Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's been a few months since the last BuzzFeed listicle mis-categorizing everyone over 40 as "Boomers". It's time for another! Earlier this week I read "If You've Done At Least 15 Of These 35 Things, You're 1000% A Boomer"... which I'll note was titled "...You're 1000% Over 65" (emphasis mine) at the time  I first read it. Like the last of these articles I read it shows that Gen Z— the age group that authors who write these fluffy click-bait articles belong to— thinks that anyone who remembers things that were common up through the 1980s must be a Boomer / senior citizen.

Ahem, we kids who were growing up and doing things in the 1980s are called Gen X. And we're in our 40s/50s. And even many older Millennials remember many of the things on this recent list.

BTW, my score on this list was 20/35. And I'm many years short of being a Boomer. Here are just Five Things from the list of supposed "Boomer" items that virtually all Gen Xers, and most older Millennials, would be familiar with:

1. Have you ever manually cranked a car window up or down?

Manual-crank car windows were common up through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The first car I bought, a new 1991 vehicle, had manual crank windows. Yes, power windows were common by then, too, but in that era economy cars still had manual windows. I recall once getting a rental car in the mid 2000s that still had manual windows. I'll bet most people who are 35+, not just 65+, have cranked a manual window at some point.

3. Have you ever watched television on a TV that had no remote control and just dials?

I recall my parents first got a TV with wireless remote control in about 1985. Prior to that changing the channel— or even adjusting the volume— required walking up to the device and turning a knob. Or pressing a button. Yes, there was a middle ground between turning big, chunky, old-fashioned knobs and modern remote controls. TVs had modern push-button controls on the device for years before buttons on wireless remotes became common.

I used a non-remote TV again in 1992-1993 in college. It was an older TV set one of my housemates got from his parents. It had those chunky, old-fashioned knobs on it... but we rarely used them, because with only one, weak, weeny TV station available via antenna, we left the TV tuned to channel 3 for input from the VCR. Ah, tuning to channel 3 for VCRs and video games. that's another 1980s-ism... that virtually all Gen Xers and older Millennials would remember.

16. Have you ever looked up a phone number in the phone book?

Younger people these days may have trouble imagining a world before everything was online, but it wasn't that long ago. Amazon didn't even open until 1995, and back then it was just a bookstore. It wasn't until the early 2000s that most traditional businesses began to have even a minimal web presence, one where you could at least find their address and store hours. Thus, needing to use a phone book to find phone numbers to call for information— if it wasn't already shown in a yellow pages ad— was a regular thing up through the early 00s.

BTW, I say this as a digital native living in Silicon Valley. Less technical people and those living in less connected areas would've used phone books on the regular for a few more years.

19./20. Have you ever eaten at McDonald's when the food still came in Styrofoam packaging / when smoking was still allowed?

This one's a two-fer. I've grouped these two together because they're both about McDonald's and because they're not subject to any one person's memory. Questions like "When did [Company X] start/stop [doing Y]?" can be answered via simple search. Y'know, by using the web, that thing that people mistakenly believe kids these days excel at because they're online 24/7 while Boomers (and "Boomers") squint their eyes at and act befuddled and call their kids for help?

McDonald's went big with styrofoam containers for sandwiches in the 1980s. They started phasing it out in 1990 due to popular campaigns against non-biodegradable waste. I mention both the stop and start dates here because actual Boomers would remember a time long before styrofoam containers became common. And really it was just a period of <10 years. But yes, we Gen Xers remember that era well, because it's when we were growing up and treasuring those visits to McDonald's with our parents.

As far as smoking in McDonald's, smoking in all restaurants was common up through the 1990s and even into the 21st century. McDonald's banned smoking in restaurants as a corporate policy in 1994 (New York Times article, 1994!) but that only affected company-owned stores. Most stores were franchised. Smoking in restaurants was banned by law in various jurisdictions over the next fifteen years. California banned smoking in restaurants (but not bars) in 1995. New York banned smoking in restaurants in 2003. It wasn't until 2010 that many other states banned smoking in restaurants. Example source: List of smoking bans in the United States (Wikipedia article).

14. Have you ever balanced a checkbook?
Yes, two days ago.

Friday wasn't a day of literal rest. I was very busy with work, pushing through until 6:15pm (having started before 8am), and even then choosing to leave a few things undone until Monday. But Friday was a rest from coughing and taking pills.

