there is perhaps no greater pleasure in this world than the feeling of being understood

Case in point being an e-mail I received just now:

I have been wondering about your sanity ever since you started going off on Paul McCartney and his Starbucks campaign. Up until about 3 days ago, I had only seen one particular PM poster at Starbucks, which seemed pretty harmless. But the other day, I actually saw the poster which, I believe, is the one that set you off [see it for yourself here]. Now I totally understand. It's like Paul McCartney doing "Magnum/Le Tigre/Blue Steel" from Zoolander. It practically made me want to walk into Starbucks and start shooting. You were right all along. Sorry.

Yes! Keep in mind that I've walked by this poster at least once a day, sometimes several times a day, for seven weeks now.

My correspondent also points out that, by standard demographic definitions, Barack Obama is a baby boomer. Fine. He didn't go to college during the Vietnam War, and he wasn't in high school when the Beatles were together. These are what I take to be the key cultural markers of baby-boomerness, but it's absolutely correct that the demographic phenomenon went on a few years beyond that.