I don't spend money on anything but good drinks. Everybody else should spend all their money on the pig on the right. (MY STORE!)

Oh, they're still a hot market, Alan. Very hot. Just not necessarily in the way that they might like to be. Have you noticed the monstrous surge in things like powered jar openers and self-dumping wheelbarrows in the last few years? These are products that literally would not exist were it not for the aging of the richest generation in history.

I saw the oddest snow shovel at Canadian Tire today. With a cord near the working end that allows you to lift and dump the load in one easy move. I went for a grain shovel that also doubles as a sledge in a pinch.

Diet <i>Pepsi</i> is the one shooting all its retro-hair / van / blue jean ads in a one-block radius of King and Bay. Diet Coke doesn't feel the need to advertise, apparently.

Alan, the low tech shovel you describe may be like ours. Big aluminum scoop, available year round at the farm supply store, usually used for scooping horse sh!t. It is snowing this morning here in lower Eastlakia, just a little.

That's a stable shovel ... They're not just for poo any more!

Remarkable how much poo horses and cows produce.

I have a big scoop too. You shuld have asked me Alan, when I move my driveway is about 30 feet long, the one at our current and soon to be vacated one is over 140 hence the old geezer scoop-like device.

I personally like well done advertising the is witty and well acted. I despise boomer ads that yack on about boring crap that they buy that makes their lazy self important lives easier... ugh. 30 something was such a mind numbing show full of whiny sucks..double ugh

Its funny, when I am around people who act like the stereotypical boomer who can only discuss their RRSP or their kids marks, I tend to look at my wife and say "slid the cheese right in.." which is our cue in secret language for "sean is annoyed at the mindless boomer people".. its from some commercial i constantly refer to from the early 90s.. can you remember the product?

I guess what I'd say is distinctive about my relationships with Boomers over the years is how much my conversations with them have been about something other than what we’re talking about specifically. What I mean is, a lot of my conversations with Boomers have involved what I would call overzealous theorising. So these relationships seem to have had a lot to do with how I fit (or didn’t fit) into whatever paradigm they were thinking about at the time (be it Marxism, environmentalism, neo-liberalism or even demographic trends themselves). It might be that that ideological quality is what makes them easier to cater to as a ‘market’. I’ve met very few Boomers who did without an ideology.

"I’ve met very few Boomers who did without an ideology."

And now that they are aging, feeling mortality sniping at their heels, thise that did not have a lifetime affair with any particular ideology are begging for one now by joining every public committee, club, group they can. I personally believe community policing was invented to give boomers something to do once a month.

My friend the Rock Star is turning into a boomer. It's very sad.

Hey gr, you miss me?;)

Not snowing here in Indiana yet, it's cold enough for it to(at night), but for some strange reason I'm still wearing walking shorts. I'd wear Bermuda shorts, but they don't sell them anymore.

Boomers. You guys should try being a Tweener. We get crapped on from above by you Boomers and knee capped by the Gen Whatevers below. And never were we catered to(the world is so cruel). Welcome to Economic and Cultural Irrelevance, here's your comlpimentary cap, name tag, decoder ring, membership card, and the arcade is down the hall and to the right(just follow the sound of the 80s music).

Here's an odd thing I remember hearing a few years ago: the shift lays in that Boomers spoil their kidlets. Used to be kidlets didn't have large sums of cash to spend. Now they do. So now instead of one gaussian distrubution of advertising dollars(with a monoculture to pitch to) we have something that looks like two gaussians at poles(the Gen Whatevers(iToys and cell phone commercials featuring rap artists you've never heard of) and the Boomers (car commercials featuring the BasementJaxx and Cialis commercials)). And we Tweeners are still given the shaft. 'taint fair I tell you.

'course I missed you ry, you have a healthy sense of humor.
Not such a good weekend for the colts.

I've never been entirely clear on the birth years of these groups (Boomers, Tweeners, Gen-X-Y-Z, etc) ... I don't particularly identify with any of them ...

I think it has a lot to do with the lps you bought in 1977 and how old you were when you bought them. I bought The Stranglers, The Sex Pistols and The Jam so I am Gen X. That and my check shirt collection and the stickers in my 1980s passport.

