Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
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.
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.
You’re Never . . .
. . . too old
to learn
something stupid.
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Wanna reminisce?
Check in with
Flashbacks at 3:30
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Turning Away from
Mauthausen Concentration Camp
Was Not an Option
By Fyllis Hockman
While the architectural grandeur and resounding history of the four Central European capitals – Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest – were overwhelming and wondrous, the biggest impact on our Grand Circle Danube River Cruise was made at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, one of the first to be built and the last to be liberated.
My first visual exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust came as a teen-ager in newsreel depictions of the emaciated survivors with their sunken eyes and gaunt bodies liberated from some camps at the end of World War II.
It helped me understand what my mother told me about the Holocaust. Six decades later, I came to understand even more.
Mauthausen, one of the largest of the camps, was built high up an Austrian hill in Linz, where Hitler was once a resident, near a large quarry. The rationale behind concentration camps evolved over the war years from imprisoning people, enslaving them and engendering fear among the general populace to simply one of extermination.
Mauthausen was considered a Level 3 Camp. The guiding principle was simple: everyone was to be killed some way or other. The SS excelled at methods of mutilation and annihilation.
The roots of this genocide, according to our guide, were fostered in and fueled by anti-Semitism.
Many bodies fed “the stairs of death” leading to and from the quarry where malnourished and mistreated prisoners were forced to carry heavy stones up very high stairs and often died in the process. Others were simply pushed down the steps. These stairs still jut out of their peaceful and bucolic setting as cold reminders of the past.
Prisoners also were forced outside during winter and had cold water poured over them. This was a particularly appealing entertainment for the SS guards who delighted in “showering” people to death – outside the actual gas chamber showers, that is.
Another favorite SS sport was to entice prisoners into situations where they might appear to be escaping – and then shoot them. Any soldier who shot an inmate trying to escape got extra days off.
Others prisoners, sick and beaten, simply died during daily roll call, a grueling process of standing in the heat or cold for four to five hours and being forced to do exercises when most of them could no longer stand.
Students tour Mauthausen
In the barracks, hundreds were housed in such degraded conditions the term unsanitary does not begin to describe them.
On a wall is written the “wheezing, hissing, moaning, sobbing, snoring” that filled the night-time air in 20 languages: “The noise fused into a single, terrible sound produced as if by a giant monstrous being that had holed up in the dark.” Another wall writer wrote: “Anyone who hadn’t been brutal when they entered the world became brutal here.”
Our tour took us to the gas chambers where thousands were killed and the ovens where their remains were burned, with a side visit to the infirmary where unspeakable experiments were carried out.
Despite being within earshot of the thousands of prisoners suffering and screaming, the neighbors in the surrounding community claimed ignorance of what was happening. Some complained about the noise, but not about why it was occurring.
The grandmother of our guide, who was seven at the time, said she could smell the stench of the burning bodies. She knew something bad was happening but nobody talked about it.
Of the 200,000 prisoners who occupied Mauthausen from 1938 to 1945, about half were killed. There were only 20,000 survivors when liberation finally came on May 5, 1945. Some 80,000 were already too ill to benefit from the end of the war.
Most of the guards went home after the war suffering no consequences and little was said about what they had done. No one talked about it. According to our guide, it took Austria four decades to acknowledge its part in the Holocaust.
There were several teen-aged school groups visiting the camp and I felt thankful they were learning of these atrocities. The Holocaust will be relegated to the status of other historical occurrences the young will hear about in class but will not relate to. Who really cares about the Crusades?
If You Can Get . . .
. . . decaffieneated coffee,
how come you can’t get
deiced ice-cream?
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‘Tis Good for the
Sole — er, Soul
Get ready to read this aloud to a crowd.
Start simply by pronouncing the word ghoti. Go ahead, say it.
You pronounced the gh as it tough – f – right?
Then the o like in women — i.
And the ti like in national – sh.
You got it right: fish
That’s the peril of this language. Drop a letter and what’s yours is ours. It’s rough, because you add a couple of letters and you’re through.
A simple alphabet change and you cough up your dough.
Are you saying these words out loud?
It was our Spanish teacher who pointed out Sir Winston Churchill’s admonition about paying attention to the pitfalls and peculiarities of the language.
“There certainly is a difference,” he pointed out, “between looking at a young woman sternly and looking at her stern.”
Pour Yourself . . .
. . . a cup of coffee
or a glass of wine
and enjoy this:
The Reason . . .
. . . so many people
have a clean conscience
is because
it’s never been used.
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Health-Care Costs Top Concern
More than one-third of the people in this country are worried about the rising cost of their health-care services and insurance coverage. This level of concern indicates that more than twice as many people are worried about health-care costs than not being able to pay their rent or mortgage.
