"There is no such thing as safety. That is asking too much of life."

"You can�t expect those around you to constantly accommodate your need for safety. That is asking too much of people."

Asserts Peggy Noonan, in her essay titled "The Trigger-Happy Generation/If reading great literature traumatizes you, wait until you get a taste of adult life," which is about telling these kids today to toughen up.

Why, when I was a child, oldies lectured the youngsters about how many miles they had to walk to school in the snow after milking cows in the dark. These old people today! They lecture the kids about how they read Shakespeare without flinching. They've gone soft, I tell you.

"But, somewhere around the turn of the century, I lost interest. The show became less and less surreal."

"Real celebrities started showing up, and I winced as Dave would suck up to them. Suddenly, everyone had a perfectly polished, self-deprecating anecdote � invariably meant to prove the utter fiction that Celebrities Are Just Like Us � that sounded suspiciously crafted by a team of writers. Suddenly, each episode had as many as three celebrities, with Letterman being unctuous and insufferable and fake-laughing his way through every minute. At times Dave would turn depressingly earnest, particularly when he thought he had a Deep Political Point to make.... His comedy started to sound like everybody else�s, with the same potshots at the same easy targets. His act sounded less like dada, more like Dad. Letterman was the barking dog who caught the car, was invited in, and curled up delightedly on the seat...."

From "Letterman�s departure is 15 years too late," by Kyle Smith.

I feel much the same way, and yet, we all get old. Dave was getting old and we were getting old. We could stick with him and grow old with him, get comfy on the car seat, or we could stop watching. Me, I stopped watching. But that doesn't mean Dave should have stopped at the point where he was no longer the Dave that meant so much to me. It was okay for him to make a long soft landing into old age, to become Dad. Nothing really that wrong with Dad. The culture needs its Dad too. I mean, I might not want to watch Dad nod at celebrities for an hour every night. But it's okay that he's there.

Did Letterman dilute his legacy by sticking around so long? It's not exactly dada and surreal to analyze things in those terms.

"I am 80 and figure I can speak the truth as I see it. Ignorant I am not."

Said Duke professor Jerry Hough, defending himself after getting criticized for something he wrote in the comments section of a The New York Times editorial titled "How Racism Doomed Baltimore." Hough's I'm-old defense appears in a WaPo article titled "Duke professor, attacked for �noxious� racial comments, refuses to back down."

Here's what Hough wrote in the NYT:
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"The GOP Is Dying Off. Literally."

Slavers Politico.

Yes, older people tend to be conservative, and older people tend to die.

And yet, everybody's always getting older, tending more toward conservatism, and, yes, eventually, dying. So the more conservative party is always dying, but it's also always receiving new entrants, as the once-young become old.

Now's a good time to roll out the old Churchill/not-really-Churchill quote: "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart.  If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

"Drunken falls cause more deaths than drunken driving in Wisconsin."

"The most recent figures available show 349 deaths in Wisconsin from alcohol-related falls in 2012. That compares to 223 alcohol-related traffic deaths that year."

The article (in the Capital Times) does not mention the (comforting?) thought that, unlike drunken driving, drunken falling is only killing the drunk. Or so I presume. Another annoying thing in this article is that it takes a gratuitous swipe at old people:

Julia Sherman, coordinator of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project... said older people are already at risk from falls and adding alcohol or alcohol in combination with drugs or medications only adds to the problems. �When I hear about happy hours in retirement communities I get worried,� said Sherman. �With the population aging, it�s an area we haven�t looked closely enough at.�

But we're given no statistics about the ages of the the falling-down-dead drunks and the only anecdotal evidence is of a 32-year-old woman who fell off a fire escape.

Another thing about falling is that it's a standard type of accident, drunk or sober. Some of the people who fall are going to have had something to drink. It doesn't mean the person was falling-down drunk. For all I know, there are falls that are avoided because those who have had something to drink are walking more slowly and paying more attention to where they are stepping or they are just not walking that much. Whatever, people need to walk from one place to another, and drinking and walking isn't morally wrong, like drinking and driving.

