Hello all,

It’s another week of dangerously hot weather in the central part of the country and it’s unseasonably stupidly hot here as well, with no end in sight (at least until later this week)! If you live in the middle part of the country please take care.

I received a bunch of good-natured emails after last week’s column, the general thrust of which was “Ha. You aren’t old enough to talk about the good old days.” There were some great insights into the nature of the good old days as well, which maybe I will revisit here at a later date. I may not be the oldest person in the world, but my next big birthday is going to put a 5 in my tens column and mark a point where I might (just might) start to consider myself to be middle-aged. I remember moon landings and the oil embargo of 1973. I remember the floods of 1972 here, and Richard Nixon resigning.

I also remember when there were no personal computers, no internet, and no awareness in the mass consciousness that we were on the edge of a radical and widespread change in the way humans perceive and interact with the world. No idea that in the next twenty years everything would change for hundreds of millions of people. It’s often said the advent of this new era of wonder has made the world smaller, much like the telegraph and telephone did earlier. I suppose I understand that, but from my perspective—that of a kid growing up in a small town in an era when that meant your world was small already—it has gotten a lot bigger and has shown itself to be more wondrous and richer than I could possibly have imagined back there in the “good old days.”

Thanks for reading.

Liam
liam@smalldog.com