I haven’t done one of these in a while.  This will be more of a hodgepodge than usual⁠—I have a couple of items from this month and some odds and ends I found from last summer.  I guess we’ll start with those:

• I found one of these quarters in my pocket change.  I wonder how British tourists feel when they get one.  I’m pretty surprised the design was approved considering that the British are our allies now, or at least were as of 2015.  I guess we don’t really have allies anymore, just lackeys and overlords.

• It’s been quite a while since I wrote or even played any interactive fiction, but old habits die hard, I guess.  I walked past a van belonging to a police K-9 unit, and on the back of it was a bumper sticker reading “SEARCH DOG”.  My brain immediately replied, “The dog contains nothing of interest.”

• On another walk I passed some 14‑year‑old skateboarder boys.  One was saying, “I really need a haircut but I just don’t got time.”  I thought, “Same.”  Then he continued, “Also my hairdresser lives in the city and it takes hella long to get there.”  What kind of 14‑year‑old skateboarder boy has a “hairdresser”?

• I happened across an article that listed the modal age of different racial groups in the United States as of 2018 as determined by Pew Research.  Using Pew’s labels, the results were: “White”, 58; “Asian”, 29; “Black”, 27; “Hispanic”, 11; “Multiracial”, 3. 

• A more irksome article tried to redefine the boundaries between generations.  I mean, yes, of course these are arbitrary.  But still.  I think it’s pretty widely accepted that the oldest Boomers are those conceived immediately after the end of WWII, i.e., with a birth year of 1946.  Millennials are those who were children⁠—i.e., not adults, but not unborn⁠—as the fireworks went off for the arrival of the year 2000.  First birth year: 1982.  The first birth year of Generation X is not so well defined, but splitting the difference seems reasonable, and that gives us this:

  Boomers: 1946 to 1963
  Gen X: 1964 to 1981
  Millennials: 1982 to 1999

  That means “Generation Z” starts in 2000, and while some distance from the present moment will provide the perspective needed to settle upon a fitting end bracket, 2017 makes for some tidy math.

• I read an article in the Guardian about a mother in Sheffield whose brother was also the father of all six of her children.  The children knew this man as their uncle, but did not suspect that he was their father as well.  After all, the kids (born in 2005 and the years following) had been told by their mother what had happened to their dad: he’d died in the Second World War.

• I went to an Arco for the first time in ages, and the following message popped up on the gas pump screen:

  A $0.35 debit fee is
  added to this sale.
  > YES
  > NO

  “OK” vs. “CANCEL” would not have made me bat an eye.  But these options make it sound as though the gas pump is uncertain and is looking to me for confirmation.

• Down in Fullerton I saw a billboard so brazenly evil that it almost knocked me off the road:

  TEACHERS!
      Take a holiday from union dues!
          (then there was a URL about opting out)

  Some organization took out ad space to try to undermine the teachers’ union?  “Get that 2% put back in your paycheck for the low low price of kissing your 12% raise goodbye!”  That is some Grapes of Wrath shit right there.

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