The meanings of words are in constant flux.  I assume this is a common idea in linguistics, but I first encountered it in Edwin Newman's popular books on language from some years ago.

(Tip #1:  Referring to Edwin Newman makes you sound old.)

 A few years ago, a CBS news executive, describing how baffled he was by the changes in popular attitudes toward news, said "Send me a telegram so I can get it."  I think telegrams were still available at that time, but if you're questioning why you don't understand current tastes, the fact that you use the word "telegram" should be your first clue.

Of course, these things come and go.  I'm trying to figure out why we still refer to "dialing" a phone, when phones haven't had dials for years. (Same goes for TVs - "Don't touch that dial!")  Maybe it's phone calls themselves that are becoming archaic; everybody "texts" these days, don't they? Or maybe they tweet or squirt, I'm not sure.

We all know that using the word "record", as in the old vinyl discs, is a sign of your age (although I understand they're making a comeback).  However, have you considered the word "album", which many of us use in its place?  It's been a long time since I bought an entire collection of songs by one artist marketed as an album, since I've been buying music on iTunes for some years now.  I don't even play music that way anymore - it's all shuffled.  That usage of "album" may also be on its way out.

 And what about "column", as in "Have you read Frank Rich's latest column?"  Who besides old codgers reads newspapers anymore?  Yes, web pages have columns, but we don't talk about them that way.  Even referring to news stories that way may reveal your age, such as saying that something's been "in the papers".  I do think that paper itself is going to be with us for a while, so we're probably safe with other uses of the word.

For how much longer will we be using "film"?  It won't be long before movies aren't shot on film at all, and photo film is already a dinosaur.  Kodak stopped making film a few years ago, and Polaroid recently  stopped making theirs.

(Tip #2: Referring to Polaroid makes you sound old.  Doubly so if you mention Land.)

I'm not sure I know how to talk to young people anymore.  Maybe I should just shut up.

Before I moved to Portland and sold my car, I used to drive everywhere, just like most people do. Being the sort of person I am, I developed a bunch of pet peeves about driving. I don't remember many of them now, but one that leaps to mind is the Jersey Clump.
When I lived on the East Coast, it would always bother me when I was on a highway, and another car would catch up to me at a faster speed, and then pull in front of me and slow down. This happened a lot. Even worse, when I pulled around that car so that I could continue at the speed I was going, that car would speed up again.
It was as if the driver's goal was to stay as close to my car as possible. My Driver's Ed training taught me to keep as much distance between myself and other cars as possible, so this was incredibly frustrating.
Sometimes, a bunch of cars would get together and keep doing this to each other. The effect of their behavior was to draw other, innocent drivers into their group, because they would speed up and surround any car that tried to go faster than the group. I noticed that when this happened, most of the cars had New Jersey license plates; I began calling this phenomenon a Jersey Clump.

Now that I don't own a car, I've lost all my old pet peeves. Being the sort of person I am, I started casting about for new ones.
One that developed quickly has to do with the building I work in. I work on the 29th floor. The bank of elevators I use to get to work stops on floors 18-30. The 30th floor is a restaurant, and no one goes there early in the morning, so I effectively work on the top floor that our elevator bank serves.
When I arrive in the morning, no one else is ever waiting for the elevator. Invariably, three or four people (who mostly were standing around the lobby) enter the elevator foyer after I do, and of course, they all get off on lower floors. This is very suspicious. If there were always going to be three or four people on the elevator with me, the law of averages would dictate that some of them would enter the elevator foyer before me, and some after. But this never happens. They always enter after I do. A more paranoid person would conclude that this couldn't possibly happen by chance, and someone must be engineering this situation on purpose. Thankfully, I'm not that paranoid. However, I can't think of another explanation. I'm still trying to find one.

A less sinister pet peeve came about when I began walking to most places around Portland. It's a wonderful city to walk around, and a lot of people do it. The sidewalks are all built so that the curb at the intersection is curved - the corner isn't sharp. So, one edge of the sidewalk always juts out into the intersection more than the other.
No matter whether it's the left side or the right that juts out farther into the intersection, pedestrians congregate toward that side. The funny thing is that people will often walk to the inside edge of the crosswalk even if they have to walk back to the outside part to continue where they were going once they cross the street. It's hard to convey this without a picture, but what you end up with is people walking a few feet out of their way on both sides of the street because they think they're getting farther into the intersection before crossing, even though it costs them steps in the long run.
If they thought about what they were doing, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't do it. This makes it perfect fodder for one of my pet peeves.

The frustrating thing is that I have to work a lot harder to find pet peeves, since I don't drive anymore, and the ones I'm developing are much lamer than when I was driving.
Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. I've never encountered an Oregon Clump.

Well, I've bought my new computer for this year.
I've been buying them at about the rate of one per year, even though I don't actually need a new one that often. It's a weakness I've come to terms with.
Early last year, I found myself needing to carry something with me that could run Windows. I had an Apple Powerbook, but it was from before the change to Intel chips, and it ran Windows very poorly. I wanted to get another Mac for this purpose, because 90% of the time I'd rather use OS X. The new MacBooks had just come out; I bought one, but it had some problems, and I returned it. Besides, I really wanted something lighter than the MacBook.
Still needing to carry something that could run Windows, and wanting something small and light, I got a very tiny Sony PC with a 5" screen. It did what I needed, but it was difficult getting used to such a small screen.
After about a year of using that, I was still dissatisfied. Another need I had was to take notes at meetings, and I couldn't find an external keyboard for the Sony that was small enough to carry around, and worked well enough. After trying several external keyboards, I realized I really wanted a different laptop.
Enter the MacBook Air. This was around April of this year, and the Air had been out for a few months, so I was satisfied that the early kinks should mostly be worked out. I did some research and looked at one in the store - it would do just what I needed, and was phenomenally light, so I got one.

In researching the Air, though, I ran across a phenomenon I'd seen before, but never to this degree: a lot of people really hate this computer. Vehemently. As if it were an ex-lover.
From what I've seen on web forums, this vitriol usually takes one of several forms.
One type is the person who needs an optical drive and several USB ports with them all the time (I can't imagine what they're carrying around), and judges the machine based on its shortcomings in meeting his needs. We all do that, of course, but most of us don't go around the internet insisting that everyone else should refuse to purchase this machine that doesn't fit our own needs.
Another is the type who claims that the only reason someone would buy a Mac is to "look cool". These people usually talk a lot about coffee shops, and seem to believe that Mac users spend all their time there. They tend to make this argument against any Apple product, but the Air seems to bring out the worst in them. Their argument is baloney, of course. I don't doubt there are some people who buy Apple products because they think it enhances their status, but I'm not one of them. I spend my whole day at work fighting with a Windows PC, and the last thing I want to do when I get home is face the same problems. I enjoy the ease of use and reliability, and status doesn't enter into it at all.
Then there's the Spec-Counter. These people think that the only value in a computer is in the sum of its hardware specs, and nothing else. The lightness, ease of use and reliability I mentioned before don't enter into the equation for them, and they can't begin to understand why someone would buy an Air, given so many cheaper Windows computers with more impressive specs on paper.

So, all of these people are trolling the web, actively trying to prevent others from buying the MacBook Air. Why? To what end?

Anyway, I got one, and I couldn't be happier with it. It's light enough to carry everywhere, I can use my cell phone as a modem for it, and if I want more ports, I can hook it up to a hub at home. It has a full size screen and keyboard - I was getting tired of squinting at that 5" screen. It syncs with my other Macs and my iPod, so I only have to enter things like calendar events once.

That's my computer story for this year. I can't think of why I would want a different computer next year, but nevertheless, I'll probably have another boring story about a new computer by then.

I've posted here a few times about climate change, but I don't think I've ever really explained what convinced me that we need to take action.
Most people are now coming around to that view by a kind of mass culture osmosis, but it kicked into high gear for me a couple of years ago, when Al Gore came to town.

Like everyone, I'd been aware that climate change was expected to become a problem, but I hadn't really internalized the fact that it's a problem right now.
(I'm going to mostly use the term "climate change" for the phenomenon, because I think it does a better job of conveying why it's a problem. I've heard differing things about which political side prefers which term, so please understand that I don't intend for either term to carry a political meaning.)
Anyway, I was working the Bus Project table at the line to get in to Mr. Gore's presentation, and once it was about to start, we went in to see it. It was funny and terrifying at the same time. The one thing that I really took away from there was the graph showing the correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration. They march in lockstep with each other for eons, and then CO2 goes off the scale in the last few decades. It's hard to look at that graph and not be afraid that temperatures may rise quite a bit.

