I got your "zoomer" right here, baby

[the_siobhan]

Sodastream is out. Turns out the factory is in the occupied territories. (Thanks to wild_iris for pointing this out.)

http://electronicintifada.net/content/sodastream-treats-us-slaves-says-palestinian-factory-worker/12441

I expect there are plenty of knockoff companies around, so if I decide I really want one I'll buy something off label.

Whether or not those companies use sweatshop labour is another matter. Is there anybody out there who keeps a list of ethical companies? Because I think that would be a much shorter list.


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Wig Experiment Day 2: So the skullcap thing is kinda weird. I took it out of the package expecting a dome - you know, like my head. Instead it's kind of sock-shaped. I guess so you can fill it with long hair. Anyway, getting it on was a bit of a gong show and involved lots of magical four letter incantations, but it does seem to be holding my hair in.

I am so shitty at being a girl I surprise even myself sometimes.


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I am on the Very! Last! Box! of photos to be scanned. This entire process would have been so much worse if I was archiving everything, but I'm basically only scanning anything that has family members in it. Pictures of her friends are being put in a separate box so I can give them to her best friend for distribution. There are also lots and lots of pictures from her travels. It turns out that Fiona was a really good photographer. I'm seriously considering get some of her photographs blown up and framed.

Come to think of it, I do remember Dee saying that one source of friction on their Europe trip was how long Fiona would dick around with every single shot, trying to get it just perfect. It really shows in the results.

Axel has also stumbled across a photo albums he had in storage that used to belong to his father. He looks exactly like his dad, in case you were ever wondering. Except he has more hair. (So much hair!)


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I have managed to get myself on a list somewhere of People Who Buy Magazines so I get tons of ads in the mail. Yesterday's mail included an envelope from a magazine called Zoomers.

"These new boomers are coloring outside the lines, zig-zaging and zoooooming toward a bright new horizon chock-full of possibilities for reinventing retirement and redefining what it means to be a mature adult in the new millennium."

Oh. For. Fucks. Sake.

Binned without mercy.

I've always thought of myself as Gen X, but I went and actually looked up the dates and the baby boom didn't end in Canada until 1965. So I am just on the tail end of it and at the point where the birth rate actually peaked. This image of Canadian birth patterns is kind of fascinating.

It's not reflective of actual population demographics of course because Canada is so reliant on immigration. (I'm not in that image myself, I wasn't born here.) But still pretty neat.


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Somebody on FB linked to a story about the North Pacific Gyre. The comment section was full of people talking about it will be fine because birds and fish will just evolve to eat plastic.

I have no fucking idea how to even start to address that level of scientific illiteracy.

Comments

[jo]

Re: Gen X - Contrary to what most seem to think, Gen Xers are the tail end of the boomers - those born between 1961-65. We get lumped in with the Boomers, but we didn't actually benefit from any of the boomer stuff because of the glut of boomers ahead of us. See this article, for example:

These days, Foot says Generation X has two meanings. There's the real Generation X -- those born in the early '60s -- and the marketing Generation X -- anyone born between 1960 and 1980.

"The marketing of Gen X has all the opposites of the popularized Gen X that was portrayed by Coupland," he says.

The real Gen-Xers were at the tail end of the boomers, just before the pill became commonplace and birth rates dropped dramatically. The Gen-Xers in many ways lived in the shadow of the rest of the boomers.

By the time they were ready to enter the workplace, it was already overcrowded with those born in the decade before them.

"They came into a world in the early '80s, where there was a deep recession in Canada when youth unemployment was at record-high levels, and it took them forever to get established," Foot says.

He says the generation that followed was much smaller in numbers and faced less adversity than the real Generation X -- though they, too, faced the recession of the early '90s.

While Gen-Xers are technically part of the baby boomers, their experience of work and finance has more in common with the generations that follow, Foot says.

[the_siobhan]

Interesting. So I wasn't wrong to ID as Gen X after all.

