In Honor Of Mel Torme (100th Birthday) ~ Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Saturday, September 13, 2025

This was the Facebook/email invite I made for the cocktail party Joey and I threw ten years ago for Mel Torme's 90th birthday. Today is his 100th!

Happy Birthday, Mel Torme!

That was a fun party.

Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Generation X: People of a certain age who are reluctantly connected by a world of ideas at a peculiar time and place in American history.

This is a Gen X blog. The average American Gen Xer went from analog to digital to virtual and AI in a blur of just fifty-odd weird years. Our science fiction became science fact, and I think we deserve some freakin' credit.

There's something comforting in that shared experience of taking a flying leap across a great chasm, from childhood when our highest-tech toy was an Etch-A-Sketch to the very first iPads, from wall-tethered telephones that served an entire family, to everyone having a smart phone, even our kids. Could we have conceived such a thing? How old were YOU when you first got rights to partake of the analog phone? I bet you remember what room it was in. Waiting until after 7pm for the rates to go down.

We shared the experience of our toys, our games, our music, our TV shows and movies. TV shows aired once a week...if you missed it, you missed it. There were four or five channels.Movies showed in the THEATER, for a certain number of weeks or months, then that was it.

We stayed out all day long in summer. Our parents had no idea where we were or what we were up to. We have stories.

To Generation X, technology advancing rapidly is comforting. We have been part of it. We had a big hand in building the cloud, and if not directly then indirectly by using it. Anybody remember all those AOL CDs that came in the mail? If you ever popped one of those things, or had an AOL AIM account, you were part of building the cloud, too. Personally my role was more direct. I worked in telecommunications after college. I have stories from the cubicle throughout the 1990s, when Developers stood in front of a room, a drawing of a cloud on a PowerPoint, talking LANs and VPNs and Backbone Concentrater Nodes. We were building it.

Technology moved fast. We climbed the mountain, we surfed the wave, we sped along the information superhighway with all the windows open. We optimized for mobile like champs. Ours was a triumphant grand jete across the great digital divide, and I tell ya, we're doing a pretty good job of keeping up.

I have been keeping Diary of a Low Budget Superhero for over 25 years...if you're counting, that's years before the word "blog" was coined. The intent back in 1999 was to see, after a lot of years of writing the blog, how an ordinary Gen Xer had it all turn out in the end,

I guess we'll see. Gen X is not done yet.

Saturday, September 13, 2025

In Honor Of Mel Torme (100th Birthday)

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