I'm watching the Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. Wayne Newton is the guest and when the topic of his young wife came up, he said "you're only as old as the woman you feel". Anyway, my opinion of The Late Late Show has improved during the year. At first I was a bit sad to see Tom Snyder retire and be replaced by Kilborn, and so that colored my opinion of the show. Now I know that he's not bad, although the show is remarkably wacky like Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

All four late night talk shows have fallen into almost the same pattern with minor individual differences. There is the opening monologue and then the two to four guests. Musical act, if any, is last. A few skits are thrown in throughout the show. All the shows are pretty much the same to me, and I only tune in for the particular guests. It's true that they're funny, but they're all funny so it's not like I'm missing out on anything by watching one show over another.

I'm trying to watch more interview shows. Rather than a talk show, an interview show is focused on one guest for that half-hour or hour that the show runs. Later is not bad, with a guest host to go along with the guest. It gives some lesser known people a chance to host a show. Lately the hosts have been female comedians, so the banter can get amusing.

A good interview show that I've sort of started watching is Larry King Live, on CNN. This is because I've started watching more CNN and have stumbled on this show. It's quite good as it's an hour- long show with only one guest so they can really get into some of the details rather than the 5 minute promotional schtick of late night talk shows.

Today's guest on Larry King was Tom Brokaw, I think promoting his book "The Greatest Generation". Brokaw states that the greatest generation of people in the US are the one's born during the Great Depression. These people grew up in poverty, then fought in World War II, and afterward laid the foundation for the Baby Boomers. Persevering through some really tough times, they accomplished a lot.

I agree with the sentiment. Seldom in US history has there been a 15-year period of strife like 1930-45 or so. I can look at my generation and see that we are very fortunate indeed. We live in a time of great economic opportunity, where women and minorities are a vital part of the workforce. The only burden we have is the Social Security System. (I believe the environment, injustices in the world, are not imminent problems for our generation).

We're going to have to pay for our parents' retirement benefits whilst taking care of our own retirement investments, because Social Security is unlikely to be there for our generation. One of the reasons for that is that we're more or less in a dip in population growth versus age. There are a lot of Baby Boomers, they're living longer, and we're not making that many kids. I can live with that burden. We're going to support our parents and our- selves and we can do that because we're not having kids. Hopefully the next generation will have more kids and get back to that popu- lation growth business.