There have actually been several phases in automotive naming, as I see it. In the nascent days of the industry, cars were usually named for the men that built them. Most people remember Henry Ford, Louis Chevrolet, Ransom Olds, and Walter Chrysler, but there was also David Dunbar Buick, Andre Citroen, Armand Peugeot, Ettore Bugatti, and Enzo Ferrari, among others.

Several siblings teamed up to make cars as well: John and Horace Dodge, James and William Packard, and the five, count ‘em five, Studebaker brothers. There was the famous partnership of Stewart Rolls and Henry Royce. Only one car was named for a woman: Mercedes was the daughter of a man who worked for Karl Benz.

Of course, one of the most recent auto manufacturers to name a car after himself was John DeLorean, and you know how that turned out. I’m frankly surprised that Henrik Fisker has been bold enough to put his own name on his electric car company.

Then there were the 50s and early 60s, which besides coinciding with my childhood, were Detroit’s heyday. Each division of a car company targeted a specific income level, and each division had gradations within it. In order to show your upward mobility, you moved from a Dodge to a Plymouth to a Chrysler to a DeSoto. And frequently, the gradations evoked associations with exotic or wealthy place names: Chevrolet Bel Air and Biscayne. Chrysler New Yorker, Newport, Saratoga. Packard Caribbean. Lincoln Capri. Cadillac Biarritz. Buick Riviera. Mercury Monterey, Montclair, and Montego. Pontiac Catalina. Dodge Monaco. Those were cool car names.

About the same time, the NASA space program spawned a cluster of names: Plymouth Satellite. Mercury Comet. Ford Galaxie. And then, although Jaguar had been around a while, muscle cars ushered in an animal phase: Ford Mustang. Plymouth Barracuda. Corvette Stingray. Buick Wildcat. AMC Marlin. Corvair tried to have it both ways, with the Monza Spyder (Monza is in northern Italy). Just as Delorean killed the tradition of using founders’ names, I believe the Pinto killed the animal phase.

Nowadays, manufacturers have resorted to boring model numbers and inscrutable wordplay. What the heck is a Camry or a Passat? If the Acura is supposed to connote accuracy, what does Integra connote? Did Lexus steal one of Rolex’s syllables to establish a connection? Does Infiniti refer to how long you’ll be making car payments? Do you really want to be caught in a Crossfire?

There remain feeble attempts to bring back evocative places for car names, but they’re doing that all wrong. Kia itself misspelled Sorento (the Italian town has two r’s). Is the Dodge Durango named for the Mexican city or that cute little town in southwestern Colorado? Had anyone at Toyota ever actually been to Tacoma before they named their pickup? Why aren’t there cars named for Bermuda or the Bahamas, or Hawaii, or French Polynesia? Wouldn’t any thinking person prefer a Toyota Tahiti to a Toyota Tacoma?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to return to those materialistic days when people could tell that by spending another $500 or $1000, you were rich enough to move from a Chevrolet to an Oldsmobile to a Pontiac (an Indian chieftain) to a Buick to a Cadillac (the founder of Detroit), when the number of taillights on your car or the height of their fins indicated your income. But if I’m going to be stuck in traffic, I would like the name of the car in front of me to transport me somewhere else.

1. Subscribe online to your hometown newspaper. It’s the best way to keep up with what’s going on with friends, families, schools, and more.

2. Watch a movie you first saw when you were deeply in love as a teen-ager. Doesn’t matter whether you loved it or hated it. Chances are you were so smitten with your date that you didn’t pay attention to the movie, and it will be like seeing it for the first time.

3. Tackle a hobby you gave up when you were younger. You’ll either reconfirm that you really do hate it, or find a new pleasure.

4. Attend a high school reunion, even if you believe that reunions are periodic gatherings of people who have nothing in common to confirm they still have nothing in common. You will either reconnect with someone whose kinship you’ve missed, or with someone whose kinship you never knew you had.

5. Corollary: Consider planning a workplace reunion of a job you loved, even if it was a very long time ago. I’m organizing a 35-year reunion of the staff from the startup I joined right out of college. I’m delighted by how excited everyone is about the idea.

