My friend and Mac guru Gil posted a really good blog on the issue of the Apple vs. the FBI controversy. It starts out: “BURIED DEEP within the (Touch ID &) Passcode settings on our iPhones is a toggle switch that reads simply: “Erase Data.” Below this switch, a small block of help text adds the following explanation: “Erase all data on this iPhone after 10 failed passcode attempts.”… Read the whole post Here for his usual enlightening take on the specifics  of what Apple and the FBI want to happen.

Here’s what I posted as a comment:

I have to say that I’m torn between the “small picture/big picture” attributes of the story. Small picture, take the phone into a room at Apple with an FBI agent present, unlock the phone without telling the agent how you’re doing it, get the bad guys. One phone, that’s it.

Big picture, the FBI agent in my neighborhood decides I look suspicious, tells his boss, they want to look at my phone, I say no, they can’t figure out that my password is 1234, they say to Apple “you did it once, so do it again- lives are at stake!” Apple complies because of the precedent and finds pictures of my stupid cat and great kids and nothing else.

Mark Cuban’s right, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Same deal with banning people from entering the country because of their religion or race. Once you do one, you can do them all.

Deer in the headlights, road kill, car accident… all things that we try to avoid looking at but can’t. There are two things in the newspaper (yes, I still look at the newspaper) that are equivalent to a car wreck to me: The Family Circus comic strip, and the NYTimes Style section. Try as I might, if I’m looking at the paper, both things get to me like sand in a bathing suit.

This post isn’t about the Family Circus, but those sanctimonious little roundheaded kids and their sanctimonious rounded headed parents and grandparents should be locked in a cage with the alligators from Pearls Before Swine and be eaten alive. Such as it were. I know they’re not REALLY alive, but that’s the fate they deserve.

But I digress.

The Style Section normally is so far out of my reality that I can get over it. Most of the men’s stuff they show would barely fit my thigh. BUT NOW they’ve intruded on something I carry with pride… my increasingly gray hair. It seems millennials are coloring their not-yet-silver hair to match mine.

And without my permission.

I’ve been nurturing my graying hair for 30 years. Watching it gradually take over in the mirror and when I get a haircut. I still wonder who the fuck’s hair it is on the floor when the cut’s over.

But now, a former member of One Direction has gone gray; the lead photograph in the Style article features a 30 year old senior business analyst (senior my butt, when you have REAL gray hair you’re senior) who says “I really love it. I feel sexier.”

Believe me Jack, if gray hair makes you feel sexier, you’ve got bigger issues to deal with. Having gray hair doesn’t make you any sexier than using Grecian Formula whatever to cover your gray, it’s fake no matter what.

I’ve never had a problem with my gray hair, never even thought about it. I don’t have a problem with anyone else’s gray hair. My problem is that it’s just something else that’s being commoditized and being made phony by superficial people looking for the next thing to sell and be made to seem important.

But then again, the now gray guy from One Direction just shot a racy video with his girlfriend, a model and television “personality”.  Maybe I should try shaving my head….