And that was the ambitious plans of airlines all over the world. In the US, development of the Boeing 2707 was undertaken. In Russia, the Tupolev Tu-144 was created. And over in England, the Concorde was born.

Thus, during the late 60's, a race to become the first airline offering supersonic flights was started. This 1968 Braniff commercial from Youtube shows that 1975 was the magical year that was being forecast as the time that supersonic flights would become, not only available, but commonplace.

The Tu-144 was first conceived of in a January 1962 article in a Russian aeronautical magazine. On December 31, 1968, the first Tu-144 took off on a test flight. In June of next year, the Russian bird broke the sound barrier for the first time. A month later, it hit Mach 2.

The list of famous names behind the scenes at comic book publishers is a short one. DC comics, purveyors of Superman, Batman, and the rest of the members of the Justice League of America, was largely a faceless corporate entity. I can't recall a single name that jumps out at me, despite reading hundreds of editions of their products.

But when you're talking Marvel comics, two names stand tall. One is Jack Kirby, artist/editor who will likely rate his own column here in the future. The second is Stan Lee, creator of a huge number of superheroes whose names have become as familiar to us as our own.

Stanley Lieber was born on December 28, 1922 in New York City. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania. Stanley loved reading as a child, and by his teenaged years had found a talent for writing as well. He made a few bucks writing obituaries for a press service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center. He also took on whatever other odd jobs he could find, helping out his family's Depression-ravaged situation.

Profanity, I discovered, has a very interesting history. Taboo words have been largely generational. Thus, thumbing one's nose is nowadays considered a childish insult. But go back a hundred and fifty years, and "cocking a snook," as it was then known, was as obscene as the modern-day one-fingered salute.

The scatological S-word has taken the opposite track. Once, it was as proper to use as, say, the term "feces." But somewhere along the line, it gained a reputation for vulgarity.

One thing's for sure, though. Words and expressions that were sternly forbidden by society in general, our parents in particular, are now quite commonplace, for better or, mostly, worse.

But other pendulums swing in opposite directions. Take ethnic terms, for instance.

1960's Miami, Oklahoma was ethnically diverse, to a degree. The degree consisted of two races: white, and Native American. Of course, back then, the latter race was "Indian." But nowadays, that word has taken on some tarnish. Thus, you don't hear it as much as back then.

But all of that changed in 1972.

That year, Vincent Marotta released his invention for sale to the general public: Mr. Coffee.

With the help of one of baseball's greatest players, it revolutionized the way we prepared the essential get-going beverage. Within a few short years, the percolator was nearly extinct.

Our parents drank percolated coffee and were used to it, but the percolation process has issues.

The same water is continuously pumped over the grounds over and over. This is simply not good coffee making form. Plus, the brewed coffee is subjected to 212 degree heat, and that's bad for flavor. However, it did make for one catchy TV commercial!

The Andy Griffith Show was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show. On February 15, 1960, an episode aired where Danny was detained by a small-town sheriff for running a stop sign. Outraged at the size of the fine, Thomas elected to sit in jail rather than pay. While in the hoosegow, he observed Sheriff Taylor's kindly ways in dealing with Opie, his son, Otis, the town drunk (played by Frank Cady, who would go on to star as Mr. Drucker in multiple TV series), and Henrietta Perkins, played by Francis Bavier. Yes, the character names and actors were familiar, but their roles were not yet established as we know them.

The episode was a hit, and plans were made to launch a series that fall based on Mayberry's day-to-day small-town activities. Andy Griffith was a hit from the word go, and never fell below #7 on the Nielsen ratings for its entire eight-year run.

An actor named Don Knotts watched the Danny Thomas episode and called his friend Andy Griffith when he got word that a new series was in the works. He suggested that Sheriff Taylor would need a deputy, and Griffith agreed.

Good call.

I'm a subscriber to Charles Phoenix's Slide of the Week, and I recommend you do so too. Last week, I received a slide that featured a TV that I'd known about, but didn't know too much about. It's called the Philco Predicta, and it had the picture tube on a yoke in a wonderful expression of modern design. Charles had located a slide that featured a Predicta "in real life," as he excitedly put it.

