Archives for May 2025

Boomers to the Rescue

May 25, 2025 By admin

Guess what? We can solve the housing crisis. Seriously. Millions of single-family homes (and boomers own most of them) are underused and on spacious lots. If they were retrofitted they could be converted into “roommate houses” and accommodate backyard cottages.

A developer in Dallas converted his 2,400 square foot home into four studio apartments, each with an outside entrance. Each has connecting doors to the rest of the house that remain unused. He didn’t do it for the income. His purpose was to allow him to claim he lives in a single-family home and is in accordance with local zoning. He calls it a suburban retrofit.

America needs between four and eight million more homes. Meeting that need by building new homes and apartment complexes is too slow and ponderous. But we have 145 million homes that already exist and two-thirds of them are single-family. The loophole then, is to allow the single-family homes to become multifamily.

It’s not clear how many of these single-family homes are owned and occupied by baby boomers, but if they started renting out their empty rooms – voila – big problem solved. Many boomers are already living with one or more of their offspring who are unable to buy homes of their own. How much difference would it make to take in boarders the way people did post-depression?

I’m looking at you baby boomer living in 3,000 sf 4-bedroom house. Why not take in one or more renters? The space is going unused and the extra income can go a long way to reducing your property tax burden. Co-habitation a little to crowded for you? At least consider an accessory dwelling unit out back. More and more communities are altering zoning to accommodate this trend.

Boomers have often been tagged with the bad rap of being selfish, but if we opened up our homes to renters, it might prove to everyone that we can be part of the solution rather than the problem. Just saying.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Para-Crustaceans

May 25, 2025 By admin

There was a creek behind our house. Looking back, it was more of a drainage ditch that has since been covered in cement and turned into a culvert. But for us, it was a natural wonder. This was not a group of kids who got to visit Yellowstone or Glacier National Park each summer! It was a place to ice skate and play a very linear form of ice hockey in the winter, a place to build tree forts along the banks, and a place to dream of starting adventures that would lead to faraway places.

In that creek lived many wonderful creatures. Among them, and probably largely limited to only these, were snakes and crabs. I really don’t know if they were officially crabs, but they had pincers, and that’s what we called them. A lot of people near the Texas Gulf Coast where I live now eat creatures that look a lot like these did. This is probably not only a better use for them than described below but may, in fact, even be more humane.

About the same time that we were in the early stages of experimenting with launching ourselves off structures in attempts to parachute to the earth, we were also using the handkerchiefs our moms forced us to carry in our pockets as parachutes for smaller, non-human items, like toy lead soldiers we made in our basements. In retrospect, this creative work with lead may explain some of our behavior. These parachutes were very simple to construct. The handkerchief would have light strings tied to each corner, and then the lead toy soldier would be fastened to the free end of each of the four strings. The strings would be wrapped loosely around the toy and the handkerchief, and the whole thing would be thrown high in the air or dropped from a tree. With practice, these worked pretty well.

It occurred to us that with slightly larger pieces of cloth, like those cut from an old sheet, we could conduct transitional experiments between the proven results already obtained with the toy soldiers and our dreams of parachuting ourselves—much like NASA would eventually use chimps in the space program. Sadly, there were no chimps living by the creek behind our homes, but it seemed to us that the small crabs we were pulling out of the creek were just the right size.

Surprisingly, it’s not that easy tying four strings around an unwilling crab without getting pinched, and the snapping of the crab on your fingers severely limits the quality of the toss. While the personal sacrifices were great, there were some limited technical successes in that, on the very best combinations of throws and perfect wrapping of the strings around the cloth, some crabs would fall back to the ground noticeably slower than others.

After the experiments, the crabs were all released back into the creek, where the stories of their bravery and historical significance are probably still repeated by their descendants, living much less exciting lives under the cement culvert covering their creek.

Bob Marksteiner was born in Chicago and grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois

The Difference Between Men and Women

May 25, 2025 By admin

MATURITY: Women mature much faster than men. Most 17-year old females can function as adults. Most 17-year old males are still trading baseball cards and giving each other wedgies after gym class. This is why high school romances rarely work out.

HANDWRITING: To their credit, men do not decorate their penmanship. They just chicken scratch. Women use scented, colored stationary and they dot their “i’s” with circles and hearts. Women use ridiculously large loops in their “p’s” and “g’s”. It is a royal pain to read a note from a woman. Even when she’s dumping you, she’ll put a smiley face at the end of the note.

BATHROOMS: A man has six items in his bathroom–a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of Dial soap, and a towel from a Holiday Inn. The average number of items in the typical woman’s bathroom is 437. A man would not be able to identify most of these items.

REST ROOMS: Men use rest rooms for purely biological reasons. Women use rest rooms as social lounges. Men in a rest room will never speak a word to each other. Never in the history of the world has a man excused himself from a restaurant table by saying, “Hey Tom, I was just about to take a leak. Do you want to join me?

CHILDREN: A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and soccer games and romances and best friends and favorite foods and secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

SEX: Women prefer 30-40 minutes of foreplay. Men prefer 30-40 seconds of foreplay. Men consider driving back to her place as part of the foreplay. Women like to have sex when they’re in the mood. Men like to have sex when they’re in the room.

LAUNDRY: Women do laundry every couple of days. A man will wear every article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants , before he will do his laundry. When he is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweat shirt inside out, rent a U-Haul, and take his mountain of clothes to the Laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the Laundromat. This is a myth perpetuated by reruns of old episodes of “Love, American Style.”

