Whenever there’s a pile of items that accumulate over the week and we can’t get around to individual pieces on each one, we throw them into a bin like this, which we previously called a stew and then a hash. This time we’re call it a mash-up, which seems like another food metaphor but less so than the others. We’ve obviously not settled on the right name for this segment. Maybe “News Bin.” We’ll keep working on it.

  • That senior ski discount you’ve been hoping for keeps receding, like the glaciers in Alaska and your retirement. Because of the increasing number of people who stay healthy and active into their 60s and 70s—and who have the time to hang out at ski hills—resorts keep adjusting the price of their senior passes and pushing out the age when you qualify. The latest: Purgatory at Durango Mountain Resort. We get it. The National Ski Areas Association says that over-65s ski between 10 and 11 days a year at Colorado resorts. Those 56-65 ski eight to nine times; skiers 46 and younger only get out five to six times. So quit your complaining.
  • A 74-year-old Honolulu resident just finished his first marathon in six hours, which is awesome enough, and even more so considering he is living with kidney failure and undergoes dialysis treatments three times a week.
  • If you have a morbid fascination with retirement trend pieces, this list of “5 appealing trends in retirement lifestyles” will make you happy. Your options run the gamut from the imminently reasonable (senior co-housing, in which you have a private home but share a common house and a grassy commons area), to the seductive (can you really live comfortably in Belize—and eat loads of fresh seafood—on just $25,000 a year?) to the goofy. By goofy we mean this: building a 400-square-foot home in the backyard of your adult children; driving around in an RV, moving from temp job to temp job (or workamping, which sounds much more agreeable that calling yourself a migrant worker); and retiring on a cruise ship (not until assisted suicide is legalized).
  • Las Vegas is that edgy girl or street-tough guy you had a crush on in high school and still think of as a slightly dangerous alternative even though you’ve grown out of whatever sparked your interest in civics class. You’ve changed and so has the object of your desire. Las Vegas, despite its veneer of reckless release, is a bit tame, really. It isn’t that much different than anywhere else. (That’s another way of saying that if you were inclined to do whatever shenanigans you think you might someday do in Vegas, you’d be doing them.) But when you look at Vegas today, you find other attractions that might match your grown-up interests. The weather can be nice. The housing is cheap. The ski hill was an early opener last year. And the city is actively trying to make itself more attractive to bicyclists. A state law passed last November requires cars to give cyclists three feet of space and local proponents claim the city “has one of the best cycling infrastructures in the nation.”

Photo: Southern Elephant Seal (Mirounga leonina) in South Georgia by Serge Ouachée. This picture ranked fourth in the voting for Wikimedia Commons’ 2010 Picture of the Year.