There are people who will argue that none of this means the Earth is warming. They make various assumptions to get from here to there, but their basic argument seems to be, "You aren't 100% certain that the rise in CO2 will cause warming, therefore it won't."
Looking at that graph gives me an idea which way to bet, though.
The best argument I've seen that this may not occur is in Skeptic magazine, where there's an article arguing that the uncertainties about the future direction of temperature are greater than the certainties, leading to the conclusion that we can't reliably predict what's going to happen. In the same issue, though, there's a very convincing point-by-point breakdown of why we should expect warming to happen.

The main reason I expect it to occur, sooner and to a greater degree than is predicted, doesn't really have anything to do with those arguments. It has to do with the news.
It certainly seems that warming is happening right now. Every so often, there's an article about another ice shelf breaking off, or another species abandoning its habitat because of the change, or how the permafrost is melting.
Think about that: a region that people saw fit to name "permafrost", presumably because no one could remember a time when it wasn't frozen, is melting. I take that as a piece of evidence.

There's something else about those news stories, though. The scientists who are interviewed are always shocked by how quickly the event happened. There's always a statement about how this wasn't expected for another 20 years, or something similar.
This leads me to believe that one of two things is true. Either the scientists aren't adjusting their predictions by the increased rate of warming, in which case they're pretty incompetent, and warming is happening quicker that they're predicting. Or, they are adjusting their predictions for the acceleration in warming, and it's still happening even faster.
Neither of those possibilities is pleasant.

So, even though it isn't 100% certain that our spewing of CO2 is causing all this, I think there's enough reason to bet on it. And since we have the ability to cut our carbon footprint, we should do it.
Yes, it will mean that everyone can't drive SUVs anymore, and maybe that we can't travel quite as much, and will have to use more local resources.
However, we spent a long part of our history behaving that way, and I don't see why we can't make a few adjustments to go part of the way back to that. It's a matter of managing people's desires and expectations. Maybe the sort of thing a leader would do. Maybe Obama will be the guy to do it.

I didn't bother watching the Tony Awards last night. I thought about it, but I watch very little TV anymore, and when I saw the show wasn't in high definition, I passed it by.
That was a mistake.

My taste in musicals has evolved gradually, to the point where some shows that I didn't particularly like when I was younger are my favorites now. Gypsy is one of those. I think the first time I saw it was the movie with Rosalind Russell, when I was about 10 years old. I didn't think much of it, as you would expect from a child of that age. A few years later, when I was 12 or 13, I saw it on Broadway with Angela Lansbury. Ms. Lansbury may be many things, but Mama Rose she's not. It didn't make much of an impression on me.

Fast forward twenty years. I'd seen the movie a few more times, but I still wasn't in love with it. As I found out eventually, some of the important numbers were excised from the movie, like "Together", and Rosalind Russell isn't really a singer, which hurts the movie. Natalie Wood was priceless, though, as always.
Around that time, a new production was done for television, with Bette Midler as Rose and Peter Riegert as Herbie. This is a role Midler was born to play, and seeing this version rekindled interest in the show for me. I finally realized how powerful the story is, how good the music is, and how meaty the acting roles are for those who can fill them.

By now, it seems that every female Broadway star eventually plays Mama Rose. Bernadette Peters did it a few years ago. I think the world of Ms. Peters, but it's hard for me to see her as Rose, although she got some very good reviews.
And now comes Patti LuPone. She's a legitimate Broadway legend, having made her name in the original production of Evita. Had she never done anything else of note, she would have been long remembered for that. But she's been in the trenches all these years, wowing them every night in shows like Anything Goes and Sweeney Todd.
She's always been excellent at playing strong characters, like Eva Peron, and when I heard that she'd be starring in Gypsy, I was intrigued. I just forgot that there would certainly be a performance from the show in last night's Tony Awards. Which there was.

Luckily, some enterprising soul has uploaded the performance to YouTube, for as long as it lasts there. If you're not familiar with the show, this scene takes place at a train station, where Rose's youngest daughter, the star of their failing vaudeville show, has just left the act. Rose, the pathological stage mother, now has only her older daughter, Louise, and her boyfriend Herbie. Herbie has just suggested that they all leave show business and settle down as the scene begins.