Over the past few days, I've made mental notes about good potential blog subjects. Those mental notes are now lost somewhere! While at work, the gym, on my lunch hour, or hanging out with summerless_year this past weekend, what I thought at the time were worthy topics to explore popped into my head repeatedly, but I have since forgotten them. It's very frustrating! 

I need to either carry around a pencil and notepad at all times, or get one of those digital recorders where I can hold it up, press the record button, and say "Note to self: saw squirrel at 14th and Irving, it looks like Abraham Lincoln" or whatever. I'll have to look into that. Damn my poor short-term memory!

 

 On the way to work this morning, I saw a poster in the Gallery Place Metro Station (Red Line platform)  soliciting sperm donations to some fertility clinic. It said "Sperm Donors Wanted, Age 18 - 39, College Educated, Healthy" etc. Not sure why college matters, as that's more a function of socioeconomic status and upbringing rather than evidence of innate intelligence (GW Bush went to Yale, after all). But that's not the point; what caught my eye was the age requirement. I'm too old! Now I know how all those Hollywood actresses of a certain age feel when they get turned down for a part. Not that I'm even remotely interested in that part, so to speak, but still.

Soon after obtaining the Life magazine from the week I was born, I bought a copy of the January 1965 National Geographic for $1.00 on eBay.  That was the same as the original newsstand price! A subscription could be had for $8.00/year. Articles include:

Drowned Galleons off Florida Yield Spanish Gold
Americans in Action in Viet Nam
Royal Wedding at Jaisalmer
Profiles of the Presidents: Part II, a Restless Nation Moves West
The Making of an Astronaut
Special Map Supplement: Viet Nam and its Neighbors (missing)

On a whim, I bought an old Life magazine from the week I was born in 1965. I got it in the mail today, and it's quite the time capsule. The first thing you notice are the cigarette advertisements every few pages: Merit, Chesterfield, Kent, Salem, Viceroy, and Half & Half. Other interesting ads for defunct companies are Royal McBee typewriters, Winegard TV Antennas, Howard Johnson's (steak dinner for $2.45!), and Diet Frosted Cereal. Life's annual subscription price is listed at $7.75, and it was still a weekly at that point. The photography wasn't very impressive in this issue, with both the color and b&w images being a bit grainy and murky. The table of contents lists the following articles:

Editorial: To LBJ, What IS our aim in Vietnam?
Book Review: Stephen Becker's A Covenant With Death
Movie Review: Sex and the Single Girl
Cover Story: Deluge and Havoc in the Northwest: ...one of the worst floods in US history
Explosion in Saigon: ...a Communist terror bomb destroys a US officers' billet  [the more things change! -T]
What to Do about DeGaulle?
Audacious New Swimsuits  [looking pretty tame by modern standards -T]
The Pressures of College: first of a three-part series
Henry Roth's Late-blooming Success
Broadway's Wonderful Wallachs

The main conclusion I've come to from this little experiment is: Damn, I'm old!