[the_axel]

If I understand the article you linked to correctly
1. There's a guy called David Foot who wrote a book that says Generation X is the tail end of the Baby Boom, and that's the proper definition.
2. Douglas Coupland, who wrote Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, used that cohort for his book.
3. Every other definition of Generation X is the fake, marketing definition.

Wikipedia, by contrast, says very different things:
1. The term "Generation X" was coined by Robert Capa in 1953 as a title for a photo-essay about young men and women growing up immediately after the Second World War.
2. Generation X is a 1965 book on British Mod culture.
3. Coupland got the term Generation X from Billy Idols band formed in 1976.
4. Couplands book is about Americans who reached adulthood in the late 1980s - so they would have been born in the 60s.
5. Coupland denied that Gen X existed. "This is going to sound heretical coming from me, but I don't think there is a Generation X. What I think a lot of people mistake for this thing that might be Generation X is just the acknowledgment that there exists some other group of people whatever, whoever they might be, younger than, say, Jane Fonda's baby boom."
6. Generation X has become the common term in academia, media, etc. for people born between 1961, 2, 3, 4 or 5 and 1981. For example:
a. http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122044
b. http://www.volunteeringinamerica.gov/about/glossary.cfm#Generation X

So you people born in the first half of the 60s are part-time Boomers and part-time Gen-Xers.

[the_siobhan]

You know it's people like you what cause unrest.

[jo]

I never use Wikipedia as a main source given that I know too many people who like to enter total BS into some entries and giggle like crazy people when, years later, the BS they entered is still there and has been expanded on. I used to have another paper that took the same position as Foot (who's an academic, not "some guy") but it doesn't seem to be online anymore. So yes, for me, Gen X is the 1960-66 gang.

[the_axel]

The point with Wikipedia is that if the article is properly sourced it has the external references that allow a reader to validate its claims. The Gen-X articles have that.

As far as the English language goes, an academic is still just some guy. Everybody is just some guy. A words definition is only ever the consensus opinion of its meaning at a given time.

So, if you don't like Wikipedia, here's what the four major English dictionaries - Oxford, Collins, Merriam-Webster and American Heritage - say. None of them include a definition of early 60's, so using that definition is going to confuse most people you talk to. It's true that there doesn't seem to be a consensus as to exactly when it started and finished, but it definitely includes the period '65 - '75.

Oxford Dictionaries free definition:
the generation born after that of the baby boomers (roughly from the early 1960s to mid 1970s), typically perceived to be disaffected and directionless

Merriam-Webster
the group of people in the U.S. who were born during the late 1960s and the 1970s

American Heritage Dictionary
The generation following the post-World War II baby boom, especially people born in the United States and Canada from the early 1960s to the late 1970s.

Collins English Dictionary
members of the generation of people born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s who are highly educated and underemployed, reject consumer culture, and have little hope for the future

[cincinnatus_c]

Know who came up with "Zoomers"? Moses Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzznaimer!

We often listen to the classical station at the cottage, which is now part of Moses's Zoomer empire, since we don't get much else there. On their news blurbs, every time they refer to someone of whatever age Zoomers are supposed to be, they call them Zoomers. Also, periodically through the day there is Libby Znaimer with the Zoomer Report, wherein she tells you about some stupid shit she read on the internet about what you should eat to live longer or whatever.

I'm pretty sure we will evolve robot birds and fish to eat the plastic.

[the_siobhan]

I shouldn't be surprised.

Soda Stream is crap anyway.

[erik]

For under $100USD I built a carbonator with parts mostly from the hardware store that uses a standard CO2 tank and can carbonate anything. The gas use by it is on the order of pennies per liter of soda.

[greylock]

I don't know what's stupider:
Fish evolving to eat plastic in the near term OR the copywriting on Zoomers.

[the_siobhan]

The plastic thing upsets me more because those people vote for politicians who make decisions based on popular perception instead of on science. The whole Zoomers nonsense affects nothing, except maybe the decision to buy a crappy magazine.