Archive for August 2023
We’ve Been Taught That . . .
. . . nothing rhymes with orange.
It does not.
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Got A Problem . . .
. . . with your cell phone, computer, laptop or tablet?
No need to call,
just show up at noon in the lobby
and let the Fourcher Tech lads solve it for you.
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Planning Your Future
Includes Your Funeral
A neighbor’s husband took care of her, both emotionally and economically, until his death early last year. More than six months later, even with the assistance of her family attorney, she is still looking for documents vital to tying up all the loose ends in the estate.
While she’s alone in her predicament, she’s not alone in the number of men and women left stumbling in the dark after a spouse’s death. It seems that, along with prostate cancer, gaffes at work, and spousal-abuse, nobody wants to talk about their death. But everyone faces it. So a bit of planning is in order.
Several years ago, a friend who was the police chief in a city far away, was diagnosed with raging cancer in his early 40s. He was given weeks — not months — to live. He called all his friends and colleagues to a night at a local club and hosted a farewell party. At the beginning of the evening, he told everyone of his situation, told them all to eat and drink up and that he didn’t want to see them anymore because he wanted them to remember him as he was that night.
You don’t have to do the same thing. You can acquire a life-insurance policy payable on your death to be used to pay for the casket and caterer when you die. You can pare the price by opting for less-expensive cremation rather than pay for an elaborate and costly sealed box to house your remains underground.
You can work out your own funeral plans simply and economically. First ask yourself if you want an elaborate service and several-day visitation or do you prefer a simple gathering of relatives and friends. Do you want to be buried in a casket or is cremation your preference.
What does your family want? Discuss it with them.
Just as sure as you were born, with which you had nothing to do, you’re going to die, and you can so do something about those arrangements.
Some Of You . . .
. . . may remember this
(and some of you may not),
but it’s a reminder of why
we wish an actor good luck
by saying “break a leg” —
it’s because every production has a cast.
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It’s Fall Season
Year ‘Round at Home
More than 50percent of all falls occur at home, so that’s where you should start looking for hazards – and eliminate them. The death toll from fall-related injuries for people 65 years and older tops 17,000 each year and some 3 million more seniors were treated in emergency rooms around the country for injuries sustained in a fall.
Fall-prevention should be high on seniors’ priority lists.
Start by making sure your vision is not failing and that the interior and exterior of your living quarters, whether it’s a house or apartment, are well lighted night and day.
Remove rugs from slippery floors and tack down carpet edges that may curl up. Don’t leave shoes, slippers, socks and clothing laying around on the floor. Install handrails alongside all stairs and steps and grab bars in showers and bathtubs. Then check your medications to see if any of them interact in a way that might affect your vision or make you dizzy.
If Marriage . . .
. . . ever becomes illegal,
only outlaws will have in laws.
(Think about it.)
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Check Moles for
Alphabetical Clues
It’s not always practical to head to the doctor’s office every time a new spot shows up on your skin. If you have concerns, have your physician take a look, but there are certain indicators, dubbed the ABCDE’s of skin cancer, that signal the need for closer scrutiny from an expert.
Stand in front of a full-length mirror and take note of moles that you’ve always had. Then check all blemishes for:
— Asymmetry, moles that don’t look the same on each side;
— Borders on moles that are irregular, jagged or blurry;
— Colors that are inconsistent, including areas that are darker; multiple colors, such as blue, purple, red, or gray, or colors that change;
— Diameter of moles larger than a quarter inch or the head of a pencil eraser, and
— Evolving lesions, namely, lesions that are not stable and are changing, even if they are small.
Any of those indicators individually and, certainly, together warrant a trip to the doctor.
.
My Tablemate . . .
. . .was not impressed
when he asked me
what I was feeding my dying plants
and I told him it was their favorite:
root beer.
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Bard’s Spirit
Still Alive in
Avon ‘s Stratford
By Silvia Shepard-Lobanov, Mature Life Features
STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England –- The “Sweet Swan of Avon,” Ben Johnson’s honorific for William Shakespeare, is reflected best in Nature’s choreography as the stately curvaceous creatures carve their way over the surface of this world-famous waterway. When you visit here, chances are you will find a place where a swan, in Wordsworth’s words, “floats double, swan and shadow” and fluttering its feathers while skimming noiselessly upon the water.
The Avon, like many English waterways, has a series of locks designed to let the water flow evenly across the countryside. Their dimensions determine the length and width of the long boats that carry visitors and others on relaxing cruises. Row, motor, and small boats of every sort ply these waterways. In summer, the setting becomes a liquid raceway with rafts, canoes, and home-made craft “struggling,”as the locals say, down the river in complete disarray.
The town’s largest venue where the Bard’s words are given substance is the Royal Shakespeare Theater that opened in 1932. The Other Place Theatre, 100 yards up the road, also houses themed medieval events as well as lectures and debates. Other local sights of interest include dwellings that played a part in Shakespeare’s life.
In 1582, at age 18, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, and sired three children, Susan, Hammett and Judith. Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, where she grew up, is open to visitors. It’s a 12-room farm house with timbered walls and lattice windows and a signature piece of Elizabethan homes: the thatched roof is made of straw piled high without wood planks underneath.
