JB Eckl explores the “pretend to pray” line in “California Dreamin’.”

For 60 years, people have misheard the ‘pretend to pray’ lyric in ‘California Dreamin’.’ It totally changes the song.

Even Cass Elliot sang it wrong until bandmate Michelle Phillips corrected her.

By Annie Reneau

“California Dreamin'” is arguably The Mamas & the Papas’ most popular hit, embraced by hippie Boomers upon its 1965 release and beloved by generations since. There’s just one problem with the song: a whole bunch of listeners have gotten a key lyric dead wrong for 60 years.

JB Eckl explains in a Sacred Riffs video: “‘California Dreamin” may be the only hit song whose central event is a fake prayer.” The lyrics describe someone stopping into a church, kneeling, and pretending to pray to get out of the cold.

However, countless people have misheard the lyric “and I pretend to pray” as “and I began to pray.” Clearly, pretending to pray and beginning to pray are two very different things. So what’s the deal?

Gen X is heading toward retirement.

Gen X is redefining what retirement means: ‘We’re not afraid to blow up our lives.’

“We were always very independent and borderline feral, so why would that change in retirement?”

By Annie Reneau

Gen X has never really cared for rules. We’re the Ferris Bueller and Breakfast Club generation who thinks rules are for suckers and old people, right? But what does that mean for us now as we head toward retirement?

According to Caren Magill, the Gen Xer behind the Retire(ish) YouTube channel, retirement for the “forgotten generation” will bear little resemblance to the Boomers’. As Magill points out, “We were always very independent and borderline feral, so why would that change in retirement?”

“I find that Baby Boomers are probably the last generation of folks who get older in a very sort of templatized way,” says Magill. For the most part, Boomers had traditional career trajectories and bought houses along a traditional timeline. Many had pensions. Their road to retirement was pretty clear.

For Gen X, that road looks quite different. In fact, Doc’s line in Back to the Future pretty much sums it up: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

Rosa Parks’ pancake recipe still holds up.

Rosa Parks wrote a pancake recipe on the back of a bank envelope. One key ingredient stands out.

Her “featherlite pancakes” included melted peanut butter. Here’s why it works.

By Annie Reneau

Rosa Parks is known for her civil rights activism, not her cooking. But her handwritten pancake recipe is worth a look, not just as a historical document, but to see why it calls for a hearty helping of melted peanut butter.

Written on the back of a bank deposit envelope, the recipe lives in the Library of Congress. On TikTok, Carlena Davis, a cook, author, and the creator of the Spilling the Sweet Tea TikTok account, tried out the recipe here and raved about it:

People who live frugal lifestyles share best frugal advice from older generations.

Frugal people share the best money-saving advice from parents and grandparents they still use

“My mother taught me how to compare prices per item or ounce rather than by the package.”

By Emily Shiffer

For those with great grandparents, grandparents, and parents from the Greatest Generation (those born 1901 to 1927) and the Silent Generation (those born 1928 to 1945), much can be learned from how to live a frugal lifestyle. These two generations lived through the Great Depression and World War II, two events that forced Americans to become more resourceful due to difficult financial situations, food scarcity, and rations.

People who consider themselves frugal are always looking for more ways to save money. To glean frugal wisdom from older generations that would still aply, one frugal person posed the question on Reddit: “What frugal lesson from your parents or grandparents you still use today?”