THE TELEPHONE: Men see the telephone as a communication tool. They use the telephone to send short messages to other people. A woman can visit her girlfriend for two weeks, and upon returning home, she will call the same friend and they will talk for three hours.

NICKNAMES: If Laura, Suzanne, Debra and Rose go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Suzanne, Debra and Rose. If Mike, Charlie, Bob and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla, Peanut-Head and Stinky.

ARGUMENTS: A woman has the last word in any argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

(From the Best of BoomSpeak, 2014)

Jack Goldenberg is a prolific Copywriter, innovative Creative Director and consummate, strategic marketer. Read his blog at 10 minutes of brilliance. With all he’s done, he still believes his best efforts are ahead of him.

Cereal Killers

May 11, 2025 By admin

cereal boxes I’m not feeling sorry for Kelloggs or General Mills, but cereal sales have fallen off sharply. Apparently baby boomers who grew up eating cereal for breakfast and snacking cannot make up for millennials who rarely go in for the milky crunch.

We had Rice Crispies, Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, Raisin Bran, Wheaties, Puffed Rice, Sugar Pops, and loads of other brands I can no longer remember. We ate them with milk and if they were covered with sugar, we ate them as snacks.

According to recent surveys, millennials forego the cereal habit because “it’s too much work.” Read that again. Too much work. You have to clean up the bowl and spoon afterward. Almost 40% of those surveyed gave that as the number one reason they prefer the convenience of protein bars or fast-food biscuits. I’ll grant you that some of the cereals we ate back then were just slick sugar delivery systems, but as we got older we turned to Wheat Chex, Rice Chex and other somewhat healthier alternatives. Then we added fresh fruits as well, all in the name of eating smarter.

Cereal makers have not given up on trying to attract millennials and the inducement of healthier offerings is still being used as a lure. Kellogg has come out with a variation that has quinoa in it. Can Kale Bran be far behind?

If it’s too much trouble to get out a bowl, spoon and milk, can we count on these people when we’re no longer able to feed ourselves? Are they going to put us on protein IV drips for breakfast? That may be the same way they get their morning nutrients, but for folks who grew up listening to their Rice Crispies making snap, crackle and pop noises it’s going to be a real downer.

Convenience is a great selling point for just about anything. Internet access, cruise control, electronic bill paying, ATMs, and more have made our lives easier and more pleasurable. But the pleasure of cold milk hitting a bowl of crunchy grains and scarfing it all up while the cereal is still crunchy – that may be an indulgence that future generations (thinking about the Matrix here) never get to experience.

Sugar Pops are Tops!

(This is a Best of BoomSpeak post from some time around 2016)

TGIF Now IFIF

May 11, 2025 By admin

TGIF I miss Fridays.

More specifically, I miss that Thank God It’s Friday feeling one has when one is slogging along in a Monday through Friday job.

When I first started working at my last job, I was expected to show up on Saturday mornings because the office was open until noon. “Showing the flag…” is a concept I never bought into. Just because the boss was in the office didn’t make the employees feel any more valuable or hate working on Saturday any less.

I always hated that, so eventually I convinced the owners that having the office open on Saturday morning with a skeleton staff to take care of three or four customers wasn’t really necessary. Of course what I really meant was: I HATE having to come to work on Saturday morning.

We had a strong online presence so 90% of customer service issues could be accomplished by visiting the newspaper website.

So those of us who showed up on Saturday just screwed around. Some tried to “save work” from Monday through Friday so do on Saturday to make the time go more quickly.

They were rare.

Of course we had a newsroom that showed up at various hours on Saturday to do their thing for the Sunday newspaper, and there was a production schedule that included Saturday work.

But there’s nothing like that Thank God It’s Friday feeling when it means Saturday and Sunday are available for just screwing around.

I like being retired because every day is available for screwing around.

But sometimes I Forget It’s Friday.

Mark Van Patten originally wrote this for his blog Going Like Sixty circa 2008 and we republished it on BoomSpeak. We just liked it so much we’re running it again in hopes that we can get him to contribute more for us. Oh, and yeah, he has been married to the same woman since 1968.

Love Is…

May 11, 2025 By admin

Love, according to the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, is a living, breathing thing, but for the life of me, I can never remember her name.

No matter how many times we meet, Love’s name just goes in one ear and out the other. She keeps coming around, though, always unannounced, and when she does, I stare, mute, a vague recognition in my eye, her name on the tip of my tongue, escaping me, only to arrive with the force of a hurricane after she has gone.

Perhaps, I think, if I could meet Love in a quieter place, where the din of society’s messages is hushed, I would see her and recall her name with ease, but society’s messages are everywhere there are people, even by the fireplace in the cozy living room on a snowy day, my adult daughter curled up on the couch, deep in a book.

Perhaps it would help if I used a mnemonic device. I might think of something that rhymes with Love. Or repeat the name three times. Maybe I could associate it with a color. But how would that work, I wonder. Love never looks the same way twice. What will prompt my memory in the absence of a constant?

I’ve finished my bowl of Mexican wedding soup. My son-in-law goes back for seconds. My daughter tells a joke about an architect, and my granddaughter delights in gumming and swallowing yet another meatball from the tray of her high-end highchair, and something within me stirs.

A moment later, I watch as my son-in-law takes a breath, purses his lips, and blows a cool breeze through my granddaughter’s downy hair, eliciting a squeal of delight.

And this time, I recognize her right away. “Oh, yes! Hello, Love,” I say. “It’s ever so nice to see you again!”

Tricia Bernard lives in Charlotte, NC