Are We Fading Away?

I remember reading several years ago that the replacement fertility rate is 2.1 births per couple. The 2 part is easy, but obviously to get the .1 you have to use an average of the fertility rate of a number of couples. I also noticed that of all my many friends and associates, only two couples have had more than two babies. After pondering this every now and then and lacking anything else very compelling to blog about, I decided to generate the following list of pseudonyms using my own nuclear family, our siblings, and the names in my email address book.

Round Rock Thomassens 2
Austin Thomassens 1
Brevard Thomassens 2
Sherbans 2
Wokkers 3
Chapkin 1
Mookie & mate 2
Mookie's sister 1
Schwinns 2
McMormans 0
Petersons 2
Bostons 0
Cheeres 0
Bakkers 0
Cranfields 2
Bratleys 0
Marxs 1
McMarthy 2
F. Roddys 1
Bailey 0
Blewett 2
Hewes 2
Humppers 2
Blaiges 0
Humpties 2
Nickels 2
Smacks 0
Brewflott 1
Pubigs 0
Minkelmanns 3
J-Carnes 1
Tutz's 2

So, all these happily "coupled" folks, all 64 of my closest friends and relatives, would have to have produced 67.2 babies just to meet the replacement rate. In the event, we have only had a total of 41 children. That's 1.3 kids per couple. If this trend continues, my peer group will produce only 27 grandchildren and only 18 great grandchildren.

In the long run, if everyone on the planet were following this trend, it might not be such a bad thing. But as it stands, it seems that our cohort group (which I would describe as consisting mainly of members of the "creative class") seems to be virtually alone among the various social classes that is not growing.

Another Disappointment from the Spoetzl Brewery

I want to like Shiner beer. I really do. It's regional. It has a long history. It used to be really good. Shiner Bock was the beer of choice for my first 8 years in Austin--- years that admittedly came before the Beer Revolution that swept our country starting in about 1994. I'll save my longer lament about Shiner Bock for a later post, but suffice it to say that I think my growing disappointment in what we once termed "the creamy creamy" had less to do with the rising standards for beer that accompanied the Beer Revolution than with the falling quality of the once-vaunted products coming from the the little brewery in Shiner.

The latest disappointment is "Shiner Commemorator", brewed to celebrate Spoetzl's 100th birthday. Like many Shiner beers, it is not all bad--- it's only half bad, as if each bottle consisted of 6 ounces of a mildly decent craft brew and 6 ounces of downstream American wank. Add two drops of vanilla extract and, Voila!, there you have it-- Shiner Commemorator. Even at the bargain price of $5.99 for a sixer, it proved a bitter disappointment... though without the bitterness, which would have been a step in the right direction.

inspiration

Seeds in a dry pod,
tick, tick, tick...

---

Can you name the poet? The "poem"?
Can you do this without internet assistance?

An Oral History of the Bush White House

Read and be disturbed.

Books 101

The 101 best novels of all time, as voted for by Exclusive Books customers.

What do you think?

1. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
3. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
4. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
5. The Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
6. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
7. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
8. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
9. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
10. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
11. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
12. Spud - John van de Ruit
13. The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
14. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
15. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
16. Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
20. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
21. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
23. My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
24. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
25. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
26. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
27. Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
28. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
29. Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
30. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
32. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
33. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
34. Atonement - Ian McEwan
35. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
36. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
37. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
38. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
39. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
40. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
41. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
42. I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb
43. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
44. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
45. War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
46. Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel
47. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
48. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
49. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
50. Possession - A. S. Byatt
51. Perfume - Patrick Suskind
52. The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
53. Chocolat - Joanne Harris
54. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
55. Q & A - Vikas Swarup
56. Dune - Frank Herbert
57. Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
58. Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
59. River God - Wilbur Smith
60. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
61. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
62. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
63. Mort - Terry Pratchett
64. Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoyevsky
65. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
66. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
67. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
68. The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory
69. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
70. The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
71. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
72. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
73. The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
74. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
75. Animal Farm - George Orwell
76. The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
77. Watership Down - Richard Adams
78. Magician - Raymond E Feist
79. Middlemarch - George Eliot
80. The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth
81. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
82. The Magus - John Fowles
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk
85. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
86. The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
87. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
88. The Beach House - James Patterson
89. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
90. Kringe in 'n Bos - Dalene Matthee
91. The World according to Garp - John Irving
92. Northen Lights - Phillip Pullman
93. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
94. Shades - Marguerite Poland
95. Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
96. Fiela se kind - Dalene Matthee
97. Story of an African Farm - Olive Schreiner
98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
99. The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
100. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
101. Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne