Ed note: With apologies to pet dogs. Very sorry if this article ruffles some fur 😊.
If you’ve noticed guide dogs walking with their chests poofed out a tad more than other dogs and their noses a few degrees higher in the air, you’re not mistaken.
A recent study from Ruffs University found that guide dogs are 99.7% more arrogant than their more carefree, unemployed counterparts because they have actual jobs and believe they’re higher in the chow chain.
The study surveyed 4,000 dogs nationwide. According to lead researcher Jonathon Hound, one reason cited for their arrogance was that, unlike regular dogs, guide dogs are not available for people to freely pet whenever they choose.
“Guide dogs realized they were unique when they noticed people had to ask permission from their owners to pet them,” he said. “They started gaining a superiority complex. I mean, you don’t just go pet the president or king either.” He added that their arrogance is further compounded by the fact that blind or visually impaired people revere guide dogs for helping them navigate situations and restoring their independence.
We interviewed some guide dogs for their take on the study.
“I can’t deny or confirm that us highly esteemed guide dogs are more arrogant,” barked Garmin, who has been a guide dog for five years. “But we are highly focused, and we don’t have time to do silly, mindless things like play or snuggle all day. We have an extremely important job to do, and we only play after a hard day’s work when the harness is off.”
North, another guide dog, who’s been on the job for the past three years, agreed. “Did you know only 45 to 50% of dogs make the grade to be a guide dog?” woofed North, puffing his chest out and polishing his claws. “Our training is intense! We’re held to really high standards and if you didn’t already know, I am a part of that exclusive group. I mean there’s a whole month dedicated to us. It’s obvious we’re pretty darn special.”
The Americans with Disabilities Act states that service dogs like guide dogs are allowed any place a person can go. This freedom afforded to them only makes guide dogs’ arrogance levels skyrocket even more, according to Hound.
Garmin confirmed this. “Yup, I am a world traveler, and I only fly in the plane cabins with humans, not trapped in those claustrophobic carriers or the cargo hold. That’s soooo beneath us. And, I get to board first like royalty,” he yapped with attitude. “I also get the honor of entering any restaurant or building; we’re not chained outside like those other lazy, pathetic canines who just live to get their bellies rubbed. Tsk.”
Hound’s next really important study is on guide dogs’ GPS skills and their amazing ability to read traffic signals. North and Garmin will not participate in the study; they did not deny or confirm if it was because of their egocentricity.
Posted inAnimals, Humor|Comments Off on Study Shows Guide Dogs More Arrogant Than Pet Dogs Because They ‘Have a Real Job Unlike Lazy Sparky Over There’
Thanks to Ann M. for this reminder and for the Art of the Month on-going project
Residents will remember our Art of the Month display, “Confrontation at the Selma Bridge,” painted by Jacob Lawrence in 1975. A signed print of the painting was loaned by Christian and Joyce Zobel in January, 2020 for our monthly art display on the 4th floor. John Lewis is honored as a leader of the civil rights group attacked by Alabama Law Enforcement on the bridge in 1965.
Posted inArt, History|Comments Off on Confrontation at the Selma Bridge
Civil rights giant and former U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who spent decades fighting for racial justice, will be honored with a postage stamp next year.
In a Tuesday announcement, the U.S. Postal Service said the stamp “celebrates the life and legacy” of the leader from Georgia, who risked his life protesting against segregation and other injustices in the violent Jim Crow-era South.
“Lewis spent more than 30 years in Congress steadfastly defending and building on key civil rights gains that he had helped achieve in the 1960s. Even in the face of hatred and violence, as well as some 45 arrests, Lewis remained resolute in his commitment to what he liked to call ‘good trouble,'” USPS said in a news release.
In March of 1965, then-25-year-old Lewis led a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery alongside other civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. The peaceful protest calling for equal voting rights came to be known as “Bloody Sunday” after Alabama State Troopers descended on the non-violent demonstrators in a brutal attack that left Lewis with a cracked skull.
His public service career spanned nearly 60 years. As a young student he joined lunch-counter protests; later, he became a member of the Freedom Riders; and at 21, he was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. After serving on the Atlanta City Council, Lewis was elected to Congress where he spent more than 30 years representing the Atlanta area in the House of Representatives.
He died at age 80 in 2020 after suffering from advanced-stage pancreatic cancer.
Posted inHistory, Law, Race|Comments Off on U.S. Postal Service honors the late civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis with a stamp
by David B. Williams (author and son of resident Jackie Williams)
The other day when it was snowing, my wife and I took a short walk from our house. We headed north two blocks, then east over I-5, and up a slight ridge. In doing so, we passed through a phase changing temperature gradient. At our house the snow was not sticking to the sidewalk. At the apex of the ridge, the snow stuck. Total elevation change was about 100 feet.