I picked up an upper respiratory infection probably on the way to Vegas for SKO last month. Being in a smoky casino-hotel for 3 days certainly didn't help. By my first evening back home I was already sick. "This could be the start of another two weeks" of a cold, I lamented. Unfortunately it was worse. My symptoms wound up running four whole weeks.

Yesterday, Day 28 since the start of significant symptoms, was finally the first day I didn't need to take any medicine to quell my cough.

Four weeks. Four freakin' weeks. And bad enough early on that I had to go to a doctor and get prescription medication because the coughing was so bad I was struggling to breathe. I haven't had a respiratory illness that bad since childhood, when I was a 4-pack-a-day second-hand smoker.

Picture it: Las Vegas. The Bellagio. You're thinking of those fountains, right? The beauty. The luxury.

Now imagine that you're at the Bellagio, and you turn around 180° from that and walk away.



There's a loooong corridor leading away from it. And your room is almost at the end.

On all my trips to Vegas in recent years I've always been reminded quickly of why I hate Vegas. This one has been no exception. Crowds. Traffic. Driving 20 minutes to go 2 miles. Waiting in line another 20 minutes to check in. Having to trek through a smoky casino both ways to get to... anything. And sadly, the Bellagio's casino is smokier than others I've stayed at in the past few years. Even though nearly nobody is actually smoking, the whole place reeks of it. Years of second hand smoke piled up are already making my throat scratchy, and I'm going hoarse. After just minutes in the poisoned air.

Oh, but there's my room...



It's a fairly well sized room, if utterly dull. And the view outside is nothing special. Remember what I said above about the fountains? Yeah, here's the view from my "desk":



Hey, look, a 10-lane boulevard, a freeway, some high-voltage power lines, and... miles of concrete desert. Fabulous Las Vegas!

Well, at least that little round table I pulled over to the window to serve as my desk today is better than sitting at an ironing board.

A few weeks ago I watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut. My impetus was reading an article about it. I saw the original Blade Runner (1982) back in about 1989 and enjoyed it a lot at the time. The article promised that this second director's cut, released in 2007 after years of wrangling over legal rights, was the truest to filmmaker Ridley Scott's vision. It was on one of our stream services, so I gave it a watch.

A 1980s Vision of the Future

The thing I enjoyed most about the original Blade Runner was its vision of the future. The movie imagines a world where technology is more advanced but society is still gritty. There are flying cars and interstellar space ships, yet the big city of Los Angeles on Earth is crowded, disorganized with people speaking multiple different languages, and still has poverty and homelessness.

The filmmakers' choice to imagine the future that way was a fresh break from the predominant trope in SF through the 1970s and into the early 1980s that technological progress would create a gleaming future of material abundance. Blade Runner clearly had dystopian elements... but without going full-on dystopia. Especially as I watched it in 1989, toward the end of a decade that had seen real-world cities become increasingly plagued with drugs and crime, it struck me as the most realistic extrapolation of what the future 20 years out might look like.

The Final Cut keeps all of the atmosphere of the original theatrical release. Possibly it even goes longer on it, telling the story at a slower pace than I seem to remember from 34 years ago. I didn't re-watch the original back-to-back with this version so I can't say for sure.

How that Vision Looks Today

Watching it today, of course, the movies' vision of the future is laughably quaint. "Los Angeles - November 2019" reads the subtitle over the opening scenes. That's now 3½ years ago, and we don't have flying cars, let alone interstellar space travel. Oh, and why is it constantly raining in Los Angeles? I've lived in LA. It gets, like, two rainfalls a year, and everyone loses their minds when it happens.

Here are several more things I chuckled about as terrible guesses from the 1980s of what 2019 would look like:

• Billboards for Pan Am airlines. Oops, they went bankrupt in 1991.


• At least the billboards for Coca-Cola aren't obsolete. Though the movie does predate the whole New Coke fiasco of 1985.


• The head of Tyrel Corp. is making a replicant that's "more human than human" but hasn't invented Lasik to get rid of his need for Coke bottle-bottom trifocal glasses? (Probs because Coke is an ad placement; see above. 🤣)


• Soundtrack by Vangelis.... Wow, there's a name— and a body of music— I haven't heard since about 1993!


• 37 years in the future and they imagine everyone still using crappy little picture-tube TVs?


• In the club scene everyone's smoking. Haha, we (California) fixed that futuristic problem in 1998!

