We watched the last episode of Mad Men the other night and re-watched it last night. I was in my early 20's, in the early 60's, the setting for the program and, like all my contemporaries, I remember where I was when I first heard President Kennedy was shot. But, unlike most of them, I missed the drama and shock as it unfolded on TV. I was in the Army at Fort Bliss, without a TV, and we soon spent most of our time packing our HAWK surface to air missile system – thinking we were going to be sent to Cuba to provide air defense for the 101st Airborne.

Seeing the assassination for the first time on TV was powerful and moving and, yes, shocking. Like so much of Mad Men, it was both very familiar and a different world. It seems very real and very alien. It was a time when the country was poorer than today – much poorer – not poorer as in destitute but poorer as in less opulent. We have slowly but steadily become astoundingly  rich since the 1960's and it is easy to forget what it was like to live in a world without air-conditioning, or cell-phones, or color TV.

Mad Men seems to pride itself on being visually accurate. In the program, the suitcases are smaller – except for the very rich, people had less to put in them. In the 60's, even fires were smaller. When camping, we were told to build an Indian fire: a small fire that we would sit close to for warmth. At home, the holiday fire would burn down to embers and we would sit around it in sweaters. Now we keep throwing more wood on so that even the cat doesn't have to get close.

Farmers Markets have to be one of the best retro ideas I can think of.  

Because I am California centric (Californiaophile?), I tend to think of Farmers Markets as being particularly California. Of course they aren't and, I suspect, some of the best Farmer's Markets are in places like the Mississippi Delta. But here, at least, they came out of the whole healthy food revolution movement that started in Berkeley. In many ways, the Berkeley free-speech, hippie, 60's revolution has evolved or devolved (depending on your point of view) into much better food. Watching Mario Savio and other participants in the Free Speech Movement at Cal in the fall of 1964; nobody would have predicted that it would, through a long and circuitous path, lead to heritage tomatoes.

Or, during the early 60's while watching supermarkets drive the corner grocery out of business, nobody thought the corner grocery would come back; let alone, that the farmers would come back into town with their trucks of produce (in the olden days, they were called Truck Farmers). And most surprising of all, that this return to old values would be driven by liberals.

And, in some strange way, the Farmers Market in Menlo Park – where the farmers are  expanding their repertoire – is starting to morph into the City Market in Yangshuo, China.

But still a far cry from a Farmers Market in India

When I heard about the shootings at Ft. Hood, my first reaction was "I hope the shooter is not a Muslim". This is sort of a different take on my usual first reaction when I read about some jerk running a Ponzi Scheme, scamming people on Wall Street – "I hope he is not Jewish."

In most cases, the shooter or con-man lives down to the expectations of the bigots among us (including me). I am afraid that, in the popular imagination, Timothy McVeigh was a lone wolf mass murderer but Nidal Malik Hasan was a Muslim…on a mission. But, just like most Christians aren't lone wolf assholes neither are most Muslims. And, just like there are lots of very funny Christians, there are lots of very funny Muslims. Here is one of them: Kumail Nanjiani, a very funny Pakistani.

Over the years, everybody's favorite dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus Rex, has changed radically. When I was a kid, dinosaurs were slow, lumbering, stupid, cold blooded animals. They were primitive and had small brains. They walked sort of upright, dragging their tails.  

Just looking at the pictures of T-Rex and you could tell it was a dumb animal. Then paleontologists began to question those assumptions. First there was questions about the evidence that the dinosaurs were cold blooded. Led by Robert Bakker, paleontologists started seeing the the same evidence – the same bones – in a new way. T-Rex stopped dragging his tail and started looking more alert and dangerous.

Then came DNA testing and we learned that dinosaurs were related to birds. So we now have the new T-Rex. Complete with proto-feathers. T-Rex has never been an animal anybody would want to mess with, but this latest version looks particularly bad-ass.