We get the Wall Street Journal at home — it helps to be married to a financial journalist whose company pays for it. I love the WSJ Saturday paper, where it’s less about stocks and more about books, wine, gadgets and cars. But today’s headline was a bit of a downer for those of us turning 50 and beyond: Declining Cognitive Ability Presents Challenges to Boomer Finances. The article includes one of those lines I hear often as a turning 50 joke — it’s all downhill after 20. More specifically:
“Fluid intelligence — that is intelligence displayed in things like memory tests — decreases dramatically with age. In fact, ‘it’s all downhill from age 20′ “ said David Laibson, of Harvard University.
Darn, I thought it was all downhill after 80.
The good news for us baby boomer: “Crystallized intelligence — memory, wisdom and so on — does increase over time, but less so, on average, in senior years.”
But one question: Does there all have to be a “but” after turning 50?
It was about two years ago that I decided I would retire this blog, which at the time I called My Year of Turning 50. I had started it as a way to chronicle my thoughts about turning a half century old, and it seems fitting to end it sometimes after passing the mark. So why, two years after turning 50, should I restart the blog? Maybe it’s because I still haven’t answer the question in my first post on whether this is a time for sunrises or sunsets.
Things have changed since 2008. I left OrlandoSentinel.com, where I was deputy online editor, and spend about 18 months working as digital news manager at WESH TV, the NBC affiliate in Orlando. In February 2010, I came back to OrlandoSentinel.com, where I am now the digital news manager.
So, we’ll see where this takes me, this decade of turning 50.
…well, retiring from the blog. For the few of you who know me and follow the blog, it’s obvious I haven’t been feeding it much lately. Part of the reason is the usual business of life, but some of it is that I started it to talk about turning 50 and I have. As with all things Internet, the blog will live on. Some people come every day — fewer since I moved it from Blogger to my own server — looking for turning 50 jokes and the like. For them, I hope you find it useful.
“The good news is that with age comes happiness,” said study author Yang Yang, a University of Chicago sociologist. “Life gets better in one’s perception as one ages.”
To be honest, that’s not really as new a news as it appears from the headline and lead. But then, now that I’m closer to old age, I’m happy to hear it.
GOP presidential candidate John McCain made light of his age by appearing to fall asleep as he was interviewed about the impact of age on his candidacy. See the video here. I guess I would rather have seen him take the question a little more seriously.
Wondering what song to play for someone turning 50 years old? Or 60? Or 30 years ago? Or maybe just 8?
How about the song that was No. 1 on the day the person was born? A post from New York Times tech guy David Pogue mentions a web site where you can check out that info. By entering a birth month and date on Josh Hosler’s site, you can see what the No. 1 song. For me, it was “Jailhouse Rock,” which is cool. Glad I didn’t turn 30 last year or they’d have played “You Light Up My Life.”
MTV has a reality series called “The Hills.” I know, I haven’t seen it either, but Heavy.com has a parody called “Over the Hills,” which apparently uses the real dialogue from the series and puts it in the mouths of, uh, “senior citizens.” To me, it’s quite funny. Some might see it as making fun of old people, but when you hear those 20-something words coming out of their mouths, I feel sorry for the young and not the old. As the tagline says, no seniors were harmed in the making of this video. There’s one clip below. (Tip of the Hat the Katherine of What the Blog! for the link.)
If you notice something different about this blog, it’s because I have moved it to a new server and have started to use WordPress 2.5 instead of Blogger. Now My Year of Turning 50 is hosted with my other web site work — the web and blog for the Warren Acting Company — on BlueHost.com. I will be tweaking the template in coming weeks, so expect more changes.
I remember reading Mad Magazine here and there in my youth, but I connected more with National Lampoon, since I went to high school during the 1970s. Its humor was a little sicker and grosser — hey, I was, like, a teenager. But one thing I do remember from Mad were the cool fold-ins where a picture looked like one thing, until you folded one third of it over to meet the first third, covering the middle — thus showing off the joke.
That all came back today when the New York Times wrote about Al Jaffee, who has drawn the feature since 1964. The online version of the article has a cool Flash graphic showing some classic fold-ins. (Tip of the hat to my colleague Steve Mullis for alerting me to this).