The next thing you know, I'm watching Revenge of the Nerds on TNT, and lo and behold: a Predicta! It was being used to play 80's Atari games.

OK, two Predicta sightings in one week. Time to write a column!

Philco began in in 1892 as the Helios Electric Company. They manufactured batteries at first, but as electricity caught on, they diversified. In 1927, they began manufacturing radios, and soon became one of the Big Three in the business, along with RCA and Zenith. When televisions began appearing after WWII, Philco jumped on board.

Fourteen hours of work recently begs to disagree.

Issue number one: Upon moving from one dedicated server to a more powerful one at half the price two years ago, a large number of graphics were lost. I went into the articles in question, beginning in May 2007, and deleted the references to the now missing graphical files.

The result was over a hundred articles from may to August of that year which became text-only, no pretty pictures.

That has long bothered me. So last week, I decided to take a couple of hours, go find new graphics, and re-illustrate the articles.

After six hours last Wednesday, I had not succeeded in fixing half of them.

So, yesterday, I woke up bright and early and put in another eight hours. There are still a couple of articles left, which I will get to today.

Issue number two: Youtube, and it's yank-first-ask-questions-later policy.

I had posted a dozen or so links to Youtube-posted commercials of the past, and most of them were removed due to copyright concerns.

Now, the way this works is that if you feel you hold copyright on anything that Youtube hosts, let them know. They will instantly take it down, and the person who posted it has to now prove that there was no copyright violation.

Of course, if someone has simply posted an old commercial, they blow off Youtube's request for confirmation.

Who wins? Some slimy outfit that has collected old commercials on DVD, wanting you to buy them. They hold NO copyright claim, but Youtube follows its paranoid policy. So getting them out of the public view, and forcing you to pay to see them, is a no-brainer for DVD manufacturers.

Who loses? We do.

Ergo, I have re-located many lost commercials, or else found replacements, and reposted Youtube panels.

However, I have ALSO downloaded my own copies and posted and linked to them here, on my server.

If I have anything that anyone feels is a copyright violation, let me know and I'll investigate.

But what I WON'T do is take anything down for trivial reasons.

All that being said, I'll be back next Sunday with a new Boomer reminiscence. In the meantime, why not revisit the May-August 2007 archives, and see the results of all my hard work?

The other big release that year was the Polaroid SX-70.

Polaroid had long ago made its name with instant photography. They released their first peel-and-see camera in 1948, just in time for our fathers, getting more prosperous by the day, to preserve images of their lovely kids (that would be US!). By 1965, they released the affordable Swinger, which many Boomers made their first camera purchase.

But let's face it: peeling off the top layer after exactly the right number of seconds was, well, a pain. While still preferable to waiting days for pictures to get developed, we tired of having to carry waste disposal means with us wherever we went. And that emulsion was seriously nasty, sticky stuff if you happened to touch it.

Thus, the world was overjoyed when the SX-70 was released, a camera that spit out a picture that would magically develop right before your very eyes! And no nasty paper to throw away!

It's a tradition with me. While my high school buddies were getting into formulaic crap like Styx, Foreigner, and REO Speedwagon, I was jamming to the Beatles and Stones of the 60's. I am just now discovering that there was some pretty darned good stuff recorded in the 90's. My daughter was pleasantly shocked to hear that I got a kick out of Radiohead's OK Computer.

So prepare to be amazed, Boomer friends. I'm about to heartily endorse an album populated by lots of twenty-somethings!

There's a Boomer connection, of course: the songs all belong to the Grandfather of Grunge, Mr. Neil Young. I've been a passionate NY fan since I first listened to Comes a Time, way back when I used to style my hair.

Cinnamon Girl: Women Artists Cover Neil Young is a two-CD collection of songs by independent artists who all have two things in common: they hold the Canadian genius in high regard, and they all sound amazing.

The look is hard to describe. But there are unmistakable differences.

Later in life, I learned that the soaps were filmed on videotape. The other TV shows were captured on cameras that utilized conventional film.

