This Week in Old

-Is Mark Twain’s autobiography surprisingly “tame, unfrank, and highly embarrassed”? (Slate)

-You might have to put that watercolor set back in the closet for a few more years: The pros and cons of raising the retirement age. (AOL News)

-Ineffective when house breaking dogs, unusable as emergency wrapping paper, and other reasons why Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper will fail. (Gawker)

-Barbara Bush would much rather watch “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” than have to live in Sarah Palin’s America. (CNN)

-91-year-old track and field star defies nature and is not afraid to elbow you out for the good seats at her grand kids’ holiday play. (New York Times Magazine)

-Woe de toilette: 69-year-old Parisian woman traps herself in the bathroom for 20 days. (CBS News)

-The refrigerator is the least of his worries: A phone prankster tricks an elderly man into trashing his own hotel room. (USA Today)

-One man’s quest to satisfy the world’s need for old, expensive water. (Los Angeles Times)

Elderism #91

“You should have called.”

–Fran Lebowitz to me four years ago when, meeting her for the first and only time ever, I revealed to her that I had lionized her when I was younger and that she was “why I became a writer.” (Martin Scorsese and Graydon Carter’s HBO documentary about Lebowitz airs on Monday night–and, presumably, every five or six minutes thereafter.)

Elderism #90

“Mike Nichols, who directed [Cher] in Silkwood, said: ‘I heard her on the radio once, somebody was interviewing her, and they said, ‘How do you feel about the Middle East?’ She said: ‘Listen, I’m Cher. You don’t want to know what I think about the Middle East.’ She knows who she is.”

–From Frank Bruni’s “An Ageless Diva of a Certain Age” in today’s Times.

This Week in Old

-Noam Chomsky discusses his Cultural-Zionist upbringing, his ties to Hezbollah, and his favorite frittata recipes with David Samuels. Well, two out of those three at least. (Tablet)

-Are older voters blocking whippersnappery…I mean progressive…social policy changes? (AOL News)

-Chris Dodd crosses off “send salty tweet” from his senatorial bucket list. (Gawker)

-Larry King tells Joy Behar the same thing he tells Stonehenge: “I made you.” (Huffington Post)

-You live by the sword, you die by the sword: The Rent is Too Damn High guy says his party suffered because its name had to be shortened to fit on the ballot line. (New York Post)

-Faster than a speeding Rascal: French photographer Sacha Goldberger turns his 91-year-old grandmother into a full-blown superhero. (My Modern Met)

-There Will Be Sideburns: Daniel Day-Lewis will play President Abraham Lincoln in new Spielberg film. (Variety)

Stuff to Talk About

Here are some conversation topics for the upcoming weekend, from my Times column. The holidays are soon upon us, bringing with them countless opportunities to try to break the ice with your intransigent uncle and his eerily silent new wife. I wish you good luck.

Elderism #89

“It’s like a striptease. There’s a queue of the doctors to do an injection.”

-Bombshell actress Gina Lollobrigida, now 83, telling the New York Times about the unprofessional enthusiasm she elicits whenever she goes to a doctor’s office in Italy.

How/Not How

“Henry,” I hear you whispering in my ear, “are you aware that another person besides you has just published a book called ‘How to Live,” and that it, being a life of the French philosopher Montaigne by someone named Sarah Bakewell, is receiving laudatory reviews from precisely the same venues that your own ‘How to Live’ did, and that, in bearing the same name as your own tome, is likely ultimately to drain some of your profit margin when addled Alford fans land on the wrong Amazon page, thus occasioning a slightly sparser showing at the base of the family Christmas tree come December?”

“No,” I would respond. “No, I hadn’t heard that.”

This Week in Old

-President George W. Bush confuses his memoir for one of his Yale term papers. (The Huffington Post)

-No shuffleboard, but not a raw deal: Stranded Carnival cruise ship tries to make up for feces-soaked floors and mayo-sandwiches with all the booze you can drink. (CNN.com)

-Just hope He calls you the next day: World’s Oldest Person’s secret to longevity was “giving her virginity to God.” (BBC.co.uk)

-A group of porpoises goes all Baywatch on a snoozing Dick Van Dyke. (The Guardian)

-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s “Bunga-Bunga” means exactly what you think it means. (Newsweek.com)

-The jacket was his first mistake: Columbia Sportswear CEO Gert Boyle lays down the law on North Face-clad burglar. (The Washington Post)

-Gene Shalit leaves a huge, moustache-shaped hole in the hearts of “Today” viewers. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Elderism #88

“I’d just as soon not.”

-Joan Didion, when a reporter asked her how aging has treated her. Intriguingly, Didion’s next book, “Blue Nights,” a memoir due next year, is about the very topic.

Elderism #87

“It would be a real bitch if I ever lost my hearing. I know I couldn’t be no Helen Keller. That would be worse than death.”

–Ray Charles, who’d been blind for 67 years, in 2003