The thatching was the only place where animals could get warm, so all the village‘s cats and dogs lived in the roofs. When it rained, the thatch became slippery and sometimes the animals would fall off the roof. Hence the saying, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”
Stratford, which is less than 100miles northwest of London on the M-40 motor way, breathes Shakespeare. You can see his bed, the dishes he used, and other elements of his life. And on his gravestone in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church the epitaph on the stone, supposedly written by the Bard himself, reads:
“Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.”
Free Summer Concert . . .
. . . at Chandler Center of the Arts
Friday evening
featuring rowdy renditions of
Scottish and Irish tunes
as well as rock ‘n’ roll.
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How Good Were
‘The ‘Good ‘Ol Days’?
By Tom Morrow, Mature Life Features
In today’s fast-paced life, many older folk long for the way things used to be. It seemed like time was slower paced when they were growing up. Well, maybe.
Life was less complicated back in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. As a youngster, the only real worry I had was “the bomb” and “polio.” My part of the world was southern Iowa, where television was something you read about in the newspapers.
We didn’t get a TV set until 1953. The screen was snowy and the nearest station was in Ames some 130 miles away. Des Moines, the state capital, didn’t have a station until 1956. For us kids, radio and the movie theater were the only sources of entertainment.
Most of the movies were not first-run but radio had some really great programs to get our minds working. We were glued to early morning news reports hoping for announcements of snow storms that closed school and offered us a day of freedom from classroom drudgery.
Back then, telephone party lines were commonplace. There was plenty of coal and coal oil for heating in winter but there was no air conditioning in the summer. Some of us had the luxury of an indoor toilet.
For cars, new tires were relatively expensive but used re-treads were available for about half the price. You had to watch where you drove because pot holes and the like could actually break a tire. The new tubeless tires were especially prone to breakage and inner-tube tires were pretty common up into the ‘60s.
During high school, I had an after-school job at a Conoco service station and I learned prying a tire off of a wheel was no easy feat. And remember this? When a customer drove up for gasoline, we had to wash his or her windshield, check the oil and tire pressure and, in the station where I worked, whisk-broom the floor mats. A lot of work for a few gallons of gas at 29 cents per, but the station owner didn’t care because I was working for him at 50 cents an hour.
Radio programming after school and Saturday morning was for us kids. We rushed home from school to hear the latest adventures of “Straight Arrow,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” “Sky King,” and others. They were 15-minute serialized programs and every bit as exciting as the soap operas Mom had been listening a couple of hours earlier.
A number of those after-school radio programs made it to Saturday mornings with expanded 30-minute presentations.
We were given special privileges if we became club members. We got secret decoder rings if we eat two boxes of breakfast food and sent the box tops along with a dime to complete the transaction.
More sophisticated programming such as “Dragnet,” “Johnny Dollar,” “Sam Spade,” “The Whistler,” “You Bet Your Life” and the Bob Hope’s, Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny and Groucho Marx shows were top listening fare. Later we shared the night with Mom and Dad listening to after news commentary by H.V. Kaltenborn.
At the movies, our appetites for cowboy shoot-em-up westerns were fed old (and I mean really old) films from the ‘30s starring the likes of Hoot Gibson, Buck Jones, Harry Carey, Tom Mix, and early John Wayne as “Singing Sandy” or one of the “Three Mesquiteers.”
Red Ryder and the Durango Kid were featured Friday and Saturday nights at the Lyric Theater. Red was played by “Wild Bill” Elliott and the Durango Kid, who always seemed to have his great white stallion close by in a cave for quick retrieval to chase the bad guys, was played by Charles Starrett.
Chance . . .
. . . to learn about
short-term
home-health-care
insurance
at 2 p.m. today.
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Learn How Michelangelo . . .
. . . distorted some of his masterpieces
to make them look more real.
Check in with Ken Sorenson at
10:30 a.m. in the theater.
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MURPHY’S OTHER 15 LAWS
Submitted by a Resident
1. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
2. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
3. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
4. A day without sunshine is like, well, night.
5. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
6. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t.
7. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
8. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.
9. It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end-to-end, someone from California would be stupid enough to try to pass them.
10. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.
11. The things that come to those who wait, may be the things left by those who got there first.
12. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
13. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
14. God gave you toes as a device for finding furniture in the dark.
15. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of twelve people, who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.
Like Most Folks . . .
. . . I have a favorite chair – –
my recliner and I
go way back.
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Poking Fun into the Past:
Our Most Beloved Humorist
By Tom Morrow, Mature Life Features
Today’s humorless woke culture makes it almost impossible for anyone to poke fun at anyone in the political spectrum without being shouted down by some portion of the population.
That is to say, it’s a good thing Will Rogers isn’t tossing off his incisive barbs these days when so many folks search for reasons to be offended.
He was born Nov. 4, 1879 in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, and fashioned a life as a cowboy, vaudeville performer, stage and film actor, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator.
Rogers often quipped his ancestors did not come over on the Mayflower, but they “met the boat.” He traveled around the world three times, made 71 movies (50 silent films and 21 talkies) and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns. By the mid-1930s, he was among the highest paid Hollywood stars.
