Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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It's a question worth asking in these nutty times: how old is too old to trick-or-treat? On the question-and-answer website Quora, some people ask if the age of 12 is a good time to hang up the ghost costumes. That sounds about right to me. My mother would have decked me if I'd tried to collect candy in the ninth grade. Trick-or-treating has long been a rite of passage of childhood - that is, it used to be. Other people responded to Quora that they see no reason for older people - adults in...
Changing communications technology is one of life's never-ending annoyances, and now we have a new agitation: voice messaging. Voice messaging allows smartphone owners to record their voice and send the recording to others as they would a text or a chat. According to the Wall Street Journal, some people consider the technique bothersome and rude - a camp I am clearly in, and I'll happily explain why. I've experienced a lot of phone-technology changes in my life. When I was a kid in the '70s and...
I bought my first lottery ticket recently. It was a $20 scratch-off that paid me a $40 prize. Winning produced a nice little thrill, so I bought another $20 ticket right away. And lost. I put out $40 to win $40 that day. I’ve bought three $20 scratch-offs since then and won nothing. To date, I’ve paid out $100 to win $40. The house always wins in the end. Still, some people enjoy big paydays playing the state-sponsored lotteries. I know a fellow who hit twice for over $100,000 or so...
"Half of that goes to the bank for your college fund!" That's what my father told me in the 8th grade, when I got my first paycheck for waking up at 5:30 a.m. to ride my bike a few miles to Cool Springs Driving Range before school, where I plucked golf balls for a dollar an hour. My dad had six kids to feed on a single income, after all. Paying my full college tuition bill was never going to be an option. There was only one option for me: work. When I got a little older I started mowing lawns...
Comedian Carl Reiner was good at living well - and he lived well until the age of 98. I recently watched his 2017 HBO documentary, "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast." It introduces viewers to several people who are flourishing in their 90s - running races at 100, doing yoga at 98, playing the piano professionally at 100 - and it really does inspire people of all ages to get off their duff and take life by the horns. Average life expectancy has taken a hit in the past few years due to...
Here's a trend that may not bode well for the future of our country: According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 40 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds have summer jobs - down from 75 percent of teens a generation ago. As it goes, according to the NerdWallet website, teen summer employment has been declining for decades. Why? One reason is that jobs typically tailored for teens are either shrinking or being taken by older folks. Another is that more teens are attending summer school,...
I sure could use a vacation about now - but I have no plans to take one this summer. That's the breaks for self-employed people like me who do not enjoy paid-vacation benefits. When I do not work, I do not get paid. However, nearly one in four American workers are not taking a summer vacation, either - in part because we're the only advanced economy in the world that doesn't mandate employer-paid vacations for them. This is the time each year when I envy my friends in vacation-rich countries...
The only worry I had was that Old Man Miller might be hiding out behind the shed trying to catch us running through his garden when we played "Tag" in our back yards. If you grew up in the '70s in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Our childhood was essentially a 1950s childhood, a great time to be a kid. We played outside all day long in the summertime and no kid was ready to come home for dinner or when the street lights turned on. We had zero involvement in...
I started my first business in the fifth grade when I convinced a neighbor to allow me to cut her grass with her electric lawn mower. That project ended in immediate failure. The mower was powered by a long extension cord — a cord I ran over and sliced in two shortly after I began mowing. Such is the life of the entrepreneur, a life typically filled with lots more failure than success. According to The Balance Small Business, an entrepreneur is someone who develops an enterprise around an i...
I recommend the seasonal flu — but please allow me to explain. About a week ago, I felt suddenly rundown and weak. I just wanted to lie down. I thought nothing of it at the time. My family is facing some difficulties at the moment, difficulties we all must face now and again — and all of us are getting beat down. But it wasn’t just fatigue. Was it the big C, I wondered? Nope. I’d never tested positive for having COVID-19. Did that dreaded virus finally find a way to feast on my blessed good heal...
I’m glad there’s widespread confusion about what a woman is. I’ve been confused my entire life. In the most basic sense, the difference between a male and a female is that a female has two X chromosomes and a male has an X and a Y chromosome — or, in my experience, a “WHY” chromosome? I was raised an only boy with five sisters. All my sisters ever said to me was: Why did you eat all the graham crackers? Why can’t you stop picking your nose? Why don’t you ever change the toilet paper roll when...
My mother and father keep our old photos in their hall closet in a sturdy old Pabst Blue Ribbon box. Sifting through old photos is a glorious experience — one, we now know, that relieves aches and pains by calming the brain, according to a recent study. The last time I looked through the box with my mother, we came across a black-and-white photo of a little girl. That photo was taken 82 years ago, when the girl had her whole life before her. She didn’t know yet that one of her sisters would be...
Their bravery inspires. As I sit safely in the cozy office in my home writing this column, the people of Ukraine are greeting Putin's massive military invasion with incredible defiance and courage. Their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, reportedly rejected an offer to evacuate to safety in the U.S. - despite reports that Putin hired mercenaries to assassinate him. His response: "I need ammo, not a ride." Zelensky's story reads like a Hollywood screenplay. He was born to Jewish parents in the Russi...