Depending on which website one trusts, with every 1,000 feet in elevation we could have risen, we would have lost between 3.5 and 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Since we ascended only 100 feet, the temperature only dropped between about a third and half a degree, but still just enough of a nanohabitat change to allow snow to remain on pavement.
Several years ago, I also passed through a similar temperature gradient in a downtown building. I had ridden up to the 47th floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower and done a bit of research. When I looked out a nearby window it was snowing but when I got down to the ground floor it was raining. Dropping more than 470 feet, I had gone from snow cold air to rain warm air. It was pretty darned nifty, what you might call urban snow virga, or snirga, if I may coin a portmanteau.
Virga, in which rain doesn’t reach the ground.
The subtle variation we experienced on our walk is one of the challenges in snow forecasting in Seattle. When it snows here, it generally happens right around the freezing point. Combine the mutability of topographic temperatures with our big bodies of water—Lake Washington and Puget Sound—which hold heat longer than pavement and it’s very challenging to provide a definitive snow accumulation forecast for the entire city. So be nice to forecasters, they’re people, too.
But, of course, there’s even more complexity. On our walk snow accumulated in a hodge podge of patterns. The most obvious was the difference between grass and pavement, primarily because grass retains less heat than a sidewalk, and provides a cooler surface where snow can collect. More beautiful was how leaves looked like snow whisperers, as if they had charmed the snow to land only on them. This would be a very wonderful and novel phenomenon but alas has to do with the leaves also providing a cooler surface than the pavement.
Shrubs and trees also play a part. Not surprisingly, less snow accumulated under leafy and well-needled vegetation but the same happened with bare trees. I wonder if, in addition to capturing the snow, the branches changed the flow of air enough to alter accumulation. Considering that I got a 16 percent on a physics test in college, you probably shouldn’t trust any ideas I write that have anything to do with physics.
Proximity to walls also influenced where snow remained. Solar radiation bouncing off south facing walls added enough warmth to sidewalks to keep them bare. There were also many areas with no discernible reason for where snow wasn’t. Were there sewer pipes with warm water heating pavement, geothermal deposits, or not very good snow sweepers?
It looks like the car provided a bit of warmth that kept the sidewalk bare?
So what does all this mean? Some climate change skeptics say that we don’t need to worry about one or two degrees of temperature increase. They are wrong. As I witnessed with the minimal temperature variation I experienced, little is required to alter what happens with snow. In addition, what I saw is predicted to play out in our regional precipitation patterns: climate change induced warming will mean that the mountains of the PNW should get less snow and more rain. Precipitation is expected to rise but because of warming temperatures snow will arrive later in autumn and stop falling earlier in spring. The impacts on salmon, recreation, and urban water supply will be dramatic.
Our planet, our neighborhood, each is sensitive to temperature change. As I walk the streets around my home, I cannot help but be fascinated by the beautiful effects of small variations and worried about the detrimental effects of the big changes we are inflicting on our planet.
Last week I wrote about the old Chamber of Commerce Observatory. Here’s a link to a video I made from another great downtown location with a view. It is the public viewing space on the Seventh Floor Patio of the Fourth and Madison Building, one block north of the former Observatory. The elevator to reach it is in the southwest corner of the main lobby floor, sort of hidden away. Ask at the front desk if you need help.
Ed note: I’ve been asked on occasion how one can find an advocate when they have no one close to them who can be their power of attorney or assist with health care navigation. HealthAdvocateX is a national non-profit organization committed to helping you transform into an active participant in your care. It’s a consortium of advocates you can hire for navigating health decisions, doctor’s visits, insurance, end-of-life planning, etc.
When you are overwhelmed with a diagnosis (or a lack of one), are facing surgery or long-term treatment, or are unsure of your medical expenses and your insurance options, it might be time to call a professional Health Advocate. Health Advocates can assist you with a variety of things, including health care navigation, eldercare, insurance, billing and administrative issues regarding long-term or brief but severe care needs.
Posted inAdvocacy, Health|Comments Off on WHAT ARE TYPES OF HEALTH ADVOCACY SERVICES?
The holidays may be known for their go-go-go stressful energy, but we also tend to spend a lot of time in December being sedentary. Historically, people are least physically active during the winter, thanks to falling temperatures, limited hours of sunlight, calendars jam-packed with travel and social commitments and, of course, the tug of the couch after too much eggnog.
Americans are five times more likely to say their stress level increases rather than decreases during the holidays. And while these higher stress levels aren’t only caused by a lack of physical activity, the lethargy certainly doesn’t help, said Dr. Rebecca Brendel, president of the American Psychiatric Association and an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School.
