Old Fashioned
It's dying I guess, the drink now as irrelevant as the Tom Collins, Stinger and Rusty Nail; ahh the days of college and bold livers (those of you who are much younger and steadily growing tired of creative concoctions such as the Appletini and Horchata, saunter up to the bar next time and ask for a Manhattan or an Old Fashioned; if you happen to get an older bartender, you might just get a sly smile). So it is with these blogs fading away or so one hears, the written personal e-posts soon riding off into the sunset to be replaced by the newest craze, the personal podcast (wait, you'll have to listen??). Nothing against any of the changes because even we listen to Desert Island Discs and their radio/podcast which has been ongoing for over 75 years (our favorite of the batch is quite likely the aging reflections of a rather humorous Dustin Hoffman, now 80). But following the shift from a blog to a podcast just wouldn't be for me, my speaking voice being far from optimal; beyond teaching an old dog new tricks, my reflections just didn't transfer well audibly as I learned when a radio station once gave me a try ages ago and, after three attempts, rejected me. Sigh...so much for hearing my booming voice saying "Coming soon to a theatre near you!" Of course, change overall is usually a good thing, sometimes evolving into a set of fads that capture us as a group. We're human so we absorb what we can, make our Borg-like choices, and move on. But as additional long-term studies begin to arrive (the after-effects of Lasik, is one), studies that have had a decade or so to settle, some of the news hasn't been so good. Glance at some of these tidbits which came at the end of the year from The Week: Coconut oil is high in artery-clogging saturated fat; juicing concentrates sugar and makes it easier to consume too many calories; and many gluten-free foods are high in processed carbohydrates, which are linked to a higher risk for type 2 diabetes...Social media is making people lonely...Tatoo ink contains dangerous contaminants that can potentially affect the body's immune system (French researchers found that those with tattoos had elevated levels of various metals --including titanium, aluminum, chromium, iron, nickel, and copper-- in their skin and lymph nodes.)...Red meat increases the risk of death from eight major diseases (In a National Cancer Institute study of 537,000 adults between ages 50 and 71 over 16 years, researchers found that those who ate the most red meat had a 26 percent greater risk of dying from cancer, heart disease, liver disease, or lung disease)...The number of people dying from Alzheimer's disease in the U.S. has soared 55 percent over the past 15 years. Godfrey Daniels, to quote W.C. (no, not the toilet but the vaudeville comedian).
But it wasn't all doom and gloom as some of the recent changes showed. There was the ongoing promise of PDT or Photodynamic Therapy which might eliminate some common skin cancer surgeries (drugs injected under the skin are hit with light which activates the drug); Michael Hamblin of Mass General in Boston told AARP: It will kill anything. It's like the strongest beam of X-rays that you can imagine. Then there's QuickSee, a two-pound handheld device that: ...measures light shone into users' corneas and lenses to calculate measurements for corrective lenses in a matter of seconds (the company was recently bought out by Google). Or for those fearing the limits of Moore's law, the newest experimental processors from Optalysis use not electricity but low-energy lasers which results in huge reductions in heat & energy and huge increases in processing speed. Or take the continuing shift in colors emerging on such traditional vehicles as fire trucks and other emergency vehicles; bye-bye reds, the new colors will likely continue to be...lime yellow; said an article in the now-defunct offshoot of Scientific American (Mind): Lime yellow, which falls in the middle of the color spectrum, is easy to see during the day, when we rely on our trichromatic cone vision, and is the most visible wavelength at night, when human vision is dominated by achromatic rods rather than cones (the link takes actually you to an earlier article by the magazine on our infatuation throughout history with the color red...bull fighters take note). Then there's the recent news that the Chinese textile business has gotten so efficient that they can make blankets as cheaply as recycling older ones (read the story of the new Chinese garment plant going up in Little Rock which expects to make tee shirts for just 33 cents a pop). And finally, what's the savior to the fading paper industry? ("outpacing that of every other paper-based household staple in the U.S.," says Bloomberg Businessweek)...adult diapers. What??