Original Theatrical Release vs. The Final Cut

The main difference between the versions is that 2007's Final Cut tells a more cerebral story. In particular, it strongly implies that Deckard (Harrison Ford), the blade runner himself, is a replicant. A few key scenes that I think were not included in 1982's theatrical version show him doubting himself.

Of course, "Is he or isn't he?" is a hotly debated topic. I've read stories that Harrison Ford outright demanded to know, Is Deckard a replicant? to portray him accurately. The same stories indicate that Ridley Scott initially wanted the answer to be Yes but was pushed to No by the producers. The Final Cut changes the calculus.

In making the story more cerebral it seems to get more ponderous. I was surprised that there was basically no action until halfway through the movie's full run time. Again, I haven't re-watched the original so I can't say for sure, but I feel like the original had more action earlier on. Either way, The Final Cut is definitely a slow boiler. But at least it doesn't suffer the bloating problem of most director's cuts stretching toward 3 hours (or more). It clocks in at a trim 1 hour 57 minutes.

A few news organizations this week have picked up the story that smoking rates have dropped in the US. The source of the story is the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from 5/5/23. The MMWR is a fairly wonky weekly report. It sport no pretty charts or infographics. It's fully of stuffy, stilted language. The references it cites are research papers or abstracts that are even harder to read. But the MMWR can't be ignored because it's where important health news breaks. For example, it's where national awareness of AIDS started 40 years ago.

Alas the good news on smoking is not earth shattering. Rates are down only very slightly— and that's for smoking cigarettes. Use of e-cigarettes actually increased. And the "new" data reported are from 2021. Still, it's interesting to see what the picture of smoking in the US is. Here are Five Things:

1. Overall the use of any tobacco product (include e-cigs) is 18.7%. Use of lighted tobacco products (cigs, cigars, etc.) is 14.5%.


2. The breakdown by sex is startling. Tobacco use is far more prevalent among men than women. Use of any tobacco product is 24.1% for men, 13.6% for women. Lighted tobacco use is 18.2% of men, 11.1% of women.


3. Older adults seem more likely to smoke than younger adults... though some of that could be that the smoking age was increased to 21 by federal law a few years ago. And among seniors (age 65+) the rates are basically half those of middle-age adults.


4. Smoking tracks inversely with education level. Those with only a high school diploma or GED are 3-4x as likely to smoke as those with a post-graduate degree. (This is not at all surprising to me.)


5. Per a separate report linked in the MMWR that breaks out smoking rates by state California remains the second least smoky state in the US. Our rate of 11.2% is beaten only by Utah's 9%. Go Mormons! The smokiest state is West Virginia, at 25.2%. Note: these state level numbers are from 2018.

I've seen a few articles in my newsfeed today that cigarette smoking is down and marijuana use is up in the US... so much so that the latter now outnumbers the former. Rather than cite the articles here I figured I'd go the the source. The source is a Gallup publication, "Americans and the Future of Cigarettes, Marijuana, Alcohol" published 26 Aug 2022 from a poll conducted in July. I read that study and the more detailed breakouts it links to. (Yes, I just cited primary source documents to support my opinion online. That's how I roll!)

One Gallup survey question was, "Have you, yourself, smoked any cigarettes in the past week?" A record low of 11% answered yes. That's a big drop from 16% a year earlier and rates of 40%+ five decades ago.

Some news articles reporting this Gallup release cross reference it with another recent publication, "Global Smoking Report" from NiceRx, to show how smoking rates vary by state within the US. (It's not a primary source, per se, but it does disclose its methods and sources— which include the World Health Organization and Our World In Data.) This report finds that, globally, the smoking rate is 22.3%. Within the US it breaks down smoking rates by state. The smokiest state is West Virginia, with a smoking rate of nearly 24%. Kentucky is only a hair behind at #2. The least smoky state is Utah, at 7.9%. Gotta love the Mormon faith that abjures alcohol, tobacco, and even caffeine! The second least smoky state is California, with a smoker rate of 10%.

Back to the Gallup poll and the headline about pot use overtaking cigs. While cigarette smoking has dropped to 11%, the same survey found that 16% have used marijuana recently. And that's despite marijuana being not only illegal at the federal level but also classified as a Schedule I drug— nominally the most dangerous and addictive drugs, with a "high potential for abuse". 🙄 I'm not a marijuana advocate, but there's no medical evidence pot belongs in the same category as heroin. I mean, even fentanyl, about which there's been much wailing and gnashing of teeth the past several years for its highly addictive nature and mortal danger, is only a Schedule II drug (primary source document again).