As we age, our outlook on life alters, teaching us that no matter how hard we struggle to hold back the clock of time. We find the golden years are stress-free, offering a greater sense of freedom. Many find the ageing experience tells you that you really are as young as you feel. They see little reason to turn into caricatures of their parents, or worst still - their grandparents! What was once regarded as 'old age' has become the new 'middle age'. This is the time of the sixties generation, revealing there is a lot to be said for enjoying yourself - just for the hell of it! The creators of rock music, the ageing pop stars that see little reason to sit back and collect their pension, now dance to a more exciting tune. People over a certain age discover there is a mischievous inner self waiting to come out to play. This book offers new insights into what people mean when they say they enjoy growing old disgracefully.
When people try to explain what they mean about being happy, it is a task almost overwhelmed with difficulties. Defining happiness is not only a complex task, it often defies description and is perhaps one of the most thought-provoking it is possible to address. The sheer intangibility of its meaning makes it almost impossible to capture. The pursuit of happiness is one fraught with problems, yet we recognise it when it comes into our lives. It is then we start to experience the sheer joy it brings and the remarkable change it makes. Once we experience happiness we find it offers comfort to the soul, overwhelms the heart with joy, unleashes the poet within and gives flights of wings to the lover. Nothing in the life experience is perfect, but hidden deep inside the chambers of our heart we know some part of our happiness lies in trying to make it so.
Does your mother think it's really charming to talk to every rose bush on the street? Has your father taken up obsessive fundraising for a donkey sanctuary on retirement? Does he collect elastic bands because 'you never know when you'll need one'? Do your parents make jokes about sheltered housing? Have they guessed that you've already sent off for the brochures? Do they seem to be having too much fun for a couple with two fake hips, a pacemaker and three steel pins between them? Then you need Rohan Candappa. The man who bought you The Little Book of Stress, The Little Book of Wrong Shui and The Autobiography of a One Year Old has hit the nail on the head once more. Full of wit and wisdom, Rohan will give you a much needed laugh in the face of your parents' increasingly barmy behaviour. Just one thing, you'll probably find your parents have bought it too. And they'll probably think its really funny.
A senior citizens’ center and a daycare collide with hilarious results in the new ensemble comedy from New York Times-bestselling author Clare Pooley When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide. When the city council threatens to sell the doomed community center building, the members of the Social Club join forces with their tiny friends in the daycare next door—as well as the teenaged father of one of the toddlers and a geriatric dog—to save the building. Together, this group’s unorthodox methods may actually work, as long as the police don’t catch up with them first.
The extraordinary life—the first—of the legendary, undercelebrated Hollywood director known in his day as “Wild Bill” (and he was!) Wellman, whose eighty-two movies (six of them uncredited), many of them iconic; many of them sharp, cold, brutal; others poetic, moving; all of them a lesson in close-up art, ranged from adventure and gangster pictures to comedies, aviation, romances, westerns, and searing social dramas. Among his iconic pictures: the pioneering World War I epic Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for best picture), Public Enemy (the toughest gangster picture of them all), Nothing Sacred, the original A Star Is Born, Beggars of Life, The Call of the Wild, The Ox-Bow Incident, Battleground, The High and the Mighty... David O. Selznick called him “one of the motion pictures’ greatest craftsmen.” Robert Redford described him as “feisty, independent, self-taught, and self-made. He stood his ground and fought his battles for artistic integrity, never wavering, always clear in his film sense.” Wellman directed Hollywood’s biggest stars for three decades, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Clint Eastwood. It was said he directed “like a general trying to break out of a beachhead.” He made pictures with such noted producers as Darryl F. Zanuck, Nunnally Johnson, Jesse Lasky, and David O. Selznick. Here is a revealing, boisterous portrait of the handsome, tough-talking, hard-drinking, uncompromising maverick (he called himself a “crazy bastard”)—juvenile delinquent; professional ice-hockey player as a kid; World War I flying ace at twenty-one in the Lafayette Flying Corps (the Lafayette Escadrille), crashing more than six planes (“We only had four instruments, none of which worked. And no parachutes . . . Greatest goddamn acrobatics you ever saw in your life”)—whose own life story was more adventurous and more unpredictable than anything in the movies. Wellman was a wing-walking stunt pilot in barnstorming air shows, recipient of the Croix de Guerre with two Gold Palm Leaves and five United States citations; a bad actor but good studio messenger at Goldwyn Pictures who worked his way up from assistant cutter; married to five women, among them Marjorie Crawford, aviatrix and polo player; silent picture star Helene Chadwick; and Dorothy Coonan, Busby Berkeley dancer, actress, and mother of his seven children. Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of Louis B. Mayer, called Wellman “a terror, a shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine I-don’t-know-what. David had a real weakness for him. I didn’t share it.” Yet she believed enough in Wellman’s vision and cowritten script about Hollywood to persuade her husband to produce A Star Is Born, which Wellman directed. After he took over directing Tarzan Escapes at MGM, Wellman went to Louis B. Mayer and asked to make another Tarzan picture on his own. “What are you talking about? It’s beneath your dignity,” said Mayer. “To hell with that,” said Wellman, “I haven’t got any dignity.” Now William Wellman, Jr., drawing on his father’s unpublished letters, diaries, and unfinished memoir, gives us the first full portrait of the man—boy, flyer, husband, father, director, artist. Here is a portrait of a profoundly American spirit and visionary, a man’s man who was able to put into cinematic storytelling the most subtle and fulsome of feeling, a man feared, respected, and loved.
Using in-depth interviews with punk women growing old disgracefully, Way explores how women construct punk identities. Reflecting on punk ‘then’ and ‘now’, they reveal the constraints punk women experience on their identities growing older, the complex relationship between appearance and dress, and the impact of social expectations around aging.
The intersections of aging, media, and culture are under-explored given trends in population aging, rapid increases in the mediation of everyday life, and the growing cultural significance of media consumption at the global level. This book brings together an international collection of critical scholars, both well-established and up-and-coming, from the various academic disciplines that share a common interest in the future study of aging and media. This anthology of original articles integrates aging theory and media studies through a study of core issues including the media’s influence on the construction of “old age,” the reciprocal influence of aging on media industries, age-based identities in a mediated world, issues of gender and sexuality in an aging society, and the practical implications of a more integrated approach between the two fields. The chapters explore the intersections between aging and media in the realms of advertising/marketing, television, film, music, celebrity and social media, among others.
The humorous guide to managing your money, now updated and stingier and saltier than ever. Packed with hilarious observations, unusual tips, and the stingiest advice money couldn’t buy, The Cheapskate’s Handbook is the perfect gag gift for your favorite miser—who might just be you. Skinflint Mifflin Lowe invites fellow cheapskates to come out of the closet in a celebration of all things free, complimentary, pro bono, and if need be, cheap. With advice on everything from avoiding generous impulses to creatively bumming off your neighbors, plus delightful watercolor illustrations, hilarious photographs, and Mifflin’s own “Miser’s Aptitude Test,” The Cheapskate’s Handbook will have you laughing and saving money at the same time. What a deal! Praise for The Cheapskate’s Handbook “This book is fun. Whether you truly have some Scrooge in your DNA or not, it’s hard to take the Miserliness Aptitude Test . . . explore the Roommate Fee List . . . or read the “How to Avoid Taking Your Spouse or Significant Other to a Movie” chapter and not crack a smile. Or more. Lowe is irreverent, silly, and quite often over the top. . . . It’s a 2.0 edition, after all, so he gives you the cheapskate view on Uber, Lyft, Miley Cyrus, and more.” —Ryan G. Van Cleave, Sarasota Scene
