The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
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The Fourth of July has always held a special power over me. I love the hot dogs and burgers and my mother’s delicious potato salad. Mostly, though, I’ve always cherished the great gatherings of family and friends that culminate with spectacular fireworks displays that light up the dark summer sky. I knew as a kid that on July 4 we were celebrating our many freedoms, which we earned by gaining independence from the British during the Revolutionary War, and which we cemented with the creation of...
The national debt broke the $32 trillion barrier this week. It’s a number so huge it’s incomprehensible to the average citizen. We knew $32 trillion was coming. It just got here a lot faster than the money experts thought, thanks to the roughly $5 trillion that the feds spent to help people and businesses withstand the many blows inflicted by Covid-19 and lockdowns. If you are a good citizen who’d like to gift a few bucks to the federal government to help pay down the national debt, you need...
Modern dads are portrayed as fools in television sitcoms and commercials. Lucky for me, they are the polar opposite of the loving, strong and decisive father who raised me. Over the years, as I clogged a toilet with an apple core, shattered a picture window with a baseball and hit a golf ball through a neighbor’s window, he had only one thing to say: “Son of a !!!” He always fixed the things I broke — once he found his tools, which I was forever losing. He often found them lying in the yard af...
It’s long past time for me to put a flagpole in the center of my front yard – one that holds a large American flag that dances proudly in the summer breeze. We bought such a flagpole for my father on his 70th birthday, shortly after he and my mother moved into a new house with a stately front yard. He was proud of his flag – with good reason. He was born during the Great Depression. As a boy, he was immersed in our country’s great unified effort to defeat mighty foes during World War II. He...
It’s a positive trend that I hope continues: the resurgence of summer picnics. According to Mental Floss, the Covid pandemic caused a picnic boom beginning in 2020 that is showing no signs of letting up. In 2020, with restaurants shuttered and experts telling us the bug didn’t spread so easily in outdoor air, many people, in particular younger people, began picnicking. I was lucky to grow up only a few miles from a county park that offers 3,000 acres of rolling green hills, walking and biking tr...
Every year, polls show that a large number of Americans don’t know why we celebrate Memorial Day. According to People, a 2020 Onepoll survey found that fewer than half of the 2,000 people surveyed knew that the purpose of Memorial Day was not to honor those who served in the armed forces, but to honor those who gave their lives while they served. Few Americans are aware that the original reason for Memorial Day dates back to the Civil War. Originally called Decoration Day, its purpose was to rem...
It’s an excuse I’ve been dreaming of: A reason to NOT mow my lawn. A “No Mow May” movement is afoot to nurture our bee population for a good reason: bees are incredibly important to our own survival.a According to Bee City USA, an initiative of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, bees are highly important pollinators whose busy work enables the creation of one third of the food and drink we consume. Here’s how bees work: They are drawn to plants for their sweet nectar, which the...
“Junior, this year to prepare for ‘Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day’ I want to teach you about all the taxes that you’ll have to pay as a working adult.” “What are taxes, Dad?” “Taxes are what the government will take out of your paycheck, and will tack onto almost everything you will purchase, to fund lots and lots of programs, Junior — many of which are unnecessary.” “Unnecessary, Dad?” “Junior, when our country was founded in 1776, our founders believed in limited government and th...
I will qualify for Medicare coverage in five years and, much to my surprise, I can’t wait to get government health coverage – because my current coverage is pricey. I recently finished a consulting assignment, which provided me full health benefits. To maintain my health insurance policy through Cobra, I must pay $750 a month. I also have to cover the first $3,300 of costs before full coverage kicks in. That means that if I go to the hospital with a bad flu – which I did for the first time in my...
IQs have dropped for the first time in American history, and the experts aren’t quite sure why. According to Neuroscience News, a new Northwestern University study finds that our average IQ scores have decreased in three out of four cognitive measures. The study found that “scores of verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies) and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period .…” The only IQ measure to incr...
I dread the coming of Sunday, March 12. At 2 a.m. that morning our clocks will “spring forward.” That means that my yellow Labrador, Thurber, who wakes me at exactly 6 a.m. every morning, will begin waking me at exactly 5 a.m. every morning. He’ll do so because that’s when his Labradorian clock tells him it is time for me to feed him and take him outside for Number 1 and Number 2. Which means I’ll be in a perpetual stupor for weeks until the two of us finally get used to the clock change ...
It’s at once amazing and troublesome. I speak of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence application that was launched last November by OpenAI. In a matter of seconds, it can write apparently accurate articles or answer questions on a multitude of subjects. When I asked ChatGPT what it is, it responded this way: “I am designed to understand and generate human-like language based on the input I receive . . . My purpose is to assist and communicate with people in a variety of ways, from answering gen...
All my father ever wanted as a young man was to marry my mother and start a family — plans that were interrupted when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean conflict. As he served in Texas, Germany and other parts of the world, there was only one affordable way to stay in contact: writing letters. Every single day, seven days a week, my mother told me, he wrote a letter to her and she wrote one to him. Some letters ran four pages long. Some days, they wrote two! They shared their h...
Groundhog Day cannot come soon enough. It’s the thick of winter. Cabin fever is setting in. Incivility is worse than ever. A delightful, silly diversion is what we need about now, and Punxsutawney Phil has been delivering needed joy this time of year since 1887. As you know, every Feb. 2, on Groundhog Day, Phil is pulled from a tree stump on Gobbler’s Knob, a few miles outside of downtown Punxsutawney, Pa. If he sees his shadow, his Inner Circle organizers allege, there will be six more wee...
I love my gas stove — almost as much as I love my Weber gas grill. So I became curious this past week when I heard that a commissioner in one of our ever-expanding federal-government agencies discussed a possible ban on natural gas stoves. As the story goes, Richard Trumka Jr., a U.S. Consumer Product Safety commissioner, told Bloomberg that gas stoves are a hidden health hazard and that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” Bloomberg says that 40% of America’s homes use gas stove...
“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...
A long time ago I watched a documentary about poet Emily Dickinson's life and writings. One thing that I never forgot about that film is that she lived at a time when death was regrettably common - and therefore the subject of many of her poems. "How are you doing?" is a polite way of introducing ourselves to each other now. But as I learned in that documentary, this greeting during Dickinson's times meant, "Are you healthy and well and going to be with us tomorrow?" Until modern times, dying co...
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 sch...
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...
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 USA and we have our eyes on you. It’s nothing personal, 2022. It’s just that our hopes for the last two new years 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 hig...