Go back to the early 50's, and all shows were caught on film. However, most were captured as kinescopes. The cameras capturing the action were piping their feeds straight to broadcast. The only way to record what they were filming was to point a film camera at a monitor screen. Thus, the quality of the captured show was only as good as the sharpness of the monitor and the focus of the camera. In other words, lousy most of the time.

During that decade, AMPEX, makers of sound tape recorders, was experimenting with putting video on tape. By 1957, they had perfected the process enough that a TV episode was shot for the first time entirely by videotape cameras. This was The Edsel Show, a Bing Crosby-hosted special that was considerably better than its namesake. Rumor has it that a door handle fell off of a car shortly after it was featured on the show.

When I'm in that sort of mood, a film like Calling It Quits is just what the doctor ordered.

It's one of those little indy films that went straight to DVD. Often, you never know what you're going to get with those bad boys, but rest assured: this is a wonderful movie.

It stars easy-going Dennis Boutsikaris as Dante Milestone. Dante is a successful businessman who is undergoing a mid-life crisis. The rat-race is too much for the fifty-something, and he decides to retire early and try to find the passion for life that he once had.

He is accompanied in his search by best buddy Jake (Robert Clohessy), who encourages him to find something, ANYTHING to get his head back in the game.

Early retirement gives Dante a bad case of too much time with himself, and he is soon out of the house seeking...

Charles grew up loving to draw. Once, he drew a picture of his dog Spike, who relished eating nails and tacks, and sent it in to Ripley's Believe It or Not. They published the prodigy's cartoon verbatim!

As a teenager, he offered drawings to the high school yearbook staff. They turned him down.

After a stint on the military, Schulz took a job as an art instructor at Art Instruction Schools, headquartered in his home town. Never heard of them? Picture a magazine ad of a cute figure with the exhortation "Draw me!" He also took on a side job doing lettering for a Catholic periodical.

But in 1947, he persuaded The St. Paul Pioneer Press to carry a comic called Lil' Folks. The strip included a kid named Charlie brown and an unnamed, but quite intelligent, dog. The next year, he sold some single-panel toons to The Saturday Evening Post. In 1950, he approached United Features with his best Lil' Folks strips. With considerably more savvy than his school's yearbook staff, they agreed to syndicate them under the name Peanuts. The rest was history.

The show actually spawned a genre that I was not familiar with: fish-out-of-water. In 1962, it was the first television program to take a group of individuals from one world and plant them in another, a trend continued by the likes of Green Acres, Mork and Mindy, and even The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

But, IMHO, nobody ever did it like Paul Henning and his wonderful creation.

As everybody on the planet knows, one day Jed Clampett was out hunting with his faithful bloodhound Duke, when he shot into the ground and spawned a miniature gusher.

The next thing you know, old Jed's a millionaire. Banker Milburn Drysdale convinces him that he needs to move into a nice mansion in Beverly Hills, right next to him. And thus began TV history.

Thus, the environment is on my mind.

I try really hard to stay apolitical. Truth be told, I probably lean a bit right. But I am also supportive of movements that are decidedly leftist in nature.

An example of this is the environment.

Even as a child, I felt a strong desire to protect our ecology. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring didn't affect me like it did my elders, but the crying Indian certainly did.

Therefore, my parents never had to chide me for throwing trash out the window. Would I do that to that poor Indian?

While I was making my own personal dedication to being as nice as possible to our planet and ecology, a movement of concerned young adults was doing the same thing.

In January of that year, the USS Pueblo was on patrol in international waters in the Sea of Japan. Her mission was to monitor communications from North Korea. On the 22nd, two DPRK fishing trawlers approached the ship and circled her for a while. Captain Lloyd Bucher radioed the incident in, but such actions weren't uncommon, and he wasn't unduly alarmed.

What he was NOT aware of were the events that had recently taken place on the mainland. The night before, 31 North Korean soldiers had crossed the ironically named DMZ and headed for the Presidential Palace. Their mission: assassinate the President of South Korea.

They were apprehended within a block of their goal, and thirty of them ended up losing their lives in the ensuing battle. The lone survivor revealed the nature of their mission.

Thus, tension was quite high on both sides of the border when the Pueblo was spotted. Within hours of their encounter with the fishing boats, they were approached at high speed by a warship at full battle stations.