The Boomer Chronicles

A man and his three children encountered a bigfoot while walking in the woods near Crater Lake in Colorado when…

In about late June 2008 I was hiking the Crater Lake trail outside of Durango Colorado with 3 of my children. They had run a little ways ahead of me and I was just admiring the view when off in the tree line about halfway up the trail I noticed a large hairy figure approx. 7 to 9 feet tall walking just behind the tree line at about 50 to 100 yards. It was walking upright and took long strides. I only saw it for a minute maybe and didn’t say anything to the kids so as not to alarm them. I never really told too many people about this but after watching a bigfoot special on TV about a year later I realized I wasn’t the only one to ever see something like that in this area.

Today’s baby boomer carnival is brought to you by Midlife Musings.

I remember as a kid paging through the World Book Encyclopedia. Those volumes were kept on a shelf in our den. I loved those books and learned so much from them. I forget that kids these days don’t need that A-Z set of books when they can go online and get any information they desire. Encyclopedia Britannica is going online exclusively. From Mashable:

Encyclopaedia Britannica will stop publishing print editions and go digital-only — a huge step for the encyclopedia which has been in print since 1768. The sales of Britannica print editions has been on the decline since 1990, when 120,000 32-volume sets were sold. The early nineties were the start of a revolution: People started turning to the internet for information, and Britannica sales fell to 40,000 in 1996, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. President Jorge Cauz.

In the summer of 2010, a hunter near Shingleton, Michigan, had an encounter with a Bigfoot. Here’s an excerpt of his report to the BFRO:

I have hunted bear, bobcat coon with my hounds, i am a trapper and outdoorsman. My church is the timber. I had a legally owned pet bear. I truly understand ol ursus americanus [bear]. This wasn’t ursus.

“My son in law and I were running our hounds on coon that night. There is a lot of country past green lake up into the hicki marsh and eventually the seney….The dogs treed deep. i went to a high spot to vantage my hearing on them. My radio tracker could barely read them. Its range in wooded areas is about 7 miles. i kept swinging it around slowly trying to gain a good reading. i could smell something foul. While swinging my coonlight in the direction of the antenna i noticed in the spruce a set of eyes next to the deer run on this ridge. Coonhunting you see a lot of different eye shine. i shrugged and swung the tracker when i swung back into the trail toward the truck the trail was filled with an  animal twenty feet in front of me. It was around 8 feet tall, long arms with fingers, barrel chested and pot bellied. The eyes were close and deep set but aggressive in its gaze, the mouth was agape. My goodness, the ears were small. We just looked at each other frozen. it grabbed a very large spruce, wrapping its hand around it. its hair was black to brown not long, not short, the nose flat, with a face not covered in hair like its body. i really don’t remember how it left. To this day i haven’t run the hounds up there. It was the only time i left my hounds in the woods. in the morning after sleeping a bit i rode up (nervous as hell) to try and find the hounds by myself as my son in law went to work.”

Another great definition from the Urban Dictionary:

dental swag: the complimentary stuff with which you leave your dentist’s office: toothbrush, dental floss, etc. “I think the hygienist likes me; she always loads me up with dental swag.”

Go to The Accidental Locavore and check out this week’s carnival of links for baby boomers.

I live in Massachusetts and I remember a guy by the name of Mitt Romney who served a term as governor here. I have no specific recollections of him, and apparently, neither do a lot of Massachusetts Republicans. In the city of Boston alone, out of 600,000 residents, just 7,562 cast votes for Romney in yesterday’s primary. As local political activist Joyce Linehan wrote today: “If my math is right, just 6% of all registered voters in Massachusetts cast a vote for Romney yesterday. That number rises to a whopping 9% if you take out the registered Democrats, who of course could not vote in the Republican primary yesterday. A ringing endorsement for our former governor!”

And if you look at the recent Michigan results — a state where Romney’s father served as governor, making Mitt a real hometown favorite — Mitt Romney only squeaked out a victory.

Check out our links for baby boomers at Sightings at 60.

I watched some of the live broadcast at Harvard this week when Lady Gaga launched her Born This Way Foundation. I truly do believe that Lady Gaga is sincere in her desire to help young people, but her videos undermine the message she wants to send. Her videos are peppered with images of violence, sexual violence, and demeaning scenarios, which go way beyond cynicism and are certainly not kind. She must stop and recognize the disconnect between her performance and her Foundation’s goals if she is to be taken seriously in her efforts.

Do you ever think you’re ‘too big to fail’? That you are so ultra-important that you could not be fired? Well, James Kunen probably felt that, as director of communications for Time Warner. A few years ago he was fired from his lofty executive post after 20 years on the job. He was angry, and probably felt a lot of other emotions, too. After making the initial recovery from the shock, Kunen assessed his life and thought about what made him happy. He eventually found work teaching English as a Second Language. He was paid much, much less than he made as an executive, but he’s happy. Soon he found himself writing a book about his firing and his rebirth — Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life (Lyons Press).

By the way, if Kunen’s name sounds familiar, you might recall the book The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary in 1968. At age 19, Kunen wrote that book, an account of the student uprisings at Columbia University.

Here’s a video of an interview with James Kunen.