Old Age Habits

I used to smile and say to myself, "I hope I am not that way when I am old, whenever I would see my parents exhibit those all too common old age symptoms. But ow, I am old too and I am imitating (unwillingly) some of the physical and mental decline they showed when they were elderly. We have no choice in the matter, as aging is beyond human control. Therefore, it's probably healthy to think at age 15 that you won't be like mom and dad.  Today I mention some of those symptoms, and perhaps you may already have the same today.

My dad used to lie on and fall asleep on the coach in our living room. No matter how we tried to convince him not to do so, it happened almost every night. I remember awakening him past bedtime to send him to his bedroom.  He always told me the couch was more comfortable. I now agree with him. Now, I sleep as much on a couch or chair as in my bed. It really is more suitable for sleep. I suppose their is some physical reason but I think we don't feel as much pressure to fall asleep on the coach than we do in bed. That has something to do with it.

Another old age habit is ritual behavior. These are harmless to us but they annoy the young people watching. My mom used to have certain ways of cooking, decorating, reading etc. They never varied. If, for example, she was going to decorate the house for Halloween, it always was done on the same day, October 1st. As we age we find comfort in the familiar. That's why "old people" have so much old furniture in their houses. They care less about style or fashion and more about the message their familiar furniture sends to them. I am now the same way. My house somewhat resembles a museum.

Yet another old age habit I now have that my parents modeled for me is the never say no mindset when asked by others for help in some matter. I suspect as we are older material things have less value. Thus, we donate more, give more, and extend whatever skills we have for the benefit for others. I remember my father telling me, when asked what gift he wanted for his birthday or some holiday. 'I don't need anything," he would say. Never mind wants. He was passed the want stage, preferring his family have things and he supply them.

Among the other old age habits I now display are the universal ones; sore muscles, ligaments and bones; no interest in TV or in modern music; a declining interest in traveling abroad; ignoring almost all new technology and being puzzled at the attraction it has for others; sitting and thinking often; forgetting and needing to write lists to remind me of what I intend to do; loving nostalgia and boring younger people with stories of it; finding excuses to cook less and clean the house less; wanting more and more to spend the day "doing nothing"; scheduling many more doctor's appointments.

That's a few of the future of being old. But it's not so bad. Not having to work anymore, having no child care responsibilities, being financially secure all help make being an old fart not such a bad thing after all. Now....let's see if I can take a nap on my favorite couch.

Thou Shalt Not Drive.....In Saudi Arabia

I am both baffled and amused by the phone contention of left wingers her that the United States is conducting a "war on women". Huh? I have noticed that. I have a daughter and neither has she. Maybe the war is in the bubble in which the leftists reside. They often cite pay disparities, using phony statistics, as a basis of their concern that there is some kind of discrimination against females here. That kind of nonsense is the red flag that the issue is not a real one.

Therefore, I suggest those war on women types shift there emphasis to where women really face unfair and unequal treatment..Saudi Arabia. Oh, wait! The left says that all Muslims are perfect and above criticism for anything. So I guess that shift in War on Women tactics won't happen. But in Saudi Arabia itself there is starting to be recognition of the War on Women there, a war started and continued by Islam itself and a resistance for some Muslim countries to resist the modern world. Saudi Arabia  has just announced that women have the right to drive for the first time in the ultra-conservative kingdom.

In a royal decree signed by King Salman bin Abdulaziz, the order on the right to drive said it will be effective immediately but the roll out will take months, according to the Saudi government. The decree said that women would be allowed to drive "in accordance with the Islamic laws." (Whatever that means) Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world to bar females from driving, has received negative attention for years for detaining women who defied its ban, though one would never know that if listening to a member of the Democratic party here in the U.S.

Saudi Activists are celebrating the news as a major development in a country where women face extreme social and personal restrictions as a result of the Saudi Arabia's strict interpretation of the religion of Islam. Women have not been not allowed to travel without the permission of a male guardian. They also must cover their hair and bodies in public under the law. Change in Saudi Arabia for women has come with more Saudi women working in retail jobs and being appointed top executive roles at the Saudi stock exchange and at the Saudi airport. Women can now also be appointed to the Shoura Council and run in municipal elections.

