Never forget the Icy Finger of Death
You’ve been baking under the sun for a few weeks now. There’s more to come. Summer feels like an energy leech, sucking away your strength, your enthusiasm, your life force. You long for winter. So it’s time to remind everyone that cold, though attractive right now, can be as terrifying and lethal as fire. To...
Work makes you crazy; retirement causes dementia
Let’s begin at the end: you are screwed, regardless. That is the rational conclusion you can draw from a recent and huge (half a million participants) study in France. What the researchers found was that you have two life choices, neither of which is good for you. You can keep working. (This wasn’t addressed...
Koreans love the outdoors like Americans love spectator sports
Twenty-five years ago, when Koreans were known for having the world’s longest work week (nominally six days, often longer), they still found time to get outdoors. Hiking clubs were a big deal. Camping was less popular because it requires a couple days of leisure in a row, but it was still popular. Over the...
Hot and heavy
Two stories collided last week. First, it was very, very warm, so that the heat map of the United States turned a radiant, stop-sign red—the color of Irish skin after the first day of a beach vacation. So hot, in fact, that the National Park Service had to nag people to stop frying eggs...
Record-breaking round-the-world voyage for 70-year-old
In an extreme case of a nice elderly lady wandering away from home, 70-year-old Jeanne Socrates has become the oldest woman to sail around the world, solo, without stopping. The grandmother from Ealing, west London, completed her circumnavigation last week, when she docked her 38-foot yacht Nereida back in Victoria, B.C., after 259 days...
Everyday life and death
You know how this goes. A bunch of olds get together and go on regular bike rides. Some are 90. Some are disabled. They click off 25 miles and adjourn to the bar, or have a nice salad over lunch. You don’t care and why should you. Except that the difference between doing this...
People in glass lookouts shouldn’t throw the first stone
Sometimes that old wine just can’t be decanted into a new bottle. Case in point: you have some property near Yellowstone. You want to make some money off it, so you build high-end cabins. You put in wi-fi and a flat screen TV and queen beds—equipping them like a modern condo in downtown Seattle...