Ah, the joys and perils of growing older and watching the fads come and go. Some years ago, TIME featured a segment on "the frontiers of longevity" and asked questions such as "Why are old people less scared of dying?" and "Why do some unhealthy people live so long?" And on the other side of the spectrum came articles such as the one in Smithsonian that asked "What Did Flappers Want? You May Want to Ask a Millennial" which cited how similar the tastes and desires of today's young are so similar to those rebellious youth of 100 years ago; or the recent piece in The Atlantic that concluded with this about the wavering popularity of the alt-right: Even if the alt-right doesn't survive in its current form, a generation of young white men now harbor the dangerous belief that they have no future -- a belief that will be that much more dangerous if it proves to be true. Congealing such disparities in stories probably evolved for me from a piece in the London Review of Books that asked, "Can History Help?" Author Linda Colley began her piece this way: We are, all of us, saturated with information on change. There is 24-hour news. Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms transmit the latest occurrences across the globe. Those of us old-fashioned enough still to want newspapers can scan their online versions at any time. Yet this blizzard of material easily produces a sense of overload, even powerlessness, a feeling that we are simultaneously being told too much, yet can grasp too little. One vital respect in which history can help is by encouraging us to look away from the blitz of ever shifting news stories, and to consider instead what has proved genuinely significant in the past. Once we do this, we are immediately reminded that most really game-changing transformations have happened slowly. Minute by minute change is a media illusion...As an example, she adds: Populists, a widespread breed at present, often like to represent particular territories and sets of people in terms of an unchanging and finite set of characteristics, either out of boosterism, or as a means to marginalize and condemn. Sounding familiar?
Perhaps it was those articles, even the one that asked "What was it like growing up in black and white?" The question wasn't race, but rather the age nearly a century ago of televisions, movies and camera images. But quite honestly, I think it was this one article in particular, one that talked about GW501516 or the "exercise pill." As far fetched as such an idea may seem, try to picture the pharmaceutical market if you could just pop a pill and voila, there goes your fat and in the process, you've also increase your metabolism and endurance. Would you buy a bottle, or a case, or a year's supply? Here's what the piece in The New Yorker said about the drug and biologist Ron Evans: When Evans began giving 516 to laboratory mice that regularly used an exercise wheel, he found that, after just four weeks on the drug, they had increased their endurance --how far they could run, and for how long-- by as much as seventy-five per cent. Meanwhile, their waistlines (“the cross-sectional area,” in scientific parlance) and their body-fat percentage shrank; their insulin resistance came down; and their muscle-composition ratio shifted toward so-called slow-twitch fibres, which tire slowly and burn fat, and which predominate in long-distance runners...“We got this dramatic increase in good cholesterol, and a commensurate decrease in the bad kind,” he told me recently, noting that 516 also lowered insulin levels and triglycerides. The combination of effects made 516 seem like a promising treatment for what’s known as “metabolic syndrome,” a cluster of symptoms --including obesity, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar-- that is a precursor to heart disease and diabetes. The original developer, GlaxoSmithKline gave up on the drug after tumors began appearing on test animals, but that hasn't stopped humans from ordering the readily available drug online and trying it out; other researchers are looking into the drug as a genetic insert into farmed fish such as carp and salmon (Bluefin tuna, anyone?). So backing up to humans, who would or maybe should take the chance of metabolically changing their innards? Continues the piece: For someone with Duchenne, taking 516 would make perfect sense. There are a handful of other contexts where a short course of an exercise pill could be extremely useful. Astronauts, for example, routinely spend two hours a day exercising on equipment designed to mitigate muscle atrophy and bone loss caused by low gravity, but they still return to Earth after a six-month space-station stint with mild osteoporosis and significantly weakened muscles. Other people for whom an exercise pill might be a gamble worth taking include patients recovering from surgery or attached to a ventilator. Then, there are the elderly. After the age of forty, all of us, even the athletic, lose about eight per cent of our muscle mass each decade, with a further fifteen-per-cent decline between the ages of seventy and eighty. The resulting frailty can be lethal: nearly half of seniors hospitalized for a hip fracture never go home. Would jumping on this bandwagon be any different than the current one of popping pills of turmeric or shark cartilage followed with a gulp of kombucha?