Some women in Saudi Arabia who have recently challenged the ban on driving a car defied the accepted norm of their gender not driving have not fared well. Manal al-Sharif was arrested for breaking the law in 2011 when she filmed herself cruising behind the wheel of a car and uploaded the video to YouTube. Eventually she was released from jail after international outcry. But Saudi Arabian policy still was that women who drive become immoral.  Democrats in the U.S. have raised only a peep about it, instead focusing on the imagined War on Women here. But then, the left wing bubble rarely includes reality.

Among other problems for women in Saudi Arabia include:
1. Women are not allowed to travel without the permission of a male guardian, usually their father or husband.
2. They are not allowed to "dress for beauty" and must cover their hair and bodies in public under the law.
3. Women are required to limit the amount of time spent with men to whom they are not related.
4. A Saudi woman can not open a bank account without her husband's permission.
5. Women can not eat freely in public. They must eat under their face veil.
6. Women must limited physical closeness with other men and are segregated from the opposite sex in most offices, banks and universities.

Uh...cancel my vacation plans if they include Saudi Arabia.

Meteorologists And Stockbrokers Are The Same People

I was thinking the other day that if I were a young man who was about to attend college, what field would be the best to prepare for. I am not interested in which field offers the best pay, rather, I would want to find the field in which it is the easiest to get by. This reflects my limited talents and the fact that I would just want to have an easy day at work, not be bothered by high expectations. And after ruminating about this I concluded that meteorologists and stockbrokers have it best.

Just think about your local weather person, or a broker who advises you. In both cases we have low expectations for their correctness. On average, both of the two is right about 50% of the time. Hmmm I think that's the same as flipping a coin before deciding what choice to make. I could do that! Sign me up to be the weather forecaster. Perhaps the guess ratio in the weather field is why so many meteorologists have great skepticism of the "global warming" theory. The idea that climate can be predicted so precisely, as the global warming advocates contend, while humans can not even predict what the weather will be like 30 days from now.

Meteorologists and stockbrokers deal not only in the scientific, but also in the abstract and guessing field. Stockbrokers are like the global warming crowd that is so sure that humans can control climate. It's a false bravado based on the idea that the rest of us are just as clue less about which stocks to buy or what controls weather as are those two professionals. We listen to the meteorologist and stockbroker because we want to have someone to blame for our own lack of awareness about climate and the financial markets.

Some enterprising grad student should do research on this. Perhaps 1000 meteorologist could switch places with 1000 stockbrokers for a month or so. A comparison of their accuracy in their new position to what they predict after the switch would give us an idea whether my contention that both are about 50% when predicting. Hmmmm Maybe I can take an online meteorologist course and get my degree........

Thousand Dollar Phones

I recently read that the new iPhone costs $1000. Can you believe that a telephone costs more than many people pay their government in taxes? I am not sure why they call it a "phone" because those gadgets long ago made calling on them a secondary function. It's because the inventors of all the new apps and features of those cell phones have to keep adding useless junk to them in order to charge idiots $1000 to buy them.

Amazingly, people seem to wait in line hours before a new phone is launched, somehow deluded enough to think they need the latest edition of a new phone or that they may not be able to purchase one if they are not first in line the first day it's sold. Since I have never owned a cell phone of any type, I don't feel the irrational attraction to it that owners have to it. Maybe those phones have a"nicotine" somewhere in them as do cigarettes. I wonder if any studies have been done to rate the addictive quality of a cell phone to cigarettes to heroine or even more powerful substances that take control of human willpower.

Too, I wonder when there will not longer be any new apps and features to add to those phones, so that the phone itself will be replaced with another communication technology that is more appealing to humans. They did try to do that already when Apple released that Apple Watch  that users wear, supposedly to replace of the cell phone. It seems to have been a dud. If there is a new communication device that makes the cell phone addicts throw away their cells, I will be a happy man.