6. Plan which music and activities you want at your funeral. Don’t let your survivors guess. My spouse knows to schedule the reception during a 49ers game or, if that’s not possible, to play the DVD of any of the 49ers’ or John Elway’s Super Bowls.

7. Go somewhere you never thought you would, preferably on another continent, but even in the next county if necessary.

8. Get on Facebook. Keep your privacy settings high if you must, but it’s the best way to find out (1) what your relatives are doing and (2) who among your classmates has died.

9. Invest in a good magnifying glass. Maybe two.

10. Corollary: Buy cheap reading glasses and place them strategically in places where you’re likely to need them. This includes cars and any room that has plumbing.

11. Always have cheese, crackers and a nice bottle of wine on hand. You never know when someone you’ve known so long they don’t need to call ahead will drop by.

12. Read a book you always meant to read, but not something virtuous like Tristram Shandy or Robinson Crusoe. Make it a trashy book your parents hid from you, like Peyton Place or Valley of the Dolls. If you want to read literature, do that later.

13. Take a walk down memory lane by checking out the Old Time Candy web site. I don’t know how they do it, but they stock all the candy from our younger years, including things like Bonomo Turkish Taffy and Gold Rocks bubble gum. Ordering it or not is up to you; the taste may not be as good as you remember it.

14. Ask your older siblings or cousins about a mystifying family memory. Chances are you’ll hear a perspective or a clarification that you never considered.

15. Set aside a weekend to write down the names of every person in every photograph you have. Otherwise, when you die, your heirs will toss pictures of anyone they can’t identify.

16. Track down an old teacher and tell them how much you appreciate what they taught you.

17. Pick one child in your extended family, and instead of giving them birthday or holiday gifts, set up a 529 college account for them. If everyone is the family does this, tuition will be less of a nightmare for their parents, and the kids will never notice one less present.

18. Corollary: Set up a scholarship fund at the college of your choice. You don’t have to be a millionaire to do this, because we’re not talking about full tuition. It could be as little as $1,000 a year. For the students, it’s like a Christmas bonus.

19. Buy a present for your spouse or significant other so extravagant they’ll think you cheated on them. Smile inscrutably when they ask if you have.

20. Come up with something creative yourself and let me know what it is so I can have another list ready for next new year’s.

The fact is, Boomers have generally been comfortable. We’ve ridden a multiple booms into the stratosphere, whether in stocks or real estate, or both. At least three of my high school classmates – and who knows how many of my college classmates – are comfortably ensconced in the mythical 1% everyone keeps railing against. But too many others can be described with three Ss: stuck, scared, and scrambling. They’re the ones who keep me thinking about the idea of reinventing oneself, as I wrote about last summer in Reinventing Lucy.

Every so often I run across people who’ve really nailed the art of reinvention. Take my friend and former colleague George, who’s now retired – and I use the term loosely – in Tucson. He noted in his holiday card this year that he’s now 75. He and I worked together more than 25 years ago here in Silicon Valley, and that was after his first 20-year career, spent in journalism. Long before the terms “reinventing oneself” or even “virtual companies” were thrown around, George had created a thriving home-based business doing corporate newsletters.

He had left journalism in 1983 because of a situation that’s highly familiar today: the desire of management to “sweep out the gray hairs and the high salaries” and hire younger people. (See, today is just a lesson we have to keep re-learning.) Also, he saw the dusty future of journalism better than most people: capitalizing on his psychology degree, he moonlighted as a psych professor at a local junior college. He would always poll the students on whether they read a daily newspaper, and over the years, he saw the numbers dwindling. Young people were losing the habit even before there was online news as an alternative. Between that and management banishing the older guys to the midnight police desk, he knew it was time to get out.

Knowing his insights into reinvention would be valuable, I sat down with him on the phone the other day. He offered these five salient tips for those who are now in their 50s and seeking to take control of their lives. In truth, they apply to any generation, and they can be summed up simply: maintain your financial independence, and every other kind of independence will follow.