He poked fun at Prohibition, politicians, gangsters, government programs, and a host of other controversial topics in a way that found general acclaim from a national audience. He often proclaimed, “I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat.” In 1901, he and a friend went to work as cowboys in Argentina before setting sail for South Africa, where he was hired at a ranch. It was there that he started his show business career as a trick lariat roper in Texas Jack’s Wild West Circus.
That’s where “I learned the great secret of show business — knowing when to get off the stage. It’s the fellow who knows when to quit that the audience wants more of.” He took his roping act to Australia and returned to the United States in 1904, appearing at the St. Louis World’s Fair before joining the vaudeville circuit, which led him to New York’s Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway.
In 1918, Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn gave him a three-year contract at triple his Broadway salary. At the same time, Rogers was on his lecture circuit and wrote his New York Times syndicated column, “Will Rogers Says,” that reached 40 million readers daily. His newspaper column expressed his traditional morality and belief that political problems were not as serious as they sounded. He urged isolationism for the U.S.
During his lectures, Rogers quipped, “A humorist entertains, and a lecturer annoys.” From 1929 to 1935, Rogers’ radio broadcasts sponsored by the Gulf Oil Co. was ranked among the nation’s top programs.
He was an aviation enthusiast and promoted a military air force along with his friend, Army Gen. Billy Mitchell.
Although he supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, he easily joked about it, saying, “Lord, the money we do spend on government. It’s not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money 20 years ago.” Rogers increasingly expressed the views of the common man and downplayed academic credentials, noting, “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
In 1935, Rogers asked his friend, famed aviator Wiley Post to fly him to Alaska to search for new material for his newspaper column. On Aug. 15, they left Fairbanks for Point Barrow. About 20 miles southwest of their destination they landed to ask directions. Upon takeoff, the engine failed and they plunged into a lagoon. Both men died instantly.
Before his death, Oklahoma commissioned a statue of Rogers, representing the state in Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. Rogers insisted his image be placed facing the House Chamber so he could “keep an eye on Congress.” Capitol tour guides say each president traditionally rubs the statue’s left shoe for good luck before entering the House Chamber to give the annual State of the Union address.
Many landmarks are named in the humorist’s honor: Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City, the Will Rogers Turnpike between Tulsa and Joplin, MO, and 13 Oklahoma public schools. U.S. Highway 66 is known as The Will Rogers Highway with a dedication plaque at the roadway’s western terminus in Santa Monica. There have been two U.S. Postage stamps dedicated in his honor and the U.S. Navy’s Benjamin Franklin class submarine, USS Will Rogers, was launched in 1966.
Among his more widely known sayings are, “All I know is what I read in the newspapers,” and “When I make a joke no one gets hurt; when Congress makes a joke it becomes law.” Probably his most famous quote is the epitaph in his Clairmont, OK, tomb stone: “I never met a man I didn’t like.”
Lady At A Nearby Table. . .
. . . was discussing a relative’s recent birth
and commented that women shouldn’t have any more babies after 35.
I agree,
35 babies in any one family is enough.
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Autoimmune Disease
Attacks from Anywhere
It wasn’t all that long ago when most of us never heard of an autoimmune disease.
Medical science and research has identified more than 100 of these disorders that range from type 1 diabetes to multiple sclerosis, lupus, and autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis. No one knows what causes these diseases nor why anyone gets them. Many victims live with the condition for years before being diagnosed properly.
An autoimmune disease occurs when your immune system mistakenly attacks your body. For example, autoimmune hepatitis is a result of your immune system attacking your liver instead of the lurking germs and viruses. Your immune system never rests in its battle against bacteria and it somehow can turn on you, causing debilitating, and death-threatening in some cases, inflammation of joints, nerves and organs.
Recent reports indicate the problem is increasing as more than 15 percent of the population carry biomarkers of autoimmunity, a 5 percent rise over just a few decades. Medical experts attribute the increase to chronic stress in our day-to-day lives, diets loaded with processed foods, and environmental toxins, such as insecticides and pesticides in the air and food.
A healthy diet and lifestyle helps combat the onset and treatment of autoimmunity. Starting with your diet is probably the simplest and easiest first step toward insulating yourself against autoimmune attacks. The Mediterranean diet is recommended widely as a healthy weapon against autoimmune disease.
There is plenty of literature available on what comprises this anti-inflammatory list of food that calms your immune system. A quick overview includes vegetables, fruit, nuts, fish and olive oil. Foods to avoid include refined oils, processed meat, and anything with added sugar. Almost three-quarters of your immune system lives in your guts, so probiotics and live-culture foods such as yogurt are strong shields against autoimmune attackers.
A dietician can work with you to prepare a list of eat and don’t-eat items.
Regular exercise is also urged. You don’t have to sign up at a gym for daily two-hour weight-lifting sessions. A walk in the park with your dog, a bicycle ride, or some laps in the pool all work and can be enjoyable. This activity will also help avoid stress and relax. And you’ll probably sleep better, giving your body and immune system more time to repair itself.
Before adopting any regimen in your life, discuss your situation with your primary care physician.
Mature Life Features 