It might mean that can we return to the simple device called a telephone, a one use product that makes and receives calls and is located in a stationary spot in one's house. Long live the Land line! Bring it back and civilization will soon follow.

Growing Up Slowly

Here's an interesting result from a study of teenagers today, this according to psychology  professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, the lead author on the study published in the journal 'Child Development'. She says that compared to teens of the 70's, 80's and 90's, today's teens are not concerned as much about being adults. They are creeping rather than wild and crazy,  putting off risky behaviors like drinking and sex, but also delaying jobs, driving, dating and other of the usual developmental steps teens have long taken towards independence.

“The whole developmental pathway has slowed down,” she said, with today's 18-year-olds living more like 15-year-olds once did. The study relies on seven nationally representative surveys repeated with 8 million teens, ages 13-19, over several decades.  It documents and combines several trends often explained as separate phenomena. People in their early 20s now often act more like teens, young teens often act more like children, and I guess children act like children because there isn't a lower level of development for them. But why are kids maturing more slowly now?

Some of the changes recorded among younger teens surveyed in 2010-2016, compared to those surveyed in the early 1990s. Here are some of the study's conclusions, and they are seen among all economic groups in every part of the United Sates.

• 29% of 9th graders had sex, down from 38%.
• 29% of 8th graders drank alcohol, down from 56%.
• 32% of 8th graders had worked for pay, down from 63%
Among 12th graders, data on most behaviors goes back to 1976.  In 2010-2016:
• 67% drank, down from 93% in the earlier era.
• 55% worked for pay, down from 76%.
• 73% had drivers’ licenses, down from 88%.
• 63% dated, down from 86%.
• 62% had had sex, down from 68% in the early 1990s, the earliest that data was collected.

According to the study these trends are not explained by the demands of homework and extracurricular activities, which have not significantly increased. But the Internet is a different variable and the authors of the study feel it is a main driver of the crawl to adulthood today. The study also feels that more parents who are super protective of their kids also encourages the lack of rush to adulthood.  We now have a culture in which parents invest more attention in fewer children and life expectancies are longer. Perhaps the Internet shows kids today that being an adult is not the ideal fantasy previous generations thought it to be.

Growing up is undoubtedly harder to do today. There are more places to hide and more reasons to stay a child. The question that the study and no one knows at this point is whether growing more slowly as kids do today is a better or worse model for making them more competent and happy adults.

250 New Words

Merriam-Webster has added 250 more words to the dictionary. Ugh...just what we need in this age of misunderstanding what others say and mane. More than one thousand new words have been added to the Webster Dictionary since it's inception, proving that English lives and thrives because it is a changing and accepting language. New words come about naturally through public use, and they disappear when no longer used by the same public that introduces new ones.

The new words including terms from recent advances in science, words from foreign languages that are quickly introduced and accepted aided by the rise of the Internet communication system, and words associated with technology, medicine, pop culture, sports, and from misuse of or improper understanding of current terms.

Webster's is the classic dictionary used for so long in the U.S. and it says that when it changes its word listing it merely reflects the breadth of English vocabulary and the speed with which we seek information. The new words, says Webster, also highlight the old fashioned skill Webster employs of creating useful and readable definitions.  This year new entries range from ‘alt-right’ to 'ransomeware', which show that the words in many cases are a reflection of trends and changes in society. Here are a few of the new ones you may recognize or use.

*Troll- It used to describe a dwarf or giant in Scandinavian folklore. The new definition that Merriam-Webster added is a verb and means,  "to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content.  Wow! I think I may be a troll.

*Dog Whistle- It once referred to what you blow to attract attention of Fido.  Dog whistles now refer to "coded messages political parties that will be heard one way by their core supporters and another way by everyone else." Just listen to Hillary Clinton whine about why Americans rejected her in the last election and you will be dog whistled to death.

