Can you believe it? The little TV that I watch these days is always from recordings so that I can fast forward the ads. Not that I've got anything against advertising, just that I am sooo tired of constantly being told how I should think, behave, be etc by self appointed "Thought Police".

• Don't smoke (A really safe one because they know that it's so adictive that no matter how many billions of taxes they collect from smokers, they'll just keep on smoking anyway)
• Drink responsibly
• Don't drink and drive
• Slow down
• Spend as much as you can on gambling (we make mega-bucks from taxes), but do it responsibly!
• Don't beat up women (Presumably it's OK to beat up men)
• Get a licence to work with children (all men are repressed pedaphiles)
• Don't waste water (because we, the chief thought police have spent so much of your money telling you how to think that we forgot to build any dams for the last 35 years!)

It goes on and on and on, and we (the policed) don't seem to mind!

Well, guess what, the Thought Police know that we -- we who are so weak that we have to be told how to live our lives, hang out on myspace. And they have already taken over valuable advertising space which could be imploring us to by the latest HiTech Gizmo to display such inane "advertisments" as ...

Well, I've done a bit of browsing on myspace and am beginning to wonder if I can lay claim to the being the oldest registered member?

The fact that I am certainly in the "severely age challenged" category is actually rather satisfying in an odd sort of way. I have vivid memories from my youth, of wondering just how some of the 'old' people in business could possibly survive with such a narrow and closed view of themselves and the world in general.

The terrifying thing is that the people that I thought to be Old way back then, were nearly 10 - 20 years younger than I am now!

Anyway, as I progressed through life, I discovered that there was actually a common characteristic of the "mentally old" (Deadwood!). This is that they became so intellectually lazy that they genuinely believed that experience is a valid substitute for knowledge.

This believe is sooo convenient because it means that you don't need to study, acquire knowledge or make any attempt to understand the young people around you.

I resolved many years ago to always respect knowledge and ideas before experience.

Furthermore, whenever I hear someone putting down the young ("can't understand this modern music" type of comment), I actively remind myself that my parents made that exact same comment about my musical idols (the Beatles!) and seemed to actually believe that the fact that I wanted to wear my hair as long as they did, would inevitably lead to the end of the world as we know it!

I am still at a loss to understand how most of the grown up world has completely forgotten that they were themselves mere portends of the End of The World when they were young themselves!