Articles aside, what probably started me on all of this was the sight of an 11-year old boy mowing a lawn. It was a common sight when I was growing up (dads then were a bit less lenient, it would seem for that was about the age when I was trusted to run a gas mower to mow our lawn and go deliver papers on a bicycle and all the other stuff that kids just did in that black-and-white-world). But in today's world, it just doesn't seem to happen (personally, I can't remember a time in the past few decades that I've seen a young boy using a gas mower and actually mowing the yard...alone, no less). Bravo, I wanted to say; that was once me I wanted tell him, but feared that he would just as quickly run off to get his dad because some weird guy was out there talking nonsense (ironically, almost all the researchers working on the exercise pill, at least as featured in the article, are exercise fiends). Then came this blurb from Mallory Pickett writing in Popular Science, a rant which made sense to me but apparently not to much of the rest of the business world: My 88-year-old grandfather lives alone, can't drive or do basic chores, and never learned to cook...This isn't a tragic tale. It's a market opportunity -- and big-name startups don't get that. Let's start with TaskRabbit. Why are its services not available by phone? Seniors would love to pay someone to, oh, pick up their dry cleaning and drop off their snail mail. Then there's Blue Apron, which for some reason is not peppering my grandpa's inbox with ads for senior-specific meal plans featuring large-type recipe cards. And you, Airbnb, you are really missing out: People over 60 are, according to your own data, the fastest growing host population. So start actively courting these folks! They answer their phones. They email. And, of course, they're a huge demo with cash to burn. Seniors contribute $7.6 trillion to the GDP.
But it wasn't all doom and gloom as some of the recent changes showed. There was the ongoing promise of PDT or Photodynamic Therapy which might eliminate some common skin cancer surgeries (drugs injected under the skin are hit with light which activates the drug); Michael Hamblin of Mass General in Boston told AARP: It will kill anything. It's like the strongest beam of X-rays that you can imagine. Then there's QuickSee, a two-pound handheld device that: ...measures light shone into users' corneas and lenses to calculate measurements for corrective lenses in a matter of seconds (the company was recently bought out by Google). Or for those fearing the limits of Moore's law, the newest experimental processors from Optalysis use not electricity but low-energy lasers which results in huge reductions in heat & energy and huge increases in processing speed. Or take the continuing shift in colors emerging on such traditional vehicles as fire trucks and other emergency vehicles; bye-bye reds, the new colors will likely continue to be...lime yellow; said an article in the now-defunct offshoot of Scientific American (Mind): Lime yellow, which falls in the middle of the color spectrum, is easy to see during the day, when we rely on our trichromatic cone vision, and is the most visible wavelength at night, when human vision is dominated by achromatic rods rather than cones (the link takes actually you to an earlier article by the magazine on our infatuation throughout history with the color red...bull fighters take note). Then there's the recent news that the Chinese textile business has gotten so efficient that they can make blankets as cheaply as recycling older ones (read the story of the new Chinese garment plant going up in Little Rock which expects to make tee shirts for just 33 cents a pop). And finally, what's the savior to the fading paper industry? ("outpacing that of every other paper-based household staple in the U.S.," says Bloomberg Businessweek)...adult diapers. What??
Ah, the joys and perils of growing older and watching the fads come and go. Some years ago, TIME featured a segment on "the frontiers of longevity" and asked questions such as "Why are old people less scared of dying?" and "Why do some unhealthy people live so long?" And on the other side of the spectrum came articles such as the one in Smithsonian that asked "What Did Flappers Want? You May Want to Ask a Millennial" which cited how similar the tastes and desires of today's young are so similar to those rebellious youth of 100 years ago; or the recent piece in The Atlantic that concluded with this about the wavering popularity of the alt-right: Even if the alt-right doesn't survive in its current form, a generation of young white men now harbor the dangerous belief that they have no future -- a belief that will be that much more dangerous if it proves to be true. Congealing such disparities in stories probably evolved for me from a piece in the London Review of Books that asked, "Can History Help?" Author Linda Colley began her piece this way: We are, all of us, saturated with information on change. There is 24-hour news. Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms transmit the latest occurrences across the globe. Those of us old-fashioned enough still to want newspapers can scan their online versions at any time. Yet this blizzard of material easily produces a sense of overload, even powerlessness, a feeling that we are simultaneously being told too much, yet can grasp too little. One vital respect in which history can help is by encouraging us to look away from the blitz of ever shifting news stories, and to consider instead what has proved genuinely significant in the past. Once we do this, we are immediately reminded that most really game-changing transformations have happened slowly. Minute by minute change is a media illusion...As an example, she adds: Populists, a widespread breed at present, often like to represent particular territories and sets of people in terms of an unchanging and finite set of characteristics, either out of boosterism, or as a means to marginalize and condemn. Sounding familiar?
