Archive for February 2023
After Every Mardi Gras . . .
. . . there’s an Ash Wednesday.
So enjoy Mardi Gras frolicking
that begins at 3 p.m. Tuesday in the dining room,
then
all Roman Catholics
get down to the 2nd floor theater
for Communion and ashes at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
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Some people never get my name right
While there have been several requests about how to pronounce my first name, See-sill for Cecil is easy to remember.
It’s my last name that gives them the most trouble. In English, you just pronounce every letter – Scag-lee-owe-knee. In Italian, the “gl” is swallowed and the name comes out Scal-YO-knee. It works the same as gnocci — nyoki
Even after several attempts, most seem to prefer spelling my last name ending with an “i” – Scaglioni. My insurance company persisted for years to keep spelling it that way even though it was spelled correctly on the policy.
Many editors have had head-scratching sessions to make sure the by-line on my stories was spelled correctly. For many years, they preferred the shortened Cec Scaglione. One article in my Detroit paper appeared under the by-line of Ceg Scaglione until a sharp-eyed editor caught it and corrected it for the later editions.
Early in my career, I received a check from a Toronto magazine made out to Cec Scogbone. I managed to get it cashed at my bank so it didn’t become a problem.
I get a lot of correspondence with the “g” dropped – Scalione.
One of the credit-card companies I was enlisted with a while ago persisted in sending me a monthly statement addressed to Scaslione. They even came up once with Schelione.
A welfare agency I did a story about sent me a thank-you note addressed to Mr. Scageclone. A complimentary note for another story I wrote was addressed to Mr. Scheline. A Methodist bishop sent a letter to my boss lauding the effort of Mr. Ceg Scaliogre.
But I feel comfortable with my name, especially after having run across so many easy-to-maul names over the years.
It’s The Weekend . . .
. . . so take it EZ
and drop by to schmooz
around Sunday’s ice cream
+ + + +
Happiness is
not having to set the alarm clock.
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Roman Festival Brightens
Umbrian Hillside
Why not drop around on Sunday, Riccardo suggested, “We’ll have a few artichokes.”
The retired Alitalia pilot and his wife, Mariolina, were our landlords when we arrived in the medieval central-Italy castle-town of Panicale and became our friends before we left. They opted out of big-city living in Rome and built a picture-book home in a hill-clinging olive grove just below the town’s centuries-old walls.
This fortress overlooks Lake Trasemino, the peninsula’s fourth largest lake, to the north; the manicured Tuscan countryside to the west, and the rolling Umbrian hills to the south and east.
As every hiker knows, you walk a hill at your own pace. That’s why no one hurries. Everything here is up hill. So it was about a 25-minute walk to Riccardo’s.
We knew we were in for something special as we approached the lane sloping into their farmyard. It was like breaking into an opera. About three dozen people wearing the full array of bright yellows, reds, greens – pick a color – were milling about chittering, chattering, and chanting in that Italian sing-song from which arias emerged. The accompaniment was provided by Riccardo’s tractor as it hauled dead olive branches to a pile resembling a titanic tumbleweed.
We became a member of the cast immediately because our chore was to pluck mint leaves off the plant stems and chop the stocks off the artichokes – shopping-cart-sized mounds of them. The leaves were minced with garlic and olive oil and the artichokes were given a good slam on the ground to soften them because the centers were opened up and crammed with the mint leave-garlic-oil mixture.
Through all this, you had to balance wine – almost everybody brings their own to determine whose is best for bragging rights – with oil-drenched bread, cheese, fresh fava beans, and more wine before the fire was ready.
The giant pile of shrubbery is burned and the ashes raked into a flat lava-like bed of coals. Then you had to tuck your artichoke into the coals to cook. Again, the operatic metaphor arose as each person displayed a distinctive dance pirouetting around the blistering mound. It takes about 45 minutes for the artichokes to cook in this manner, which gave everyone time to sample more wine with the sausages and pork barbecued on a fire fed with larger chunks of trimmed olive wood.
Then flowed the desserts, all of them home-made.
Name The Movie . . .
. . .you signed up for leaving Friday noon:
80 for Brady
or
A Man Named Otto
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Technology
has advanced exponentially over the centuries.
Just think,
it took only one byte out of the Apple
in Eden to change their world.
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Phoenix Embraces Desert Sprawl
Unlike its legendary-bird namesake, this sprawling metropolis ranked among the fastest-growing areas in the nation did not re-energize itself by rising out of its own ashes in the burning desert. More like that pink rabbit in the battery commercial, metropolitan Phoenix just grows and grows and keeps on growing, stretching its shopping centers and sub-divisions over and around every cactus and crevice in the Valley of the Sun.
To get our arms around this urbanized sprawl that has positioned attractions and accommodations as much as two hours apart, we traveled by car, bicycle, horse, light-rail and balloon. We launched our local exploration by visiting the Arizona Challenger Space Center. Visitors flow seamlessly through scenarios that include space missions complete with emergencies. Still in up-in-the-air mode, we headed to Deer Valley Airport on the northeastern edge of town for a mile-high 90-minute balloon ride to enhance our perspective of the local growth.
