of the numerical. I teach math to college students for a living, and I realized that at 63, I am roughly three times the age of my students now. I am much closer to being their grandparents' age than I am to being their parents' age.

It's not a sudden revelation to me that I am old. I have been calling myself a geezer for some time now. My hair isn't salt and pepper, it's grey. I have several age related maladies, notably bursitis in my left hip and arthritis in both my knees, and they are getting progressively worse. I'm not an invalid and I can still take care of myself, which is a good thing because I live alone and I like it that way.

And then there's my memory, which has been a point of pride all my life. It's a long time in the past now, but back in the 1980s I was a three time champion on Jeopardy!, which for a lot of people is my most interesting accomplishment. If someone asked "Who's that guy who was in that movie?", I enjoyed the challenge of figuring out who the actor was, and I could do it reliably and on occasion I still can. But now, my memory hits glitches and it's embarrassing. Sometimes I will completely blank on an actor's name, even though I can list several of their credits. For me, walking can help get my memory back on track, but even that is not 100% reliable. Of course, I have the Internet available and the specific odd ways I forget things can be solved by a trip to imdb.com, though it feels like cheating to me. A few years ago, I blanked on the name Jim Broadbent, but I still remembered he was in Moulin Rouge and Topsy-Turvy, so once I admitted to myself his name would not pop back into my memory eventually, I could find his name in a cast list online.

So my memory is not what it was, but it's still much better than average. This blog is going to be about my memories, mostly of public events. I'm not planning to go into the details of my first kiss or my first car or the time my dad told me to put malt vinegar on fish and chips, which was shockingly delicious to me. I returned the favor many decades later when I told him to put sriracha on pho, but as I said, this is not the point of the blog. Details like these will be the seasoning, not the meat. I will be diving into my feelings surrounding a topic, but the topics will be about general pop culture instead of private moments in my life.

I got good at trivia by immersing myself in pop culture at an early age and doing my best to commit things to memory. In some ways, it was easier then than it is today because the culture was less fragmented, but it was harder because nothing was on demand. If you saw a TV show you liked, you might never see it again unless you watched during re-run season or if the show went into syndication, which wasn't a foregone conclusion. Some movies and shows became perennials on TV, like The Wizard of Oz or How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but if you liked something out of the ordinary, it was work to find it and even with all that work, it might be lost for decades. That changed with home video recording, but that wasn't popular tech until I was in my twenties and I had already trained my memory to save things. They might be gone forever if I didn't.

And so I am starting a new blog. It's a sign that I'm a geezer that I would do a blog and not a podcast, but I'm not that keen on podcasts yet, and I don't have a good recording studio at hand. My plan is for two posts a week, one on Monday and the other on Friday. I will be posting links on Twitter and I hope to grow an audience. 

I've written single topic blogs in the past. The longest lasting were This Day in Science Fiction and It's News 2 Them, a blog about the cover stories of the supermarket checkout magazines. My current plan is for this new blog to last two years.

And so, I welcome you to my new blog. My next post will be this Friday, talking about the experiences of my father, my older brother and I had facing what was inevitable for young men until about fifty years ago, the draft.

Hope to see you then.