[Ads-l] OT: useful, but depressing, birthday gift

[Shawnee Moon]

I certainly empathize. I walked with a cane and then progressed to forearm crutches, in my forties. Handicap tag, limped, it sucked. Doctors all said MS but never officially diagnosed it. It suddenly cleared up and I was so happy I set off to walk across America. I made it to Wisconsin, the long way, 1700 miles before I blew my back out BAD. (Already had had two back surgeries, and then pounded the pavement)Now I'm nearly as bad as I was again, but I had a helluva time. I just moved over to more sedate things, like motorcycle riding, writing a book, and mandolining. (Why is that not a word? Fiddling is..)

My earliest memory was Kennedy's assassination. There's a standard Bell telephone at the local museum, an artifact from the past. The ISS floats practically unnoticed overhead, but the entire world froze on July 21, 1969 when Armstrong stepped on the moon. The older we get, the more changes we see. 

I would have to dig to find the exact wording, but I loved it, it describes the millennials or whatever the born-with-a-silver-iPhone-on-their-ear generation is called. The wording is completely wrong, but the gist of it is there.

(Gist?)<--weird word

Brian, the dog from Family Guy,  was trying to pick up a young lady. She's chewing gum and messing with her phone. 

He says in his pick up line, "I wrote a  book."

"What's that?" She keeps chewing her cud, and doesn't look up.

"It's like a magazine, about one thing, with a hard cover."

"What's a magazine?"

Brian sighs, "It's like a really long blog."

"Oh, cool."

---

Mailed from the Moon 🌜

> On May 15, 2017, at 4:41 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> A genuine HurryCane! The all-terrain cane!
> 
> https://goo.gl/a8EaAE
> 
> Of course, it's the fact that it's useful that makes it depressing! <sob!>
> I've always pictured myself as being like the living embodiment of Johnnie
> Walker Black: Born 1820, Still Going Strong! Johnnie's cane is but a
> fashion statement, of course.
> 
> OTOH, when I was but a science-fiction-reading tad, I never thought that
> I'd live to see the day when interstellar space-travel was commonplace and
> pot-smoking was legal*!
> 
> *Man, do I wish that I could find that quote! But the only thing that I can
> remember about it is that the author wrote that, some time in the '90's,
> Big Tobacco - he had only the concept, not the term, of course - would
> simply have become Big Marijuana. There was nothing else memorable about
> the story, except that it was short. The author must have been a serious
> head, though. He didn't mention any other of the many possible uses for
> hemp!
> 
> -- 
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org