In 1977, I had yet to hit kindergarten and my LPs, such as they were, were all of the <i>Winnie-the-Pooh</i> variety with accompanying illustrated storybooks.

Gen Y.

From WikiP

Silent Generation 1925–1945
Baby Boomers 1946–1964
Beat Generation 1948–1962
Generation Jones 1954–1962
Consciousness Revolution 1964–1984
Baby Busters 1958–1968
Generation X 1963–1978
MTV Generation 1975–1984
Culture Wars 1980s–present
Boomerang Generation 1979–1999
Generation Y 1988–1999
Internet Generation 1977–1986
New Silent Generation 2000–2020

Cool, Consciousness Revolution am I. I never did get the Gen X, slacker deal. Bunch of lazy bastards. LOL

I was in Grade 3 in 77, so the Stranglers would have raised some eyebrows in my house.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is sure to be watching the Boomers shrivel and die. If I ever have a life-threatening accident I shall cling to that expectation with the last breath in my body.

Dangitall I like being GEN X! Yes, I am a slovenly slacker, and what of it!! Gordo, are you 36 or 37, something like that?

I don't know about '77, but my Fonzie Favorites lp dates to '76.

37 going on 10, baby! Just ask Bridget. ;-)

See, even in Wiki we Tweeners get no respect. I was three in '77. Al and I have some cultural touchstones in common but you can't really say we are of one generation. I can say the same with Gen Whatevers(like The Wife(1979) who doesn't remember The Clash or The Alarm at all and to whom the Muppet Show was syndicated re-runs, the poor thing.)).
Hence, I'm a Tweener(I say that we occupy 1972-1978). Tweeners want to be accepted by either the Gen Whatevers or the Gen Xrs, we're the middle children who don't fit in with our older brother's crowd nor do we fit in with our younger brothers friends.
You guys got stuck with me. Ain't you wondering who you wronged to deserve that?

ACk! Make him stop, AL. Herr Flea is scaring me. Flea, dude, what did the Boomers do to you that puts such glee into watching them die? Or should I be afraid of his answer?

When Douglas Coupland wrote Generation X, he seemed to be talking about himself and people like himself (he was born in 1961). The boomers he described were born between 1940 and 1955 (here’s an interview: http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-1209-6683/life_society/generation_x/clip2). They got the best jobs in the 1970s and then they kept them. These days, they're beginning to retire. There seems to have been some drift though over the years with these definitions. Now, every time I open the Globe they've printed a story that describes boomers as the generation born between 1946 and 1966, which would mean Coupland himself was not GenX, and would make Alan here a boomer. According to this version everyone born after 1966 is GenX.

The Coupland book makes an interesting point. As usual though it’s been taken too far. I think the splintered sub groups that are only four or so years long are largely marketing ploys inflicted on us by boomers themselves (dammit!) I mean, how different can these people really be? We're not talking about huge changes in opportunities or world view, we're talking about minor differences and knowledge of some band's music, which isn't really enough for me to say that we're discussing a totally distinct generation. But maybe that's just my impression. If you ask me, which you probably won't, North American culture hasn't changed much in the last twenty or so years. Economically, there are still a disproportionate number of GenXers and younger who are waiters (or something equally soul-sucking) and there are still a disproportionate number of boomers in management (In academe, for example, you have people retiring who were hired on with BAs as full professors. Now you need a PhD, teaching experience, publications, and mucho great references to qualify as a sessional). It’s essentially an old fashioned class difference having to do with one’s relationship to power and money that is based not on your parents, or your origins, but your date of birth.

I take the Gen X hype from the cover article in Time magazine about 1990 that talked about the slacker generation being in its twenties, travelling pointlessly and staying in school too long due to a lack of jobs. This certainly matched me and my friends in Halifax, which may have had a shift in the years admittedly but, in addition to the Halifax scene being an apex of slackerdom, it was particularly affected by the economics of the times accentuating the pointlessness at the time of trying to get ahead. That being said, most of my pals from that point are now professionals but it was late coming. I think that is a better definition that a sliding one that says if you re in your twenties and not getting ahead it means you are Gen X.

I think having a different term every 4 years is silliness really. Generations are in my mind 25 years however the descriptions that define people overlap so its really hard to nail down.

