Posts:
I hesitated to write this column because so many people are suffering and dying from the coronavirus. And it didn’t seem right to place blame on someone with that as the backdrop. But it’s time for someone to yell and say, “Hey! Get your heads out of your asses and...
Hello. It's Markku Sario again, sitting in for Robert Bradley, who is thankfully out of the hospital but is still very much in recovery from his painful knee surgery. The Covid-19 news has been dominating all the media outlets with gloom and doom for a depressingly...
As reported in Interesting Engineering, in response to being cooped up at home, many are "stress eating." In addition to toilet paper and canned goods, they're stocking up on comfort foods like chocolate, ice cream, chips, and dips. They report that on Twitter,...
By Jeremiah Reardon When my father John finished eighth grade in 1913 he joined his friends working in the Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania coal mines. The tipple boys separated waste from coal dropped on screens by the wrought iron tippler. An old miner cracked knuckles to...
By Jason Murdock A California man who peddled prevention pills and a bogus injectable cure for novel coronavirus infections on social media has been arrested on a federal fraud charge. Keith Lawrence Middlebrook, 53, was arrested by the FBI yesterday evening after...
In mid-September back in 2017, Edie and I were traversing part of Ecuador’s lowlands as we worked our way up the coast from Salinas to San Lorenzo. As usual, we were on the look out for photo-ops but the atmospherics weren’t too accommodating. Eleven days of travel...
There's no shortage of coronavirus claims, miracle cures, and outright hoaxes, but some are so outlandish that they're sometimes entertaining. Let's only look to the experts for credible information. MercuryNews.com (San Francisco, CA) reports that Amazon has pulled...
By Susan Burke March As reported, water usage in Cuenca is up 25 percent, as well as the lack of recent rain. I had heard earlier this week that water usage was up 20 percent, and reached out to my friends on social media to get some top tips for saving water. Please...
By Rob Bell I am not the kind of person who waits. I’m an active person. A doer. I feel more comfortable being proactive than fatalistic. And after eight days of voluntary quarantine, I am practically jumping out of my skin! I accept the idea of remaining largely...
By John Blake In the summer of 2008, an elderly psychic who claimed she started receiving premonitions at age 5 published a book that contained an ominous prediction. "In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the...
For the next few weeks, I would like to offer a few portraits of the friends and neighbors who are suffering cabin fever like the rest of us and patiently waiting to greet us once again.
Yes, we're all staying home, trying to flatten the curve and slow the contagious COVID-19 coronavirus. Which got me to thinking — this could be a good time to kick some unhealthy habits and adopt some new healthy ones. Lent began on Wednesday, February 26, and...
By Nell Greenfieldboyce The world and the United States is facing a grim dilemma: either effectively shut down society for months to prevent transmission of the coronavirus, or see health care systems overwhelmed by people needing treatment for severe infections....
By Brenda Langdon Since I wrote about pandemic preparedness measures 11 days ago, the world’s cases of the Covid-19 virus have more than doubled from 100,000 to 232,616 (as of 1:30 p.m. March 18). This, unfortunately, is not a drill and we are collectively...
By Jennifer Hansler As nations around the world shut their borders in an effort to combat the coronavirus pandemic, thousands of American travelers have found themselves stranded. In Peru, where President Martin Vizcarra issued a 15-day nationwide state of emergency...
By Markku Sario First, may I apologize? I am Markku Sario of My Smorgasbord, not Robert Bradley, but merely a Bradley pro tempore with pretensions of adequacy. I am doing Robert’s column today while he is in the hospital with knee surgery that has become much more...
Just a few scant miles west of Cuenca lies a small and quaint paroquia named San Joaquin. Edie and I have been fortunate to call this area our home for a couple of years. It’s where we moved after our exodus from a life in El Centro where we lived high in the sky,...
Drug advertisements. Ugh. By the time they finish listing the side effects, you wonder why they even bother publicizing them? Have you noticed that almost every advertisement on the U.S. news show '60 Minutes' is for some pharmaceutical drug, or more recently, for a...
Examine the word responsibility -- response-ability -- the ability to choose your response. Proactive people realize their responsibility; they do not blame circumstance, conditions, and surely not others, as a reason not to be responsible. Our behavior is a product...
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) to leads all other causes of American deaths daily, at least 2,200 each day. For reasons not yet understood, women fare much worse than men do after suffering a heart...