If such a diversion doesn’t sound appealing, you can take a quick drive to South Mountain Park where several viewpoints offer panoramic views of this vibrant valley. The best time to head there is the first two weeks of April when rain-fed blooms carpet the mountainside. For a closer look at those, we took advantage of a mountain-bike tour – others took a more leisurely hike – of Usery Park east of the city. That’s where we were told that one reason the giant saguaro cactus, which grows only in the Sonoran Desert that stretches from Arizona into Mexico, develops “arms” not to denote its age but to balance itself against the relentless wind.
To pick up more easy knowledge, about an hour away is a hands-on complex designed to keep anyone from 8 to 80 entertained for hours on end. While the Challenger facility transports you into learning mode without you realizing it, the Arizona Science Center in downtown Phoenix caters to the touch-and-feel gene in all of us.
There’s much more to this town than desert, of course, and prominent among the valley’s notable resorts is the Phoenician, which is tucked into a fold of local icon Saddleback Mountain with its eye-candy nighttime vistas of the twinkling town lights to the south. About an hour south in the Gila River Indian Community is the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort on the grounds of a casino – the largest of the more than half-dozen casinos in this metro area — built by the Pima and Maricopa tribes of Native Americans. A small parasol-protected riverboat putt-putts gamblers on a man-made creek between the hotel lobby and casino lobby. You can tour the facilities via horse-drawn wagon or range farther by heading out from the horseback riding stables.
Get Your Arms In Shape . . .
. . . for Bocce ball
Friday 11 a.m. poolside.
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What . . .
. . .do vegetarians count
to go to sleep?
Heads of lettuce?
Cucumbers?
Pumpkins?
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Only Your Computer Knows Virtual Money
It’s a tenet of investing: if you don’t understand the company or product and what it does, drop it and move on to something else. Which makes the Bitcoin story bizarre. Not only is it understood by a select group of financial high flyers, no one is really sure who started it.
Since the Bitcoin’s birth a dozen years ago, it’s travelled a bumpy road the stretches from a price of $400 five years ago to more than $60,000 about a year ago. Along the way it dropped to $4,000 in 2019 from $19,000 two years earlier.
The value of Bitcoin rises only if there’s a demand for it. If no one wants it, the value drops dramatically.
If Bitcoin sounds a bit scary, there are more than 6,500 other cryptocurrencies on the market.
If Bitcoin doesn’t catch our fancy, you can purchase Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar, Polkadot or Cardano among the thousands of other options.
None of these currencies involve printing presses. They exist only in computers – cyberspace.
There is a growing industry servicing the spending of Bitcoins after you buy them. They’re readily available at thousands of automated teller machines around the country.
And there’s a whole new language involved.
For example, Ethereum claims to be “a decentralized software platform that enables smart contracts and decentralized applications (dapps) to be built and run without any downtime, fraud, control, or interference from a third party.
“The goal behind Ethereum is to create a decentralized suite of financial products that anyone in the world can freely access, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or faith.”
Did you get all that?
Transactions are conducted through a digital ledger called a blockchain. This involves a worldwide computer network that stores the virtual money in a digital wallet.
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A Neighbor . . .
. . . thanked me
for defining “myriad” for them.
They said it meant a lot.
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From poker to pinochle,
it’s just another day
at Verena of Gilbert.
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Sleep Right, Sleep Tight
Your mother’s nagging to make your bed turns out to be healthy advice.
A National Sleep Foundation survey reveals that folks who make their bed daily are more likely to get a good night’s sleep than people who don’t make their beds. And change your sheets weekly.
Allergens that disrupt sleep can build up in your sheets. They also can build in your pillow so you should change it every couple of years. Or use two pillows and alternate them every month or so.
St. Valentine Died . . .
. . .around 270 A.D.
His true identity was questioned as early as A.D. 496 and one account from the 1400s describes Valentine as a temple priest who was beheaded near Rome by the emperor Claudius II for helping Christian couples wed. A different account claims Valentine was the Bishop of Terni, also martyred by Claudius II on the outskirts of Rome. Because of the similarities of these accounts, it’s thought they may refer to the same person.
In all, there are about a dozen St. Valentines, plus a pope.
The saint we celebrate on Feb. 14 is known officially as St. Valentine of Rome to differentiate him from the others Because “Valentinus”—from the Latin word for worthy, strong or powerful—was a popular name between the second and eighth centuries A.D., several martyrs have carried this name. The official Roman Catholic roster of saints shows about a dozen who were named Valentine or some variation thereof.
The most recently beatified is St. Valentine Berrio-Ochoa, a Spaniard of the Dominican order who traveled to Vietnam, where he served as bishop until his beheading in 1861.
St. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers and epilepsy, among many other things.
People call on him to watch over the lives of lovers, of course, but also for interventions regarding beekeeping and epilepsy, as well as the plague, fainting and traveling. He is also the patron saint of engaged couples and happy marriages.