Three-day weekends sound good to me. According to Business Insider, a movement is afoot for companies to offer employees four-day work weeks — 10 hours a day over four days, rather than eight hours over five days — so they may enjoy three-day weekends. More employers say that a four-day work week will help them retain and attract employees who, during COVID, reported “working longer, taking fewer breaks, and signing on at all hours of the day and night.” COVID exposed millions of new work-fr...
The federal government should ban them. Girl Scout cookie season is upon us, my friends - the most agonizing of all the seasons. Dieters with ever-worsening health like me, who need to lose weight, are always at the mercy of those devilish treats - as thin mints are clearly as addictive as nicotine. This year, thanks to COVID madness, our challenge is greater than it has ever been. Millions of us haven't put a dent in removing the significant weight we put on in years one and two of our...
Hello, 2022. We hope you're not expecting to get the honeymoon treatment that most New Years have gotten throughout history. You see, 2022, most of us are very cranky here in the U.S.A. and we have our eyes on you. It's nothing personal, 2022. It's just that our hopes for the last two New Year's have fallen far short of our expectations. We remember the high hopes we had for 2020 - which seems many decades ago. That year got off to a really great start. The economy was thriving. Employment was...
‘Tis the season for giving — or, for some legislators, a good time to demand that the government force taxpayers to give others a large gift. A few weeks ago, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the house floor to issue another plea for the federal government to cancel nearly $1.7 trillion in student-loan debt. That is, she is demanding that taxpayers who didn’t go to college, or who didn’t take on large loans to go to college, pay off the often massive loans of those who did. AOC argues that...
Christmas card trends are telling — they speak to the mood of the country — and this year’s trend offers some positive news. According to the Washington Post, hand-written “snail-mailed” Christmas cards are all the rage, particularly among millennials who, all of the sudden, are spending more on Christmas cards than baby boomers. We baby boomers came of age well before everything went digital. I still have and cherish the hilarious hand-written letters my friends and I shared during our colle...
Our time is the best gift we can give to our friends and family this Christmas. Nobody knows how much time we have on Earth - nobody knows when our time will end. We all have friends and loved ones who were claimed way too early. Hopefully, you are blessed, as my family has been, to have loved ones who have lived long and fruitful lives. Such family members have an abundance of wisdom to share - wisdom cultivated over time. I particularly enjoy the pearls of humorous wisdom my 88-year-old...
I wish I had a change of heart, but I still can't support it. Back in 2009, long before I got my beloved 11-month-old puppy, Thurber, I was critical of a proposed federal bill that sought tax deductions for pet owners. According to the Washington Times, Robert Davi, a tough-guy Hollywood actor, and then Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., attempted something back then that tough guys and conservative Republicans don't often do. They collaborated to get a bill - the Humanity and Pets Partnered...
My buddies Ayres and Klinger and I walked its crowded corridors for hours on Friday nights, hoping to meet girls. That's what we did at South Hills Village Mall in the late 1970s, when we were teens and the American Mall was in its heyday. Built in the mid-1960s, and the very first indoor mall to be constructed in Pittsburgh, "The Village" was a typical, large two-level structure with "anchor" department stores at each end, a Sears Roebuck in the middle and a variety of retail stores in...
The autumn leaves are expected to be extra vibrant this year in Pennsylvania, though they are changing colors a week later than is normal. That's fitting. Very few things are "normal" this year. According to Merriam-Webster, "autumn" is "the season between summer and winter comprising in the northern hemisphere usually the months of September, October, and November...." Autumn is also defined as "a period of maturity or incipient decline." Fall has always been my favorite time of the year. The...
Our botched withdrawal from Afghanistan is hard to witness, but hearing the reports of Taliban brutality is even worse. The U.S. Sun reports that “women face having ‘fingers cut off for using nail varnish,’” and that the Taliban “reportedly shot a woman dead in the street for not wearing a burqa…” My heart aches for all Afghanis. It especially aches for the young women who’ve flourished during the last 20 years by freely developing their minds and talents in school, but who now must submit to...
Maybe croquet could improve the ratings for the 2021 Summer Olympics? Please allow me to explain. The COVID-delayed 2020 Olympics are on track to be the lowest watched games of the 21st century, according to marketing research firm Zeta Global. The company has found that "More than 60 percent of Americans were unable to express excitement or interest in the summer games, and at least 45 percent of Americans confirmed they are NOT looking forward to the Games in any capacity." That's a shame, to...
It’s an old dream of mine and I just may do it: Buy a travel trailer and live on the American road for weeks at a time. Recreational vehicle living is a growing trend, particularly for younger people, who, post-Covid, prefer to work at home instead of commuting to their company’s office building. Thanks to technology, your “home office” can now be in an RV parked next to a rushing creek in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been critical of the downsides of digital innovation, which has given us...