*Sriracha- With the craze for Asian food imbedded in the U.S. food chain now Webster added this to its dictionary It defines it as, "a pungent sauce that is made from hot peppers pureed with usually garlic, sugar, salt, and vinegar and that is typically used as a condiment." I always leave Sriracha on the table because I like to actually taste the food, not fiery spices added to it. A lot of bad food has been disguised by Sriracha sauces.

*Bibimbap- another food entry that Webster defines as, "A Korean dish of rice with cooked vegetables, usually meat, and often a raw or fried egg." Hmmm I know quite a few other Asian foods with the same ingredients without the fancy name Bibimbap. I suspect this one will eventually fade from popularity.

*The Internet of Things- Webster says it is, "The networking capability that allows information to be sent to and received from objects and devices, such as fixtures and kitchen appliances, using the Internet ." Didn't we used to just call that "hardware"?

*Hive Mind- It used to be defined by Webster as "The collective mental activity expressed in the complex, coordinated behavior of a colony of social insects (such as bees or ants) regarded as comparable to a single mind controlling the behavior of an individual organism." Now it is also defined as meaning, "The collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people (such as Internet users) regarded as functioning together as a single mind.  Society is indeed now a herd of sheep that bleats in unison whatever propaganda is fostered on it by the extreme liberal elite. And we are as busy as bees complaining about fake issues instead of the real. It's stinging.

* Working Memory- Webster says that it is, "Memory that involves storing, focusing attention on, and manipulating information for a relatively short period of time, such as a few seconds." Wait! I thought that was my attention span.

Anyway, you can see from these few examples of the new 250 that we are creating more new words because of the technology that assumes, dominates and destroys us. Maybe there is a term that describes that kind of self slaughter. How about "techno suicide"?

Scottish Links

A year or so ago I took a DNA test on Ancestry.com and enjoyed learning my "heritage" (no crazies showed up in my family history...but the, maybe I am the crazy). It's fun, if not important, and that was the end of it. But about one month ago another genealogical site, myheritage.com, sent me a message informing me that if I uploaded my DNA test result from ancestry.com, that it would give me a free trial and show me more about my ancestry. I did so. myheritage must want me to join their site because they are sending me so many interesting links to check on my ancestors, and now I finally have some information on my father's mother's paternal side.

Originally, I thought my father's mother's side of the family had roots in Ireland. But  from the information about the Lockharts, their surname, I learned that they were Scottish. Oh my. I need to buy a kilt and some bagpipes. The Lockhart hat immigrated to the United States (to Virginia in the late 1600's) apparently was Scottish. His family then moved to Northern Ireland and then that relative moved to the U.S.

More than 100,000 Scottish Protestants migrated to Ulster in Northern Ireland, but by 1717, conditions had reached such a point that many Ulster Protestants began a new migration; this time to the American Colonies. And one of those was my father's mother's family. It is estimated that more than a quarter million Scotch Irish immigrated to America between the years 1717 and 1775.  So I have an ancestor who was in the United States before there was such a country.

It makes sense because the Scottish word for Lake is Loc, as in Lockhart. The fun part was finding out who some of the Lockharts were and what they did during their lives. One was Sir Robert Lockhart the 7th of Cleghorn, county in Scotland, a prominent royal. Hmmm Maybe you should start calling me "Sir Stupid" to give some respectability to my rants here. I also found that former President Bill Clinton was spawned from a Lockhart. I am not happy about being related to Bill Clinton, but relieved I am not related to horrible Hillary Clinton.

The rest of the ancient Lockhart clan were an assortment of every possible social and economic class and of many different occupations. One relative is June Lockhart, the famed actress of the 40's and 50's. Another Lockhart was described as "Britain's greatest elephant trainer in the late 19th century. I also had Lockharts who both died and survived the famed Titanic sinking.

I hope that I didn't bore you with my genealogical report, but it was fun for me to read that information and pass it on to you. Sir Stupid has an urge to eat haggis now, and wishes that you have a Bonnie good day. Slainte sonas agus beartus (Health , wealth and happiness) to you.