Exercise can be a key way to combat the stress of the season. And it can take whatever shape and form you prefer.
If you already have an established fitness routine, keep it up. Research shows that, over time, regular exercise can help to prevent stress in the first place by improving our body’s ability to neutralize stress-causing hormones and by increasing dopamine receptors in the brain, allowing us to feel more joy.
And if you haven’t been consistently working out? You can turn to exercise “as needed,” in the same way you might take an Advil for a headache, said Sepideh Saremi, a licensed clinical social worker and the founder of Run Walk Talk, a Los Angeles-based therapy program in which she treats her clients while engaging in physical activity. Research suggests that a single session of intense exercise (whatever that means for you) can boost your mood for up to 24 hours.
While just about anymovement can offset holiday overwhelm, we asked mental health experts who focus on the mind-body connection for their best advice for this particular time of year.
Do the opposite of what’s keeping you down.
The holidays can feel constricting, both physically and psychologically. Travel requires squeezing yourself into small spaces in airplanes or trains and crowded parties intrude on your personal space. A relative’s backhanded compliments about your life choices can make you feel emotionally small, too.
When you’re feeling squeezed, do a workout (or single exercise) that encourages the body to take up space, said Erica Hornthal, a dance therapist in Chicago.
Ms. Hornthal suggested carving out time for full body, reach-for-the-sky style stretching sessions. Even two to three minutes of this can help to offset feeling cramped. She also recommended shaking off the feeling of constriction. “Shake your hands, shake your head — kind of like an animal after it gets wet,” she said. “You can make a game out of it if you have kids.”
Thanks to Diana C – Published in the Washington Post
Assisted-living communities too often fail to meet the needs of older people and should focus more on residents’ medical and mental health concerns, according to a recent report by a diverse panel of experts.
It’s a clarion call for change inspired by the altered profile of the population that assisted living now serves.
Residents are older, sicker and more compromised by impairments than in the past: 55 percent are 85 and older, 77 percent require help with bathing, 69 percent with walking and 49 percent with toileting, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Also, more than half of residents have high blood pressure, and a third or more have heart disease or arthritis. Thirty-one percent have been diagnosed with depression, at least 11 percent have a serious mental illness, and 42 percent have dementia or moderate-to-severe cognitive impairment.Advertisement
“The nature of the clientele in assisted living has changed dramatically,” yet there are no widely accepted standards for addressing their physical and mental health needs, said Sheryl Zimmerman, who led the panel. She’s co-director of the Program on Aging, Disability and Long-Term Care at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The report addresses this gap with 43 recommendations from experts including patient advocates, assisted-living providers and specialists in medical, psychiatric and dementia care that Zimmerman said she hopes will become “a new standard of care.”
Four years ago, I spent a morning cooking couscous with my grandmother Denise near Grenoble, France, where she has lived most of her life. We peeled carrots and turnips, seared lamb and chicken, tied bouquets of herbs, and mixed hot water into the grains with our bare hands. I wrote down her recipe as we went along. My mamie has Alzheimer’s, and I had to learn to make her couscous on my own, before she forgot how to do it herself. That day, I recorded a video of her on my phone. She was sitting in a familiar kind of wooden ikea chair that you have probably sat on before and that I will always associate with her. As she gazed out the window, a thought occurred to her, and she turned to me and asked, “C’est samedi que tu pars?” You’re leaving on Saturday?
Yes, I told her. I was returning to the United States, where my parents moved our family when I was eighteen months old. I found it painful to leave; each time we visited France, the progression of her disease seemed to become more unignorable. Her pencil trembled when she practiced her handwriting. She moved her daily baguette from the kitchen counter into the plate drawer. Late at night, she muttered and puttered around her apartment. When her wandering inconvenienced us, we guided her back to her chair. My family talked about the chair as if it were her refuge; it was probably more accurately described as our refuge from her confusion.
In the summer of 2020, my grandmother stopped eating and getting out of bed. She had fallen, fractured a vertebra, and forgotten about it. I flew to France with a dozen of Mamie’s favorite sesame-seed bagels, and I lived with her as she recovered, fetching prescriptions for the pain she was constantly rediscovering, and rubbing her back when she coughed until she retched. I lay in bed with her until she fell asleep. I fed her. I learned, for the first time in my life, what it meant to care for someone. After five weeks, my mom took my place as Mamie’s at-home caretaker.
