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Joey Green’s Incredible Country Store: Potions, Notions, and Elixirs of the Past and How to Make Them Today

By Joey Green (Rodale, 356 pages)
I was trawling the local Barnes & Noble seeking out the latest personal finance tome when the look of this book attracted me from across the store. For those of a certain age, cast your minds back to those old Nancy Drew mysteries – you know, hardback and instead of a dust jacket the image shines through from beneath a glossy finish. (The book is currently available as a paperback – you get the same great graphics, but not the shiny hardback experience.)

And yes, I know you can’t judge a book by its cover – in this case literally -- but I figured anything with such a cool, yet nostalgic, vibe deserved a place on my bookcase.

This book doesn’t just deserve space on the book shelf, it deserves a place of honor.

First many of us were going to commit suicide because there wasn’t going to be enough opportunity to advance in our careers, and now another set of experts is predicting the Boomer generation is going to cause the end of the real estate market as we know it.

Yep, by aging and selling our homes we’re going to irreparably tear the space-time continuum of real estate appreciation and burst the bubble in such a way as to make the current situation seem like the tiniest soap bubble popping.

Oh, please. This is just another example of statisticians looking at numbers in a vacuum and not at realities of the Baby Boomer Generation.

Those wacky guys at The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia are back on patrol to keep Saudi citizens safe from love – they are making sure that sweethearts find it impossible to proclaim their feelings with a red, red rose.

Is it just me or does this seem, um, extreme?

I do my best to remain open minded about cultural differences, but expressions of love – innocent and otherwise – are just that. What would the great poets of all faiths and creeds over the ages – including some of the Middle East’s own -- write about if the subject of love was off limits?

So red roses are banned. No word yet on chocolate – but maybe even the religious police know there are limits.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Another couple of 20-somethings (Eva Mendes and Kirsten Dunst, reportedly) have checked themselves into rehab; and the most famous troubled 20-something of our age is out of the psyche ward and paralyzing traffic in the country’s 2nd largest city.

Hey, when our generation was young we drank too much (something young people have always done) and, unlike previous generations, a majority of us did drugs: pot, acid, meth, heroin, cocaine – you name it. If any generation should understand how their kids slipped off the rails from using recreationally to a problem, it should be us.

Well, where the hell are we?

Heath Ledger, a very talented actor, dies from an accidental overdose after mixing prescription meds (don’t get me started on the masseuse – how stupid are celebs and the people who serve them – she calls MARY KATE OLSEN! The only person I can think of who would be worse to call is Britney herself.) Are Ledger’s parents so off the radar they don’t know what’s happening with their son? Yeah, they’re on the other side of the world, but they can’t pick up the phone and call the mother of their grandchild to see what’s really going on?

Baby Boomers like to remember the Woodstock moments, but we have to channel the bad times of the psychedelic 60s too, and use that experience to help our kids’ generation. We can’t sit back and pretend we don’t know about this stuff. It takes a village, man. We have to step up, whether it’s our kid or just someone who could be our kid. Image source.