The Flying Pie feels your pain. You’re like the guy who suddenly opens the never-used closet and is instantly buried by a decades-long hoard of stashables. The Barbarians are panting and raving at the Nation’s Gates and half the population is sure it’s the Second Coming of Jesus. You’d think about escaping to the serenity of the seashore or a National Park but there’s slime in the ocean and roads to the parks are blocked by the land-moving vehicles of vultures jonesing to begin mining the terrain. Acapulco is nice this time of year but yesterday it was named one of the ten Most Dangerous Places on Earth. The City of Light has always provided refuge but now there are numbskulls running around with bombs in their burkas and you have to practically strip naked to get on the elevator to the Eiffel Tower. How about visiting the Road To Mandalay, where the flying fishes play, and the dawn comes up like thunder out of China ‘cross the bay? Fine, as soon as the floods abate. Well, there’s always our own West Coast, right? Maybe not for long. The Babyfaced Bullshit Artist from North Korea is aiming nuclear weapons at our friends Marty Jourard in Seattle and Bob Follett in Oakland and even though his GPS devices are suspect, the bombs could still wind up knocking off Jack Gordon in Laguna or Deb Peterson in Yachats. Is there no end to this long-running spate of misery and wretchedness and despair that we ingest day after day after day? Is there, in fact, no GOOD news? Well, as a matter of fact, yes, there is and we’re here to provide it. Like so:
The Good News
The other day, Gus Andreone got a hole-in-one. Very nice, you might comment, but lots of people do that. Not 103-year-old people. And just in case you think it was a fluke, know this: Gus, the PGA’s oldest member, has done it a staggering EIGHT times, the latest on the 113-yard 14th hole at the Lakes Course at Palm Aire in Sarasota. All you 80-year-olds can stop squawking about your lumbago now.
A 100-year-old Galapagos giant tortoise named Diego has now fathered a spiffy 800+ offspring and has singlehandedly pulled his species off the extinction list. Diego is a rare breed of tortoise known as Chelonoidis hoodensis, which lives only on the island of Espanola in the Galapagos. In 1970, there were only two males and twelve females of the species remaining. Commissioner Gordon ran up to the roof, turned on the Batsignal and Diego, gallivanting around the San Diego Zoo at the time, took the first floatplane back to the Galapagos. Forty years later, he has repopulated the island. There are now more than 2000 of the critters and 40% of them are the offspring of Diego. Long live his fame and long live his glory and long may his story be told!
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, according to Buffalo Springfield and medical experts who proclaim that colon cancer, dementia and heart disease are waning in wealthy countries. Improved diagnoses and treatment don’t quite explain the drop, they say. The leading killers seem to be occurring later in life. Colon cancer is the latest conundrum, having fallen by almost 50% since its peak in the 1980s. Better screening, of course, is part of the answer but doctors say “The magnitude of the changes alone suggest that other factors must be involved.” The rate of hip fractures has been dropping by 15 to 20 percent a decade over the past 20 years. Although the changes occurred after drugs to slow bone loss became available, too few patients took them to account for the effect. For example, less than 10% of women over 65 take the drugs.
Dementia rates also have been plunging, believe it or not. Most people don’t but data from the United States and Europe is hard to dismiss. The latest reports find a 20% decline in dementia incidence per decade, starting in 1977. The incidence among people over age 60 was 3.6 per hundred in the years 1986-1991, but in the years 2004-2008 it had fallen to 2.0 per hundred in the same group. With the increase in the number of older people, there may be more cases in total, but an individual’s chance of getting dementia has decreased.
The exemplar for declining death rates is heart disease, whose numbers have been falling for a very long time—more than half a century, in fact. While heart disease is still the leading cause of death in the United States and kills more than 600,000 people a year, deaths have fallen 70% from their peak. Scientists agree that better prevention, treatment and lifestyle changes have played a role but cannot account for the overall percentage decrease in these diseases. Dr. Steven R. Cummings of the California Pacific Center Research Institute contends that all these degenerative diseases may share something in common, something inside aging cells, themselves. The cellular process of aging may be changing in humans’ favor. For too long, he said, researchers have looked under the lamppost at things they can measure. “I want to look inside cells,” he said. “That’s where we may find more clues to the mystery.”
The Bounce House, my friend, is blowing in the wind….