● Moonlight. That’s an old-fashioned term for a second job, which George refers to as a “kitchen-table” job. For those worried about getting laid off, George cites a Wall Street Journal article he read many years ago called “Defensive Entrepreneurship” (there’s also an unrelated web site.) It’s basically a contingency plan – something I’m always in favor of – to protect yourself not only financially but emotionally. “If you have a fledgling business, you’ve got something to do besides sending out resumes and being depressed. It may sooner or later sustain you.” George also started investing in residential real estate, which brought in extra income.

● Save. Unable to borrow money without showing years of tax returns, he decided to establish “the bank of George.” He went on an austerity program and stockpiled $5,000 in a reserve account so he always had a buffer to sustain him and his business.

● Avoid debt. Reinventing yourself isn’t necessarily easy, but in order to thrive in the process and have the emotional wherewithal, you need to focus on the task at hand without the pressures of debt. Even if you just borrow money from your in-laws, you’re still obligated. “You surrender your independence when you take on debt. The less pressure you have, the better you’ll feel.”

● Avoid overhead. George was running a virtual company long before the term was invented, outsourcing before we knew what it was. His newsletter team consisted of freelance writers, an independent designer, and an outside printing firm. He ran the company from out of his house, so he never had to worry about office overhead.

● Network. Once you’ve established your home office, leave it. “The worst thing is to be isolated. Go to places where people gather and network.”

All of that said, George acknowledges that the path of reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone, especially those who are uncomfortable with risk. His own mother, referring to his real estate ventures, said, “I wouldn’t want people calling me at 3 a.m. to tell me the toilet is stopped up.” Indeed, reinvention combined with self-employment is self-segregating: “People will gravitate to where it feels right.”

In time, the newsletter business faded away. Once desktop computers became capable of doing layout, even in word processing documents, there was no reason to hire an outside company to do the writing and the design. George spends his days in Tucson with his wife (and long-time Cranky fan) Sondra, having comfortably moved into his next phase: volunteer work.

“I just signed up to volunteer with the United Way to help families working on their finances,” George told me. “Times are rough and they’re not going to get better. For the next five years, maybe even longer, people will be working on just surviving.”

Frankly, I can’t think of anyone better suited for the job.

● A Stanford quarterback almost as good as Andrew Luck (asking for one that’s better than Luck is just insanity)

● A Goldilocks winter, with not too much rain, and not too little

● Equity (both kinds: social and real estate)

● The highest-scoring Super Bowl ever with Aaron Rodgers or Drew Brees and Tom Brady firing rockets back and forth (I love the 49ers, but not defensive games)

● A Republican party that remembers its heritage in Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Rockefeller

● A Democratic party that realizes you can’t draft an unenforceable law governing every idiotic human behavior

● A Goldilocks car – one that’s not too big and not too small, with dual climate controls so it really can be too hot on one side and too cool on the other

● A grain, a speck, a smidgen of the Facebook IPO

● Something along the lines of the kinder, gentler nation the Bushes promised but never, ever delivered

● A Goldilocks presidential election  – one that’s not too exciting and not too boring, with the outcome never, ever in doubt

● For the next person who talks about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage be forced to watch every episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians back to back

● A London Olympics that makes my wife smile for the rest of the summer

● A practical reason to buy an iPad (there are already scads of impractical ones)

● Another busy year for my career (anything that gets me closer to retirement is okay with me) with clients who pay on time and don’t schedule 9 a.m. Eastern meetings

● Fewer nose hairs (or at least fewer ticklish ones)

● Fewer aggravating airline charges (hey, United – why are you charging me a $240 “administrative fee” to change my travel dates when I’m doing it online?)

● Goldilocks interest rates – ones that won’t kill the rebounding economy but will actually give retirees some return on their savings

● Laughter, preferably involving familiar stories of youthful foibles with longtime friends

● Happiness to my friends and confusion to my enemies (and for whoever said that first not to read this)

● Continued inspiration to keep my blog readers happy throughout the year

Though I’m loath to admit it today, I never really wanted Gus. We were fostering him and another cat, Bandit, for a local humane society, and while he was quite loving, he had long, luxuriant fur, the kind that, if it didn’t shed onto everything, came up in hairballs.

