Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
1,943 words
Smoking cigarettes
And writing something nasty on the wall.
You nasty boy!
— Stevie Wonder, “I Wish”
[C]ontinual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
I recently celebrated my 62nd birthday, if you can call successfully cooking chili con carne and drinking wine with it instead of beer a celebration. It set me to thinking about what has changed during my lifetime, since I first sniffed the air in north London in March of 1961, sharing my birthday with Prince Edward, Sharon Stone, Bix Beiderbecke, and Osama bin Laden. So, what has changed?
Technology, obviously. When I was a little boy, the family telephone was made of the famously unbreakable...