You can find the flower-adorned skull of St. Valentine in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome. In the early 1800s, the excavation of a catacomb near Rome yielded skeletal remains and other relics now associated with St. Valentine. As is customary, these bits and pieces of the late saint’s body have been distributed to reliquaries around the world. You’ll find other bits of St. Valentine’s skeleton on display in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Scotland, England and France.
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Take A Free Look At . . .
It’ll be an educational view
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Learning sign language . . .
. . . could come in handy.
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Open Sesame is Too Simple a Password
As hackers break through firewalls protecting our nation’s facilities, the rest of us are wondering how to protect our assets from internet thieves. Cyberspace crooks pounce on bank and credit card accounts to fatten their finances.
It’s vital that you make your passwords as complex as possible to shield your information. they can be sheltered in the cloud, software programs, password manager and a protection service. These usually involve a fee. Or you can store them in a simple-to-keep thumb drive.
A prime rule to call to mind is that having a password that’s easy for you to remember – an old address or your father’s birthdate – makes it easier for password-hacker hounds to sniff out and attack your data. And using the same password for everything you work at in cyberspace makes it simpler for these same hackers to scramble through all your secured sites.
What happens if you lose your thumb drive? First of all you should store your passwords on two or three such drives. Keep them in safe and secure places. One should be in a safety deposit box.
Your passwords should be complex and different for every site The doorway to your email should be different than that of your bank account that should be different than that of your medical data, which should be different than … you get the idea.
Internet security experts suggest you begin with a Shakespeare quote or a song lyric or a phrase you make up yourself.
Let’s use “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Write down the first letter of each word. Keep the punctuation and use capital letters for stressed words and you get W,WeaNaDtD.
You might add the date you first visited the ocean (which might have caused you think of this quote). You can split it up with half in front and half at the end. If it was July 4, 1954 – 7,4,1954 — you can wind up with 741W,WeaNaDtD954.
Looks complicated doesn’t it, but you know what it means. It also meets the rule offered by password pros – use a combination of upper-case and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols. And the longer the phrase you pick, the longer the password and the more difficult it is for hackers to crack.
Password security experts also recommend padding the password to make it longer but warn against using the shift key for padding or adding symbols. They suggest adding a short string of letters — such as jkjkjk – in front of and at the end to strengthen your password against assaults by hackers.
If you make the process fun, you’re more likely to remember the formidable password you’ve developed to protect yourself out in the cyberspace.
Have You Ever Wondered . . .
. . .where Noah
kept the termites
on the Ark?
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Worried About Warts?
It’s always best to get medical treatment for anything that attacks your body, including warts that seem to be appear and disappear willy-nilly on various parts of your body. A common remedy is to have them frozen so they fall off or they can be cut out by a doctor.
There are several around-the-house remedies that have been successful in some cases.
For one, you can cut a small potato in half and rub the cut side of the potato on the wart twice a day until it disappears. Or you can rub the wart daily with a piece of pineapple or the inside of a banana peel.
Some folks report daily application of the gel from the aloe vera plant works. A garlic clove crushed and mixed with water, applied to the wart daily, and covered with a bandage reportedly works in three to four weeks. Another solution to try is two parts apple cider vinegar to one part water. Soak a cotton ball in the mixture and wrap it over the wart for three or four hours every day.
Be A Good Scout …
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People have quit asking me
to drive them someplace
since I’ve told them I will
if they let me know when I’m snoring.
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Friends Help When Friends Pass Away
Having a coffee or chat with a friend will help assuage your grief when another friend dies. Reviewing old times with someone will help soften the blow after a pal has passed away.
Grief counselors suggest you concentrate on the good times you had with the deceased to lighten the load of grieving. It also helps to write down some of those memories and send them to members of the dead person’s family along with your expressions of sympathy.
There are a couple of don’ts. Don’t try to forget them and don’t feel guilty. Thinking of how you might have visited more often or made a few more phone calls or sent a couple more emails only fuels your grief. So does trying to shut out the times you spent together
Taxing Time
Bocce aficionados meet at 11 a.m. poolside
Talk At Our Table . . .
. . . was interrupted
when the notorious gossip nearby
increased their decibel level to proclaim,
“I don’t want to say anything bad about (deleted)
but boy is this good.”
Get Doctor’s Opinion on Medical Fees
Whether or not you have health insurance, always ask your doctor if there is a fee involved when discussing any appointment, surgery, test, procedure, or any other arrangement being made to continue your treatment.
Follow-up appointments for such purposes as checking on proper healing of minor surgery or monitoring blood pressure can be chargeable but any fee might be avoided if the patient asks the doctor about any charge when the follow-up is discussed.
For example, follow-up visits after surgery normally is included in the surgeon’s original fee. But not all, so ask to avoid surprises.
The process has been complicated by the recent rise in telemedicine: internet contact with doctors by telephone and computer. In some cases, they’re covered by Medicare, Medicaid or supplemental insurance. In some cases, they are not, so you have to check with the doctor.
Mature Life Features 