The public also is worried about a wide range of health matters, according to a nationwide poll. About one-third said they were very worried that their health plan will be more concerned about saving money for the plan than about what is best for them.
Almost 30 percent said they are very worried that the quality of health care they receive will get worse. About the same percentage said they were concerned about affording prescription drugs. And about a quarter said they worry about the availability of health services they think they might need.
The top issues facing government, according to more than a quarter of those polled, expanding health coverage for the more than 40 million people without insurance and providing prescription-drug coverage for seniors. These two items rank higher than other health-care problems such as malpractice reform and assuring the fiscal health of the Medicare program.
Thirsty Thursday . . .
. . . is always welcome and
it’s a bridge to Friday’s Super Supper Shuttle
that gets us to
Olive Garden,
Old Chicago Pizza,
Village Inn and
In.N.Out Burger this week.
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Compound Interest Beats the Odds
Famed physicist Albert Einstein is credited with describing the most powerful force in the universe as “compound interest.”
Yet just as many people who don’t understand his theory of relativity also don’t understand what he was driving at in this instance.
Three out of 10 Americans think their best chance of amassing half a comfortable financial cushion in their lifetime is to win a lottery or sweepstakes, according to a Consumer Federation of America poll. The odds of winning a lottery are one in 10,000,000 to 20,000,000.
When the Consumer Federation asked how much money you would earn by investing $25 a week for 40 years at a 7 percent return, no one guesses as high as the actual amount — $286,640. Invest $50 a week at that same 7 percent rate – the average annual return of the Standard and Poors 500 — for the same period and you double that amount, which is well more than half a million dollars.
What makes compound interest so powerful is that you not only earn interest on the money you put into an investment, but you also earn interest on the interest. If you put $100 in an investment program at 7 percent, you should have $107 at the end of the first year. The next year you earn 7 percent on the $107 not just the original $100.
Seems Like Just Yesterday. . .
. . . but it was two weeks ago that
the Super Supper Shuttle launched its maiden trips.
And it’s here again this Friday.
If you haven’t marked down its schedule, do it now.
It’s free and operates on the 2nd and 4th Friday of each month
Departure from Verena at Gilbert is at
3 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 4 p.m., 4:30 p.m., and 5 p.m.
Departure from restaurants is at
3:15 p.m., 3:45 p.m., 4:15 p.m., 4:45 p.m., 5:15 p.m, and final pickup at 5:45 p.m.
Be at the pickup point on time or be left behind and wait for the next one.
Restaurants this month are
Wendy’s Hamburgers,
Chili’s Grill & Bar
Texas Roadhouse
Cafe Zupas.
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When the cops arrest a mime,
do they tell him or her
that they have the right to remain silent?
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Some Things Never Change
With inflation catapulting prices to stratospheric and shoving 401(k)s into the economic mud, it’s a bit comforting to learn that some things have become cheaper.
Take the humble and ubiquitous nail.
A Wellesley College economist has drafted its history from 1695 when it cost about 12 cents, to 2020, when the price per nail was half that. The reasons are a bit convoluted and his history indicates that the price per nail almost hit 20 cents in the late 1700s and sank to a low of 2 cents during World War II.
Until the 1700s, nails were hand-forged by blacksmiths hammering a rod of iron into the proper shape. As late as the 1800s, they could make one nail a minute, compared with modern machines that spit out 2,000 nails a minute.
The first U.S. patent for cut nails – a machine cut them from a thin strip of iron – was issued in 1795. It pumped out 6,000 nails an hour. This mirrored the Industrial Revolution, which saw nail production move from blacksmith to machines progressively powered by water, steam and electricity.
If you’re wondering why such importance is relegated to such a minor piece of hardware, you might recall how Benjamin Franklin regarded its importance:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost
For want of a horse, the rider was lost
For want of a rider, the battle was lost
For want of a battle, the kingdom of was lost
…all for want of a nail.
Nails are used to fasten one or more pieces of something together. The most common objects they are hammered into are made of wood. They also are used throughout the construction industry in concert, plaster, plastic and drywall. As proclaimed in the message above, that missing nail would have fastened a metal horseshoe to a horse’s hoof.
What once was a cut piece of metal with one end flattened into a head, has morphed into roofing nails, finishing nails, box nails, flooring nails, masonry nails, two-headed nails and screw nails, among others. But its original design, which has been documented to at least as far back as 3400 B.C. in ancient Egypt, still holds fast.
The description of nails in pennies does not spring from their cost. It denotes their length. For example, a 2-penny nail means its length covers the width of two pennies.
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.
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
Mature Life Features 