But my wife came to love Gus and Bandit, so instead of putting them up for adoption, we kept them for ourselves. Gus was not only furry, but he was big, so big he probably has a generous helping of Maine Coon in him. He tips the scales at 18 pounds, but not all of it is fur. When we got them, our first kitties, Tuxedo and Fluffy, were 13 and 12. I never thought of myself as a person who would eventually have four cats, but I was, and it was delightful. Fluffy could have been related to Gus. They were both black and white, and had long, silky hair.

Though Fluffy was not purebred, we researched his markings and discovered that he probably had a healthy dose of Ragdoll in him. Ragdolls are a fairly new breed known not only for their raccoon-like masks, but also their friendly disposition, their ability to get along with both people and other animals, and their propensity to flop in your arms as if boneless – hence their name.

For Gus, two out of three ain’t bad. He has a friendly disposition. When he flops, he sends out seismic waves. However, he doesn’t get along with his brother as well as Fluffy did with Tuxedo.

Fluffy was a wonder. He was a lover and an adventurer. He figured out how to pull on the door stop to get the front door of our townhouse open so he could explore the fenced front yard. Once when we were having the window screens replaced, he managed to get out onto the roof. One foggy morning he ran across the street and behind the cluster of townhouses over there. Realizing he didn’t recognize anything, he sat down and waited for me to come looking for him.

But one evening, not long after we’d moved in our current home, Fluffy didn’t come for dinner with the other three. We hadn’t started letting them out because we weren’t sure they’d marked the house as their territory. I knew Fluffy had to be in the house somewhere, and I eventually found him in a cubbyhole underneath the stairs, motionless but panting heavily.

I put him in the car and rushed him around the corner to our veterinarian. She stabilized him with fluids and recommended getting him to an emergency vet that evening for more tests. Eventually he was diagnosed with lymphoma, and even though we tried chemotherapy, his tumors returned fairly quickly and we lost him about nine months later. I miss him every single day, just as I do Tuxedo, who passed away a few years ago at the ripe old age of 18.

As I said, Gus shares a lot of Fluffy’s characteristics, especially his affectionateness. At night, after I’ve gone to bed but before lights out, he’ll settle down on my chest and expect loving. When I wake up in the morning, he’s usually tucked up against my legs, as if the only really good place to sleep in this house is next to Daddy.

When I go into my office to start my work day, he follows, jumping up on my desk and stationing himself between me and my keyboard (just as he is now). If I’m not typing, and only using the mouse, he rests his head on my arm, a throaty purr emanating happily. He has a comfy bed on one corner of my desk, but he prefers being on the hard wood next to the keyboard, because he sees that that’s where my hands usually rest. That’s where the action is for him. And there I can pet him, and inhale the musky scent of his fur, and watch his huge paws knead the air in ecstasy.

Sometimes, if I’m just reading online material, he can flop there. But if I really have to work – and I get my best work done in the morning – that involves typing and I have to shove him away. I hate to do so. How do you tell someone who loves you so much that you don’t want them around?

Then I remember all the kitties that I’ll never have the chance to cradle again, and I think:  just a few minutes more.

He had just turned 24, and they had been married for less than a year.

I thought of my father’s record when I saw the Associated Press had issued an unintentionally appropriate holiday story last week. It seems that the Smithsonian Institution had, for 130 years, the original wax discs on which Alexander Graham Bell recorded his original experiments in voice, the ones that culminated in the invention of the telephone. Scientists couldn’t hear what was on them, however, because the device that played them hadn’t survived as long. Finally, through the use of a 3D camera and laser, they were able to read the grooves on the discs and reproduce the sounds.

Does this sound familiar? Anybody out there with VHS tapes lying around without a working VHS player? As Christmas day and the exchanging of new electronic gadgets takes place, let this be a lesson to you. How are you going to preserve your content – text, photos, video, voice – when the gadget goes obsolete? As the Bell example shows, this is not a new problem.

Players need content and content needs players, whether it’s a 76 RPM record from the 40s, an 8-track tape from the 1970s, or a CD from the 2000s. How many of you had super 8mm movies transferred onto VHS tape, only to find that you know have to have them transferred onto DVDs? As one wise comedian recently opined, “Can we all please agree to just ignore whatever product comes after DVDs? I really don’t want to have to start my movie collection over … again.”

