From Monte: "Terry and the Pirates."
You're
bragging about your age now, guy! From when I was a little kid, I loved Milton Caniff's comic strips, though I confess that I preferred
Steve Canyon because I thought "Canyon" was slightly closer to reality. Trivia bit: I read somewhere in a reputably news magazine that Caniff received more than one visit from federal counterintelligence agents during wartime (WWII? Korea? Vietnam? I forget—but Caniff was drawing the strip during all three.) The agents asked him where he was obtaining his information about military operations. Caniff told them that he could read a map of the world and could imagine reasonable scenarios from the map situations. Seems that Caniff was imagining things that were actually being planned, and perhaps were already underway. If that's true, Caniff definitely missed his calling in life (though I'm sure his bank account was the better for it.
)
One-eyed Monte? Full monte? Before this, the only monte I knew was three-card monte.
Regarding cataracts: What I learned during my talks with physicians and a bit of reading is that cataracts tend to form with (1) age; (2) trauma (blows, objects in eye, etc.); and (3) long periods of not wearing protective glasses in bright sunlight. Seems to me that we're a group that has experienced at least one of the above, and often two or three.
Though I know we're age-diverse, I still get the feeling that a number of us like our R65s in the same way a some people of a certain age like their pets: all grow old together.
