Tuesday September 2, 2025; 4:41 PM EDT
- How you know you’re reallllly old. You tell Alexa to play songs by Elton John and you find yourself singing along with Crocodile Rock with tears streaming down your face. Then they play Philadelphia Freedom. Mama mia.#
The thing about Crocodile Rock is that it's twice-nostalgic. He's singing about a generation-older than mine. Yet it planted in my memory connected to a period in my own life. I was a freshman at Lehman College in the Bronx, recovering from a raucous high school experience where I dropped out and moved into an apartment in the Bronx at 16 and came pretty close to losing my middle-class education-valuing upbringing. At Lehman, I was investing in myself and found out I was good at the things I thought I was no good at because the teachers were so awful. I got a good math teacher, Dr Isaacs, who treated me special because I had a good mind for math, it turns out. And thus I became a programmer when I thought I would likely go into politics before that. I still had the taste for politics, and as it turns out, writing, so I combined all of them into one, and out comes blogging and podcasting, and complicated algorithms that do simple easy to understand things. #- And now Scott Knaster who has had an exciting Adjacent to Greatness career says that Philadelphia Freedom is about Billie Jean King. I did not know that!#