Bill Morem

As my grandfather Earl would say, it’s time for some minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata decendum pantorum. (Translation: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.)

Harvey Balmer pretty much sums up my feelings about the elders in our tribe: If genes and good fortune allow us, most of us will end up in a rest home at the end of our lives.

It was one of the odder gigs I’ve done: Introducing Marvel Comics’ Spiderman to groups of kids and parents at this year’s Central Coast Book and Author Festival. It was a resume-padding experience that anyone would covet, no doubt.

My wife, The Lovely Sharita, and I were Zero Population Growthers for the first 16 years of our married lives. It was a situation that suited our nomadic lifestyles in pursuit of a variety of newspaper jobs.

Cut Greg Steinberger — whose alter ego is Doc Burnstein of Doc Burnstein’s Ice Cream Lab in the Village of Arroyo Grande — and he bleeds philanthropy.

A couple times a year I get the distinct pleasure of filling in for The Cambrian’s editor, Bert Etling, while he vacations (which raises the question: Where does one vacation when one lives in paradise?).

Fifty years ago, The Twilight Zone, one of the best written series to air on TV, got its start. Ten episodes into the inaugural season, Cambria resident Nehemiah Persoff appeared in an episode called “Judgment Night.”

They drilled by day, jitterbugged by night, and now age is culling their ranks at a clip of more than 1,000 deaths a day. If you’re 83 or older, chances are good you were one of the 16 million men and women of the Greatest Generation who served in World War II. It’s believed these veterans now number less than 3 million, although there’s no real way to know for sure.

In the grand scheme of things, it may not be the most complex or farthest-reaching of inventions. But when you consider that the device has been implanted in billions of breasts, its importance is both sublime and magnificent.

Big ol’ honkin’ crocodile tears: Those are what our state legislators have been shedding with regard to passing their smoke-and-mirrors budget. “We’ve had to make the hard decisions,” they bemoan with grimly set mouths.