Mitch Gann’s

What Happened the Year You Were Born is a website that answers its title question only for those of us lucky enough to be born between 1946 and 1964. Baby Boomers, in other words. Take 1952. This was the year that Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine. Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea. Richard Nixon defended himself on national TV with his “Checkers” speech. The U.S. exploded the world’s first hydrogen bomb and Great Britain developed an atomic bomb. The Korean War dragged on. Ike was liked enough to be elected to his first-term as President. Somewhere in that muddle of the good, the bad and the highly explosive, I was born.

Ronni Bennett, on her Time Goes By blog, has this to say about money and politics:

. . . it has been said that should Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination, there is precedent for him to hold a fund raiser to help refill Senator Clinton’s personal coffers. This is disgusting – moreso in a time of $4/gallon gasoline, 47 million people without health coverage and skyrocketing food prices. If there are going to be fundraisers, certainly there are more deserving beneficiaries than rich presidential candidates.

I won’t be contributing to Mr. Obama’s fund-raiser on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, should it ever occur. However, I can’t see singling it out as a bad example when presidential campaign spending is setting records and we are still six months from a decision. (Six months! Can it really be that long to go? The horror, the horror . . . .) It’s all a huge waste of resources. 

Yes, I have been known to make a political contribution, and will do so in the future.  But Big Money Politics is one of the things dragging this country down.

One of the things.

Part of aging gracefully is to do it somewhere else. A new travel web site for baby-boomers called “Boomeropia” (www.boomeropia.com) boasts 30 travel categories. One that caught my eye was called “Glamping.”

As far as I can tell, glamping is roughing it in style. Destinations are places like the Adirondacks, where you can sleep in a yurt on an island in Upper St. Regis Lake, or Ayers Rock, Australia, where you can watch the sun rise from a king-sized bed in your “5-star” tent.

For the hard-core glampers, there’s the Three Camel Lodge in the middle of the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. You get to ride camels and horses, and eat in a ger. For you non-glampers, a ger is a really big yurt. The Khans ate in them all the time. You’d know that if you’d ever glamped anywhere.

Glamping it at the Three Camel Lodge, Gobi Desert, Mongolia, China.

(Source: Three Camel Lodge)