To me, from the psychology of the workforce crud I have been forcefed, the term Gen X is valid as it is the post-boomer generation. They were hand fed money and freedom from parents who rebelled against the structured society of the previous generations then didn't know what to do with themselves when on their own. In the end, we rule the world but we are grumpy about it.

Gen Xers want interesting work and good pay and benefits and to be left alone to do their work.. thats me.

Boomers, tried to make change and failed miserably and now crave attention and reward for simply existing. Bah.

Boomers want recognition and constant petting and fawning.. ick.

When I graduated university in '88, Aislin published a cartoon in the Montreal Gazette where a father asked his son what his job prospects were like and the son replied "Great, dad, in 2000."

No matter how you slice it, I refuse to be categorized as a Boomer.

This is what Coupland says about boomers in 1991 (?):

“Now, Martin, like most embittered ex-hippies, is a yuppie, and I have no idea how you’re supposed to relate to those people. And before you start getting shrill and saying yuppies don’t exist, let’s just face facts: they do. Dickoids like Martin who snap like wolverines on speed when they can’t have a restaurant’s window seat in the nonsmoking section with cloth napkins. Androids who never get jokes and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence, like and underfed Chihuahua baring its teeny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in or like a glass of milk sloshed on top of the violet filaments of a bug barbecue: a weird abuse of nature. Yuppies never gamble, they calculate. They have no aura: ever been to a yuppie party? It’s like being in an empty room: empty hologram people walking around peeking at themselves in mirrors and surreptitiously misting their tonsils with Binaca spray, just in case they have to kiss another ghost like themselves. There’s just nothing there.”
Obviously, some of this resentment is misplaced. It's true, these people were the beneficiaries of particularly generous hiring policies, but they didn’t initiate them. And hiring doesn't have to be a zero sum game, so things probably could have gone differently, they just didn't. I think if I were to blame anyone or anything it would be the fashion of downsizing. I think people got greedy and they discovered that firing employees could make them more money than actually building up their companies.

First, there is nothing wrong with a non-discriminatory grudge against an ill defined group. You can't move me on that. But the real claim against the boomer being made is not economic, it is the tediousness. Now, that was culturally more important 15-20 years ago when you could not hear current music on the radio for all the frigging greatest hits of the 50s, 60s and 70s so I do not know how it plays out today. But don't undersell resentment. I get a lot of mileage out of resentment.

Has anyone ever thought that even resentment qualifies as attention to the Boomers?

You have a point there, Gordo.

Economics may not be what interests Alan, but it was a big part of what interested Coupland, he has one of his characters say to Martin the boomer: "Do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed wire fence around the rest. You really make me sick."

Ahem, OK, back to what I said: I like being Gen X. That way nobody will ever think I was a hippie or a boomer nor useless like the Paris Hilton Generation. I can remain, perhaps, Tragically Hip, oh yes.....

Hey, SayNay. It's old home week!

In other news, I hate popular culture.

It was a mirage.

I'm not saying that every four years should be different. But the Tweeners does/should cover that small a window. Culture and attitude, style and music, and national character changed rapidly for those of us in it. My sister is only 5 years older than I. We never moved. Yet, my schools were always vastly different then hers, but they were largely the same for my sister and our two older siblings.
For my group(Tweens) we had the dying off of 'All Americanism' and the rise of 'PC', as a mish mash that we lived in during our formative years. We're schizophrenic because of that. We're the tailing of the demographic curve. There's probably some like that between each new major demographic.

Not everyone should get a four year grouping. Just that we recognize that the boundries are not crisp. That haze generates Tweeners. People who have a foot in one major age demographic and the second foot in another. My wife is definitely Gen Y(Whatever). I was born in 1974 and she in 1979. But the culture she and her friends grew up with was different than the one I did, but not radically so. The one Al grew up with, when corrected for geography, was somewhat different than mine own but not radically so. But the two are radically different to each other.

Others I know born around the same time as I also note this difference. We remember when Oprah was in her angry bitch and hate all men stage, but not a time when there was no Oprah. The Wife has only known the kharmic bliss seeking Oprah. For most of us here there was a time when there was no Oprah(but there was Phil Donahue). The four year thing exists, but only for Tweens. We grow up at that time that isn't dawn but isn't night. We're half-elves.

So while I agree that as a general rule a four year span is too short I do disagree that it is not applicable at all.