You may think that with CD/DVD drives in computers that you’re safe. Forget about it. Even some CD-ROMs (that is, the disks that hold software applications, not those that play music) aren’t interchangeable. This is why I have never been able to get rid of a laptop. The oldest one only plays my Scrabble CD. The second-oldest one holds my favorite casino games and my recipes, because those applications have not been replicated for Windows 7, or if they have, not for the operating system on my latest computer, Windows 7 64-bit.

Bottom line: I had to take the computers offline so that Microsoft can’t automatically update the operating system anymore. That’s the only way I can access my meticulously input recipes and other applications. I could print the recipes out on paper, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the software (and it’s harder to search for a recipe that uses both, say, chicken and paprika).

But you can’t print out voice recordings. This is why I urge you to be very, very cognizant of your electronic gadgets this holiday season. Think about how you’re going to preserve that recording as technology changes. You don’t want to end up with a 78 RPM wax-on-cardboard record that’s an amazing piece of family history without any way of playing with it.

That’s why I bought a record player from Restoration Hardware a few years ago, one manufactured by Crosley, which specializes in retro radios, record players, and jukeboxes. It would play my old 45s (if I hadn’t downloaded them all from iTunes), as well as 33-1/3 RPM records (if I hadn’t bought the CDs). As much as I deride single-purpose devices, I bought this for one reason, and one reason alone. It’s to hear my father try to soothe my mother’s fears from so many years ago.

So that’s the cautionary tale of Christmas. When you’re buying gifts this season, don’t just think about future technology. Think about past technology as well. Thanks to that Crosley, my father’s voice won’t be lost for 130 years before they find the right technology to hear it again.

As a counterpoint to these “do this, do that” stories, Middle Age Cranky offers this contrary list covering 20 things Boomers must never, ever do. Bad things will happen.

1. Keep clothes that no longer fit on the premise that, after a successful diet, they’ll be usable again. This never happens, and you’re only keeping them from the needy.
2. Sell a big house under the mistaken impression that the kids will never come back to live with you.
3. Tally up your lifetime earnings. The total will be a startling amount that you can in no way account for.
4. Eat popcorn. Your dentist will confirm this.
5. Arrive home past midnight from a class reunion your old flame attended but your spouse didn’t.
6. Try to recreate the Cialis television commercial. Moving those two claw-foot tubs down to the beach will give you a hernia, strain your back, or both.
7. Hitchhike. It may seem like a quaint throwback to the innocent days of your youth, but really – don’t.
8. Start aimlessly surfing on the Web, unless you want to lose track of two hours of your life that you’ll never get back.
9. Vote based solely on ideological purity (whether on the left or the right).
10. Put off the vacation of the lifetime with your loved one until after you retire. People get sick and die not only when you least expect it, but also when you least want them to.
11. Take your loved ones for granted. (See #10.)
12. Buy the car you’ve wanted ever since adolescence without having a boatload of money to maintain it. Similarly, don’t buy a boat without a carload of money to maintain it.
13. Return to your hometown expecting nothing to have changed. If nothing else, you’ve changed.
14. Buy the entire boxed DVD set of a television show you loved as a child without checking out a few episodes on Netflix first. Your tastes have changed.
15. Wonder why the first person with whom you went steady broke it off. That’s just wasted energy.
16. Wonder why phrases like “going steady” went out of style. (Same reason as #15.)
17. Drive at night. You know I’m right on this one.
18. Put your grocery coupons somewhere you won’t logically find them when you get to the checkout counter. Because you won’t remember them otherwise.
19. Worry about maladies that run in your family. (Everyone has those. You should, however, worry about the ones that sprint.)
20. Compile lists of things other people shouldn’t do, especially when you’ve done half of them yourself.

I’m all for more jobs in America, but just like any Baby Boomer, I was witness to the vivid decline of American manufacturing. When we were young, foreign cars, with the possible exception of Volkswagens, stood out. I still remember when a Toyota Corona was an oddity. And so it went, from cars to power tools to shoes to computers (disclosure: this is being written on my second Lenovo ThinkPad).