Back in 2011, there was a lot of talk about drinking and walking. The Freakonomics guys popularized the topic:

Steven Levitt: For every mile walked drunk, turns out to be eight times more dangerous than the mile driven drunk. So just to put it simply, if you need to walk a mile from a party to your home, you�re eight times more likely to die doing that than if you jump behind the wheel and drive your car that same mile...  For 20 years, we�ve been told you should never, ever drive drunk. We should have been told you should never, ever walk drunk and you should never, ever drive drunk. And because nobody thought about it when we were coming up with what was moral and immoral, somehow now, drunk walking just can�t find its way into the immoral box.

Oh, I'm sure some folks are working on that.

ALSO: The use of the word "drunken" is unsupported by the text of the article, which only speaks of "alcohol-related" accidents. 

"He said he hadn�t seen that guy in a long time. Then he admitted it and basically said, 'You got me.'"

"Frank Freshwaters... on the lam for 56 years."

Back in the summer of 1957, he was a 20-year-old kid with a full head of dark hair and a lead foot. One night in July, he was speeding through Ohio when he hit and killed a pedestrian. Freshwaters was sentenced to up to 20 years in prison only to have the sentence suspended.... But Freshwaters squandered his good fortune. He violated probation by climbing back into the driver�s seat and was locked up in February 1959 in the Ohio State Reformatory.

It would prove to be a fitting setting for Freshwaters. After its closing in 1990, the reformatory would be used as a set for �The Shawshank Redemption,� a 1994 movie about a wrongfully convicted man who escapes from prison. Freshwaters never escaped from the reformatory, however. Instead, he secured a transfer to a nearby �honor camp,� according to the AP. It was from there that Freshwaters disappeared on Sept. 30, 1959....

Madonna does a standup comedy routine... and the jokes are all about dating younger men.

One joke is that, needing a date, she asked her son: "Do you have any friends you could introduce me to?" Her son is 14. She's 56.



It's supposed to be funny � not that it needs to be funny (the joke is that she's doing a standup routine at all) � because we're supposed to think good for you when a woman gets a man (or boy) who is younger.

Or maybe the idea was to make the audience boo and hiss, that it was a Neil Hamburger-type routine. Well, no one seems to have gotten it on that level. You have to sell intentionally, painfully bad. It's not easy.

"You have to follow God. Don�t follow anyone else. Be obedient..."

"... and follow the laws and don�t worry about anything. I�ve followed him for many, many years and I ain�t tired."

Said Gertrude Weaver, who was the oldest person in the world for 5 days.

Have we just lost the last person who was alive in the 19th century?

Misao Okawa, born March 5, 1898, has died. She had the distinction of being the oldest person alive, but who is the oldest person now?

Japan identifies a 115-year-old woman as its new oldest person. She was born on March 15, 1900. Perhaps beyond Japan, there is someone older, but it may be that there is suddenly no one left from the 19th century.

IN THE COMMENTS: I am made to regret that I didn't title this post: Have we just lost the last person who was alive in the 1800s?

"I�m not going to get my own room, am I?" Mariel Hemingway asked Woody Allen... when she was 18 and he was in his early 40s.

They were making the movie "Manhattan" together, and he'd been trying to get her to go to Paris with him. When he � as Howard Kurtz puts it � "fumbled for his glasses," she announced: "I can�t go to Paris with you."

The headline chez Kurtz (at Fox News) is: "Young Mariel Hemingway had to rebuff Woody Allen�s advances."

Is that fair? I know it's fun to kick Woody Allen around, but "rebuff... advances" creates a picture of him groping her. And "Young Mariel Hemingway" suggests an underage female (like the character Hemingway played in "Manhattan"). But it was a powerful and not-all-that-old movie star inviting an adult female into an old-school romantic adventure. I mean � it's a romance clich�! � Paris.

Yeah, older men like younger women and trips to Paris are tempting. It may be a little hard to say no, but I can't believe there was that much scheming and trapping going on here, because how smart do you have to be � and I hear Woody's a genius � to figure out that you get the young lady to isolate herself with you in Paris by saying "Of course, you'll have your own room, and it will be a beautiful room in this charming hotel, blah blah blah. I would simply love to show you Paris, blah blah blah, museums... restaurants... the Seine blah, blah, blah"" You figure out how to lure her into your room after you're there.
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