Seen at the Gym...

This week:

1. When you go in the daytime, there are a lot of ladies there who turn the TV to stuff they want to watch. This is rarely ESPN or anything to do with drywall, and all too frequently Ellen or The View. The other day, it was Martha Stewart's show, upon which I saw several obscenities. They were showing off purses, and some of them sold for between $900 and $1,500. A thousand dollars for a purse. Ladies who own such better not let the starving hordes of the Third World learn of this, lest they be stuffed inside said expensive purses. Which will probably not be comfortable, in spite of the fact that you could buy a pretty good couch for that money.

2. The college where I work out offers a cardio training course for credit. You pay to take the course, obviously, and the way the gym part of it works is that you sign in, spend some time in the gym and then sign out in order to get the number of hours you need. So I saw three young ladies, a couple of whom had substantial presence, sign in, pick up magazines and sit on the exercise bikes and not even pedal. Fer cryin' out loud, youth of America, if you're not gonna learn which century the Civil War was in, the least you could do make an effort to not keel over from a heart attack before you're 30. You just give us old codgers more room to whinge about how worthless we think you are when compared to us.

Of course, the reason I'm in the gym is because I too took my metabolism for granted when I was 19, but just because I was dumb doesn't mean you have to be. And I suppose we all lose when stacked up 'gainst the mighty Baby Boom generation, who were the greatest thing even before sliced bread came to be. Just ask them.