Why did that happen? Did unions bring American wages up too high? Did manufacturers demand output over quality? A friend of mine from high school once toured the GM plant in Fremont, California, and witnessed workers using mallets to smack bumpers into place that didn’t fit properly.

I don’t know all the reasons manufacturing fled, but based on my recent experience with an Atlanta-based company called MyTarp.com, which prides itself on manufacturing in America, it’s too soon to start celebrating its return. Several years ago, I purchased a plastic tarp made in China and at a local hardware store, and used it to cover my wood pile. It lasted no more than three seasons and eventually disintegrated, a waste of both petroleum resources and money. I found MyTarp online, bought a canvas tarp for the wood pile, and have been delighted with it.

We are lucky enough to have a fairly large backyard, and a 12-foot-long oval teak table on the patio. Just as with the wood pile, we had a table cover that had been manufactured somewhere overseas, and it began to disintegrate after only a few years of California weather (I can only imagine how short the lifespan of such things are where there’s real weather). Because MyTarp also offered custom tarps, I asked them to create a waterproof cover for the patio table. This was in August, four months ago.

I won’t bore you with the timeline of events, but suffice to say that once I sent them the measurements, getting responses was like prying a ball out of a playful dog’s mouth, only less fun. I had to incessantly prod them for information – did they get the measurements, how much would it cost, when would it be ready? My queries sometimes took a week to answer, and some of the replies were insipid enough to ask for information that had been in previous e-mails. It took them a week to determine they’d written my credit card number wrong. I was promised shipment three times in three successive weeks. Finally, four months after I’d first submitted the order, and two months after I’d been told MyTarp would put a rush on it, the table cover arrived.

As it happens, it fits perfectly, covering both the table and the chairs skooched under it. I asked for grommets every three feet so I could use bungee cords tie it down, and there they were. So maybe American manufacturing has a chance of recovering. But if MyTarp is any indication, clearly work remains to be done on the other things associated with manufacturing: efficiency, customer service, responsiveness. What made us start buying foreign goods in the first place was a distasteful customer experience overall, of which the finished product is only part of the equation.

Supercommittee: Clearly Misnamed. In most work environments, when you’re given an assignment and a deadline, it’s considered really bad form to wait until the actual day it’s due to announce that you’re not going to be able to fulfill it. In fact, when that happens in my field, I don’t get paid, my reputation is irreparably damaged, and no further work is forthcoming. Yet in Congress, none of these rules nor these consequences apply. What a cool job!

Clarity At Last. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the federal government gave $123 billion in tax incentives to corporations in 2010, with breaks – as noted in the New York Times “for groups and people as diverse as Nascar track owners, mohair producers, hedge fund managers, chicken farmers, automakers and oil companies.” I don’t get too many epiphanies these days, but I sure got one when I read Fareed Zakaria’s Complexity Equals Corruption in the October 31, 2011 issue of Time: “The simplest way to get the corruption out of Washington is to remove the prize that members of Congress give away: preferential tax treatment. A flatter tax code with almost no exemptions does that.” Even better, it would free up politicians from having to listen to lobbyists and give them time to listen to their constituents instead.

Who Were Those Guys? Abraham Lincoln was an abolitionist. Teddy Roosevelt was a conservationist. They were both Republicans. I don’t recall them saying much about religion, either their own or anybody else’s. (Exception: Lincoln is supposed to have said, “God must have loved poor people, because he made so many of them.”) Heck, even Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency. So now why does admission to the Republican Party now seem contingent not only on being a raving right-wing religious fanatic, but also intolerant of homosexuality and ignorant of environmental issues? Whatever happened to the Republican Party I used to belong to?

Our Tax Dollars At Work. According to the New York Times, Congress established a fund to help those exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder relating to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That’s not something I would necessary vote to spend money on, but hey, it’s the kind of thing that makes it looks like the folks in the House of Representative actually have hearts. In fact, they have really big hearts, because it’s funded to the tune of $4.3 billion dollars. It’s estimated that there may have been 10,000 people affected in Manhattan that day, which comes out to $430,000 per person. I’ve been going to therapists on and off for years, and I don’t think I’ve spent even one-tenth of that.

