Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn: Column With No Name no more

For those of you who have been reading this column for these oh-so-many months, a small but very important crumb of enjoyment has been missing.

This is the proverbial Column With No Name. (Certainly you've heard that proverb, right?) Every other column in the Star Community Newspapers group has something that my column has not had. That something is a name.

If you look under that photo, the one that I don't particularly like, you'll see the word "Commentary." The truth is that word was placed there as we started the column as something to hold the space while we thought of something else. I'm sure some of you think it took so long to find a name because we're slow thinkers. That's not the case. It just kind of got stuck in there, and we haven't put a lot of effort into removing it.

The word "commentary" had one great advantage - it has an old-school, no-nonsense feel to it. Other col-umns in the chain have traditionally used a play on words with the author's name. Former Group Managing Editor Darren Watkins used the "Wat's up," for instance. That's not my style. If we had called the column, say, "Bowen's Arrows," it would fit nicely with that tradition, and I would be suffering a strong, repeating gag reflex on a weekly basis.

No, I've wanted something original that matched my personality and the personality of the column, but in a witty, slightly tongue-in-cheek way. For that reason, I, today, present to you the name of this column. I dub thee, "Hey kids, get off my lawn."

I'm not sure what it says about my personality that when I announced it to co-workers, one of our most recently hired staffers said, "Yeah, that's totally you." Apparently so. Although, for the record, most of my curmudgeonly tendencies are performed with tongue in cheek. So when in a recent e-mail conversation with friends about Dr. Benjamin Spock's child-rearing techniques, I said, "Why don't we just raise them based on voodoo," I wasn't entirely serious.

I settled with Hey Kids Get Off My Lawn after seeing a movie this weekend. I went to a midnight showing of "Rushmore," the increasingly old, deadpan high school movie. I realized that in a theater of mostly young people, I was laughing at basically everything. The young whipper-snappers were laughing at about half of it, waiting around waiting for the Jackass crew to show up and do something gross with vomit.

I realized that was one of my first "Get off my lawn" moments. I seriously doubt it will be the last to come.

Now if I just had a lawn to get off of.

Kevin Bowen is a community editor for Star Community Newspapers.

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