Like so many families that are affected by Alzheimer’s, we searched desperately for a new place where my grandmother could live. We viewed her isolation in her seventh-floor apartment as a risk to her health and safety, and felt that it was not only right but necessary to exchange what was left of her autonomy for the round-the-clock, structured care that she could receive at a nursing home. About half of the six hundred thousand people who live in France’s ehpads, or “housing establishments for dependent elderly people,” have dementia. These are imperfect institutions: in 2018, French nursing-home workers went on strike to protest staff shortages and cost-cutting, and, earlier this year, disturbing reports of abuse and neglect, untrained staff, and the rationing of food and diapers by a for-profit nursing-home company put the country’s elder-care system under intense public scrutiny.
A nursing home in a nearby suburb finally offered her a place after weeks of uncertainty.
My grandmother’s life now seems safer, but smaller. Her memory-care unit is locked with keypads to prevent her from wandering out and is rarely unsupervised; the woman who taught me to cook couscous no longer has a kitchen. My family is satisfied with her care: the staff is affectionate, Mamie is often cheerful during visiting hours, and she regularly participates in Montessori activities such as vegetable peeling and sing-alongs. I never saw her with pets when I was younger, but she now lets the nursing home’s service dog, an enormous Labrador named Nova, cuddle with her in bed. Still, it seems inevitable that, as my grandmother’s condition declines, she will lose the few freedoms she has left. Last year, I stopped bringing her bagels after I noticed that they were furring themselves green inside their plastic bags. This year, she complained of being weaker, of fighting with her brain but not understanding why. She sometimes referred to her nursing home as her aunt’s house, or the children’s daycare where she worked for decades. Someday soon, she will no longer be able to play dominoes with me—she won’t understand how to win, or even how to count the dots on each tile. Later, she might be moved to the unit next door, where people with more serious cognitive limitations live under even closer surveillance.
Anyone who has cared for someone with Alzheimer’s is likely to be familiar with this transaction. We cede their freedom to gain a sense of security—theirs, but also ours. We attempt to resize their world, removing the choices that might pose a danger to them. But I often wonder whether the standard approach of a nursing home—the constant surveillance, the rigid schedules for waking, bathing, eating, socializing, and sleeping—is the best that we can offer to loved ones with dementia.
About 9:00PM Friday, looking from 26th floor observation deck. Foreground roof is The Terraces. Visible flames are from rear of building, which caught fire several years ago.https://sfdlive.com/?area=First+HillAbout 9:05pmvia TwitAftermath. Saturday 4pm.
Nearly 9 in 10 covid deaths are in people 65 or older [from Washington Post]
Some epidemiologists and demographers predict the trend of older, sicker and poorer people dying at disproportionate rates will continue, raising hard questions about the trade-offs Americans are making in pursuit of normalcy — and at whose expense.
Ed note: I’m wondering just how vulnerable a man needs to be. Here’s one published comment on the article below: “I have different male friends that I DO different activities with. We do not need to “talk about our feelings” in order for this to be ‘close friends.’ Once again, an ‘expert’ is saying men need fixing and the fix is to feminize them.” What’s your take on male friendship?
The Tuesday before every Thanksgiving, Aaron Karo and Matt Ritter, both 43, go out to dinner with a group of seven men whom they befriended as second graders in Plainview, N.Y.
At the dinner, one of the friends wins the Man of the Year prize — a silly accolade the group concocted as an excuse to reconnect. They eat and they laugh, and the winner leaves with his name engraved on a cartoonishly large silver cup.
“It’s not really about the trophy,” said Mr. Karo, who co-hosts a podcast with Mr. Ritter called “Man of the Year,” which explores adult friendship. “It’s about the traditions that keep us together.” The friends jockey for the prize in a running group text, where they share memes and talk a bit of trash but also keep up with one another.
“I think men have been convinced that success in life does not necessarily include friendship — that if they’re successful at work or they’ve started a family, they’ve won,” Mr. Ritter said. “Our definition has always included having these thriving friendships.”
Mr. Ritter’s close crew notwithstanding, American men appear to be stuck in a “friendship recession” — a trend that predates the Covid-19 pandemic but that seems to have accelerated over the past several years as loneliness levels have crept up worldwide. In a 2021 survey of more than 2,000 adults in the United States, less than half of the men said they were truly satisfied with how many friends they had, while 15 percent said they had no close friends at all — a fivefold increase since 1990. That same survey found that men were less likely than women to rely on their friends for emotional support or to share their personal feelings with them.
“I think men have a deep craving for intimacy with their friends,” said Nick Fager, a licensed mental health counselor and the co-founder of Expansive Therapy, an L.G.B.T.Q.-focused psychotherapy group. “And yet getting there can feel so incredibly challenging.”
The four strategies below won’t eliminate all of the obstacles that can stand in the way of deep male friendship, but they are a start.
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