Here’s another bizarre example of our tax dollars at work. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, some 2,000 for-profit vocational schools receive $24 billion annually. Now, I’m sure some smart lobbyist said, “You fund public schools. You should fund vocational schools too,” and some stupid Congressperson agreed to sponsor the proposal. Hey, where do I sign up for a for-profit job that’s also subsidized by the federal government? That seems as cool as being a congressperson.

Our Tax Dollars At Play. If I can’t be a congressperson sloughing off work assignments, I think I’d like to work for the National Transportation Safety Board. For reasons I’ve yet to fathom, the NTSB is the world’s arbiter on plane crashes. No matter where a plane goes down, whether it’s an American plane or had an American embarkation or destination, it seems like the NTSB is on its way to investigate. According to its Wikipedia entry, “The NTSB will also on occasion provide technical and other advice to transportation investigative boards in countries that do not have the equipment or specialized technicians available to undertake all aspects of a complex investigation.” I want a job where I get to fly to exotic places beyond my logical jurisdiction. I bet they also get to take the congressional way out by issuing reports that say, “We have absolutely no clue why this thing came down, but we sure enjoyed the view from the mountain.”

And yet, strangely, the supercommittee still couldn’t agree on where to cut expenses.

I was attending the biennial Friends of the Stanford Daily banquet last Friday night, something I would have done anyway since it puts me in touch with and encourages an endangered species – students who still want to be journalists.

Who should show up as the unbilled keynote speaker but Joel Stein, class of ’93. He’s a Daily alum who currently – like me, as he so gaily noted – is a freelancer, except his clients are much cooler than mine: Time. Entertainment Weekly. Los Angeles Times. The New Yorker. And he’s much funnier than I am. When I was at the Daily, the funniest thing I wrote was a review of Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, which was like shooting Cybill Shepherd in a barrel. The funniest thing Stein wrote at the Daily chronicled going to a Palo Alto sperm bank whose female customers who wanted sperm from really smart men. If CBS were going to replace Andy Rooney, their first choice would be Joel and I wouldn’t even be on the list.

He’s probably most famous for his Time profile of George Clooney, during which, instead of Joel going to Clooney’s house, Clooney went to Joel’s house for dinner. The evening started with a tour of the house and ended after midnight with Clooney diagnosing problems with Joel’s carbon monoxide detector. He made Clooney sound like a regular guy, which is highly appropriate, because that’s just how Joel came across when I met him.

As the Daily dinner broke up, I went over to tell him how much I admired his work. Actually, what I really said was that I really envied him. He asked where I lived, and when I told him Silicon Valley, he said he envied me. Actually, he should. Earlier this month, he mentioned that his wife didn’t even read his column anymore. At least my wife still reads my column every week – as long as I print it out and put it on top of her catalogs.

But he was very engaging, very self-deprecating, and utterly charming – the kind of Stanford grad that makes other Stanford grads feel like they can do anything they put their mind to. Hey, I went to school with the chairwoman of the Food and Drug Administration, so I’m really one degree of separation from President Obama. I can hold my own in a conversation with Joel Stein, for crying out loud.

Naturally, I managed to shoehorn a mention of Middle Age Cranky into the conversation, and he claimed to love the name, even repeating it a couple of times and promising to check it out.

So as I walked through the drizzly night back to the parking lot, I was all aglow with the thought that Joel Stein was going to read Middle Age Cranky. I suddenly worried whether last week’s was one of the funny ones or one of the cranky ones, and then I remembered that it was one of the funny ones (as funny as they get anyway) and sighed with relief. And then I went into a whole riff of wouldn’t it be cool if Joel and I first became Facebook friends and then started being snarky together, me being a cranky baby boomer and he being a cranky Generation Xer. That eventually scared the hell out of me because it started sounding like Martin Short doing Ed Grimley on Saturday Night Live and fantasizing about how cool it would be if he and Pat Sajak started hanging out together.

By the time I had gotten to the car, I had reconfirmed my status in the universe, which was nowhere near Joel’s, and reminded myself that just because we started at the same newspaper, he was still younger, funnier, thinner and richer than I am.

But at least my wife still reads my column.