My Year 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.

Came upon an article today that says a new study shows old age is the best time:

“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.)

JibJab.com is one of wonderful places on the Internet for video parodies. It also has a place where people exchange jokes, called JokeBox.

The video below is a parody of Rocky, both sick and a little sweet. Below that is some turning 50 (and older) jokes.

This one comes from “The Summary of Life” on the Jokebox at JibJab.com:

• Great Truths That Little Children Have Learned: No matter how hard you try, you can’t baptise cats.
• Great Truths That Adults Have Learned: Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fibre, not the toy.
• Great Truths About Growing Old: Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.

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).

Great. Another reason not to have a big belly. A new study says having a big belly in your 40s might raise your risk for dementia later in life. Yes, feel free to point that out to your friend who is turning 50 years old.

Sometimes the news brings back baby boomer memories in weird ways. Today it was that Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island was arrested after marijuana was found in her car in Idaho. As if that contrast wasn’t tough enough — Mary Ann! With DOPE! — the photo made me feel old. How did Dawn Wells suddenly get to be my age? OK, she’s 69, but like many who pass through our lives, they seem frozen in a memory, and this certainly jarred that memory. (Photo is from the Teton County Sheriff’s Office.)