Balloons Run Amok; No One Injured
Absolutely no one was injured last Saturday when a giant inflatable duck ripped loose from its tethers at the Peter Vardy Car Store in Glasgow, Scotland and rolled down a busy highway, tumbling over motorists as it went. One confused driver, Andrea McCall tweeted a brief complaint back to the owner: “Your giant inflatable duck has just hit my car in the middle of the road in Glasgow. What now?” The responsible Peter Vardy promptly replied, “Terrible luck about the duck. WTF? Send details about damages.”
Meanwhile, on September 14 in Fuzhou, China, shocked commuters recoiled in horror when one of several inflatable moons broke loose from its perch at the Mid-Autumn Festival and was carried away by powerful winds from oncoming Super Typhoon Meranti. Videos recorded by passersby show the moon rolling over and between cars on a packed roadway while pedestrians run for cover and passengers inside the cars laugh hysterically. No injuries were reported.
A rented bounce house being used for a kiddie birthday party at a home in Niagara Falls, New York was caught by a gust of wind and carried into nearby power lines where it set off a flurry of sparks. Michael Gersitz, owner of the Party In Buffalo Bounce House, brilliantly speculated that the wandering edifice had not been adequately anchored. No children were injured but one had to be sedated when he couldn’t stop laughing.
New Planet Discovered
In Major League Baseball, when a struggling player is cut from the roster and sent down to the Minor Leagues he is immediately replaced by another player from the team’s farm system, a gaggle of entities scattered from Rochester to Rancho Cucamonga. Apparently, this also happens with planets, though not as quickly.
Pluto, as we all know was recently sent back to the minors, much to the surprise of its many supporters. “Pluto played its position well,” they complained, “and was never a problem in the locker room.” Why the snub after 70 years in the Bigs? Well, it turns out that somebody finally figured out Pluto didn’t observe the Three Rules of Planethood. While it is round and orbits a sun (the first two requirements), Pluto does not follow the third rule which requires a major league planet to dominate its neighborhood. The Earth, for instance, has 1.7 million times the mass ot the other objects in its orbit while Pluto is a paltry 0.07 times the mass of the other objects in its orbit. “If we’d only known,” say the downtrodden Pluto fans, “we could have been looking around for more mass.”
Astronomers always suspected the new planet existed, they just couldn’t find it. Okay, they still can’t find it, but they swear, banging a pointer on a map of the cosmos, “it’s around here somewhere.” The scientists tell us that “the clustering” in the suspected area of Planet Nine means “there is only a 0.007 percent chance” they could be wrong. Anyway, if the planet does exist it would be 2-15 times the mass of the Earth and orbit between 200 and 1600 Astronomical Units from the Sun. If you care, an Astronomical Unit is 150,000,000 kilometers. Oh, and its name would be Ernie.
“I love the Baby Giant Panda…I’d welcome one to my veranda.”—Ogden Nash
Ten Good Things Which Just Happened
1. The Giant Panda was removed from the International Endangered List.
2. Commercial Trade of the Pangolin has recently been banned.
3. Acid in the atmosphere fell to the levels of a century ago.
4. The Manatee population has rebounded 500%.
5. Costa Rica has been powered only by Solar Energy for 122 days.
6. Elon Musk unveiled the ITS, a spaceship capable of carrying 100 settlers to Mars.
7. India broke the record for planting trees, 50 million in one day.
8. LeEco, a Chinese technology company, was awarded $1.08 billion by investors to build electric cars.
9. Canada is building the world’s longest trail—14,864 miles—to be completed in 2017. It will connect over 400 community trails.
10. Chuck LeMasters has completely recovered from recent surgeries and will compete in next June’s Laguna Phuket Triathlon in sunny Thailand.
So there you go. Just goes to show you that despite the weather outside being frightful, in here it’s just delightful. There are things to consider far from the lunatic ravings of the Trumps of the world. The heat of Summer is tapering off in the South and up North the leaves are already in the dressing rooms, changing into their Fall uniforms. Soon it will be Halloween and everyone can don devil and witch outfits and drive to Evangelist neighborhoods for Trick or Treat. Around here, Bill will become 76 on November 2, ruefully known as the Day of the Dead in our neighbor state of Mexico, but he is conceding nothing to age except maybe another one of those mule rides to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Life is full of Good Things if you just know where to look for them.
That’s all, folks….
