 |
|
 |
  |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
August 30, 2006 |
|
|
Feel good facts. Gotta love ‘em. Wine is good for whatever ails, coffee’s a life extender and chocolate improves the IQ. Just three of recent, “wow I’m doing everything right”, hypothesis espoused by members of the medical and nutrition communities. Easy to live by rules seem to magically pop up as some sort of reward for a life not really well lived. Eating and drinking your way past the life expectancy mean is so much easier today than the pain in the posterior rules of our childhood where we were supposed to floss after every meal, wait two hours for the fried chicken and potato salad to digest before swimming and always wear clean underwear in case of being involved in a terrible car crash. Now, thanks to a Morgan State University professor, there’s great news for the over sixty set. Yes, the “Sultans of Grump”, the “Kings and Queens of bitch, bitch, bitch” are being rewarded for ongoing crankiness. According to Jacqueline Bichsel and as detailed by USA Today, when it comes to folks over 60 the crabbiest are also the smartest. Just last week in the latest episode of “You kids get out of my yard and don’t come back”, well past the age of 80 Sumner Redstone, he’s the head dude at Viacom a company that owns bunches of things including Paramount pictures, sacked Tom Cruise. “Mr. Cruise”, said Redstone, “is a fine actor but insists on acting like an idiot.” According to David Letterman, Cruise was so shocked by the firing he called Brooke Shields and asked to borrow a couple anti-depressants. Also last week geezer troubadour, Bob Dylan, got into grumpy mode. We know how smart he is, writing lyrics forty years ago that we’re unable to understand even today. Dylan, in Rolling Stone, was quoted there hadn’t been a good album produced in the last twenty years. “Why do they worry about illegal downloading?” he asked, “The music is worth nothing.” Maybe the boy from the North Country has been listening to way too many Creed, Train and Rascal Flatts albums but the past 20 years have witnessed some pretty tasty offerings from Bruce Springsteen, Allison Krause, Allan Jackson and even a young Dylan, Jacob, front man for the Wallflowers. Cranky geezers, some call it Irritable Male Syndrome, will really turn up the volume now that constant kvetching has been equated with a high IQ. “Why aren’t there any good TV shows like Matlock or Lawrence Walk ”, “That damn fool passing me won’t get there any faster than I will” and “When I was your age I knew the value of a dollar” will now be classified as Einstein like intelligence indicators. Public commentators like Bill O’Reilly, Al Franken and Ariana Huffington, due to their youth, are still nothing more than TV and print gasbags. Only when they reach 60 will their public persona be that of rational intellectual thought. Should Professor Bichsel’s theorems be true, it’s time for an apology. “You Said It”, turns out to be a compendium of deep thought culled from the local intellectual community. Excuse me for thinking it merely a repository of weekend ramblings from geriatric grumps. But those of you priding yourself on the ability to go along and get along, if you’re a person who tries to accentuate the positives in life, look out. Once past age 60 folks like you are in danger of being placed in the “slow” group. |