Perhaps it was those articles, even the one that asked "What was it like growing up in black and white?" The question wasn't race, but rather the age nearly a century ago of televisions, movies and camera images. But quite honestly, I think it was this one article in particular, one that talked about GW501516 or the "exercise pill." As far fetched as such an idea may seem, try to picture the pharmaceutical market if you could just pop a pill and voila, there goes your fat and in the process, you've also increase your metabolism and endurance. Would you buy a bottle, or a case, or a year's supply? Here's what the piece in The New Yorker said about the drug and biologist Ron Evans: When Evans began giving 516 to laboratory mice that regularly used an exercise wheel, he found that, after just four weeks on the drug, they had increased their endurance --how far they could run, and for how long-- by as much as seventy-five per cent. Meanwhile, their waistlines (“the cross-sectional area,” in scientific parlance) and their body-fat percentage shrank; their insulin resistance came down; and their muscle-composition ratio shifted toward so-called slow-twitch fibres, which tire slowly and burn fat, and which predominate in long-distance runners...“We got this dramatic increase in good cholesterol, and a commensurate decrease in the bad kind,” he told me recently, noting that 516 also lowered insulin levels and triglycerides. The combination of effects made 516 seem like a promising treatment for what’s known as “metabolic syndrome,” a cluster of symptoms --including obesity, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar-- that is a precursor to heart disease and diabetes. The original developer, GlaxoSmithKline gave up on the drug after tumors began appearing on test animals, but that hasn't stopped humans from ordering the readily available drug online and trying it out; other researchers are looking into the drug as a genetic insert into farmed fish such as carp and salmon (Bluefin tuna, anyone?). So backing up to humans, who would or maybe should take the chance of metabolically changing their innards? Continues the piece: For someone with Duchenne, taking 516 would make perfect sense. There are a handful of other contexts where a short course of an exercise pill could be extremely useful. Astronauts, for example, routinely spend two hours a day exercising on equipment designed to mitigate muscle atrophy and bone loss caused by low gravity, but they still return to Earth after a six-month space-station stint with mild osteoporosis and significantly weakened muscles. Other people for whom an exercise pill might be a gamble worth taking include patients recovering from surgery or attached to a ventilator. Then, there are the elderly. After the age of forty, all of us, even the athletic, lose about eight per cent of our muscle mass each decade, with a further fifteen-per-cent decline between the ages of seventy and eighty. The resulting frailty can be lethal: nearly half of seniors hospitalized for a hip fracture never go home. Would jumping on this bandwagon be any different than the current one of popping pills of turmeric or shark cartilage followed with a gulp of kombucha?
Articles aside, what probably started me on all of this was the sight of an 11-year old boy mowing a lawn. It was a common sight when I was growing up (dads then were a bit less lenient, it would seem for that was about the age when I was trusted to run a gas mower to mow our lawn and go deliver papers on a bicycle and all the other stuff that kids just did in that black-and-white-world). But in today's world, it just doesn't seem to happen (personally, I can't remember a time in the past few decades that I've seen a young boy using a gas mower and actually mowing the yard...alone, no less). Bravo, I wanted to say; that was once me I wanted tell him, but feared that he would just as quickly run off to get his dad because some weird guy was out there talking nonsense (ironically, almost all the researchers working on the exercise pill, at least as featured in the article, are exercise fiends). Then came this blurb from Mallory Pickett writing in Popular Science, a rant which made sense to me but apparently not to much of the rest of the business world: My 88-year-old grandfather lives alone, can't drive or do basic chores, and never learned to cook...This isn't a tragic tale. It's a market opportunity -- and big-name startups don't get that. Let's start with TaskRabbit. Why are its services not available by phone? Seniors would love to pay someone to, oh, pick up their dry cleaning and drop off their snail mail. Then there's Blue Apron, which for some reason is not peppering my grandpa's inbox with ads for senior-specific meal plans featuring large-type recipe cards. And you, Airbnb, you are really missing out: People over 60 are, according to your own data, the fastest growing host population. So start actively courting these folks! They answer their phones. They email. And, of course, they're a huge demo with cash to burn. Seniors contribute $7.6 trillion to the GDP.
Okay, this isn't one of those "good old days" pieces. It's just interesting to step back some times and view things from a different and often father-away perspective. There's good and bad in both the old and the new, and likely always has been. So, to end on a good note, here was another tidbit pulled from one of the local papers: Ryan McCuen went beyond the call of duty. The Clinton Township, Mich., firefighter recently responded to a medical call by a local family, whose son has muscular dystrophy and needed to be taken to the hospital. McCuen soon discovered that the boy had to be connected to a ventilator to breathe, but his family had been overwhelmed by medical costs and fallen behind on their bills, causing the power to be cut off. McCuen paid the $1,023 electric bill on the spot, and the power was restored within 20 minutes. "I was glad to do it," he said. "I'm just trying to give back." Not that you want my opinion, but that sounds a bit old fashioned to me..
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