National Treasure

Toilet habits are no laughing matter: "'In 2008, it's just ridiculous we haven't sorted this out,' says Rose George, 'and have this linguistic and mental handicap about it.'

'We need to question whether we can't change the way it's done,' she adds. 'Or at least improve it.'"

Achieving Wellness, Whatever THAT Is

2 Books on Illness and Wellness Give Opposite Advice is a cautionary tale from the NYTimes on the art and science of living:

"Both are practicing physicians who have made second careers interpreting medical principles for a lay audience. Both consider themselves experts not only in illness but also in wellness, that shimmering grail of our time. Both have combed through all the latest studies and are now pleased to provide you, the average healthy adult, with guidelines for staying well.

Both muster science, statistics and a judicious smattering of personal experience to present, with no small fanfare, completely, utterly, diametrically opposite advice."

as the article says,

"You, reader, have undoubtedly already decided which author is a sage and which one a lunatic, which advice is sound, worthy of reading and re-reading, and which is simply misguided."

and therein a fundamental flaw with the whole field of applied learning, the invisibility of The Myth. Believing our myths, inescapably, we take one side or the other the same way we align with baseball teams, rock bands or brands of toothpaste.

Fifty years in the band still isn’t enough

The Senior Times Monthly: "the Arkestra follows the big band tradition but with an avant-garde twist, as likely to play When You Wish Upon a Star or There Will Never Be Another You as they are to revisit Sun Ra’s quirky themes like We Travel the Spaceways or one of the many tunes Allen has penned. Formed in the 1950s, the Arkestra is still thriving. I spoke to Marshall Allen, who still lives in the Sun Ra house in Philadelphia, a couple of days before his 84th birthday"
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYtVe0djBmk&hl=en&fs=1]

The SENIOR Times! I love it. Yeah, 84 years old, still world touring, still writing ripper new charts, still curating boxes of arrangements Sonny left behind, still leading the world's oldest and most venerable jazz band, and still atomizes any unwary terrestrial alto that may stray into the swath of his ion beam.