Over the last couple of years, I have seen, in person, the following performers: Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason, Garrison Keillor, Candice Bergen, Bill Cosby, Angela Lansbury, and James Earl Jones. Common among these celebrities is “maturity,” and, pardon the insensitivity, plenty of it. In fact, rough math indicates that their combined age approximates the 700-year-old mummy recently discovered in China.
Two anonymous Indianapolis doctors might have been among the first to learn that the storybook career of cyclist Lance Armstrong was more cautionary tale than legend. At least, that’s according to a 2006 affidavit from one of Armstrong’s former teammates, Frankie Andreu, delivered to the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Andreu rode with Armstrong from 1992 until 1996, as a member of Motorola’s racing team. In the 15-pag
For this month’s “What I Know” column, we asked WTHR meteorologist Chuck Lofton for his life wisdom, and after almost 28 years with the same TV station, he’s accumulated quite a bit. That kind of workplace longevity, though, is becoming rarer than a full 401(k) match. I recently read a study alleging that “Millennials”—those 30 and younger, otherwise known as Generation Y—change jobs every two years on average. I keep cheap pens longer.
My father came home from work every day with grease under his fingernails. His place of business was a southside auto-parts yard the family referred to as “the store.” The first thing he did upon coming home in the evening was scrub his hands with Lava soap, and even then, you could see the faint but indelible trace of black.
In the middle decades of the 20th century, every community had a draft board, composed of local citizens whose responsibility was to interview young men and discern their fitness for military service. As you can imagine, it was not a wildly popular practice. And when young men stopped cooperating by shooting themselves in the foot, the practice ended.
Deep in Southern Indiana, businessman Robert Vicino offers the cure for paranoid doomsday-preppers: a retrofitted Cold War–era communications bunker where 80 people can weather a catastrophe underground for up to a year—among the kind of tony trappings one might find on a luxury yacht. Vicino’s sales pitch leaves no potential natural or manmade disaster unmentioned, including nuclear explosion, biological warfare, solar flares, and, of course, the Mayan prophecy that appears to foretell an apocalypse this month.
Although World AIDS Day, marked for the 25th time overall on Dec. 1, gets just one day of recognition, a movie shown at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, co-sponsored by the Indianapolis LGBT Film Festival on Dec. 1, served as a poignant reminder as to how far the disease—and its treatment and prevention—have come since the early 1980s.
I don’t believe the world will end this month, as the Mayan calendar dubiously predicts. But Robert Vicino is banking on Armageddon—or some other life-extinction scenario, be it nuclear war, meteorite, solar storms, bacon shortage. The California businessman hawks subterranean bunkers (“Doomsday Profit”), one of which resides in Indiana. The Cold War–esque lairs by Vicino’s Vivos Group come complete with flat-screen TVs and stainless-steel appliances for the low, low price of $50,000 a space.
My 5-year-old granddaughter and I like to play the Tea Party Game, in which you spin an arrow to determine which cardboard food item—finger sandwiches, petits fours, fruit—to put on your cardboard plate, and at what point you get your napkins, utensils, and other necessities. The first one whose plate is filled and pretty place setting completed wins. She cheats, though, thinking I don’t see her re-spin, lightning-fast, when the arrow points to “Lose a piece.” If she already has a dessert and the arrow points to that category again, she claims it’s “on the line!” The competitive streak runs fast and furious in our family, and I do not judge.
Every year around Christmas, I think what a burden it is to be Christian and consider joining another religion with fewer Yuletide demands. Addressing the cards and pretending I like fruitcake leave me exhausted. I toyed with the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk, which is just exotic enough to be hip, but then I remembered they have to set themselves on fire if a war comes along. As much as I dislike Christmas, I still prefer it over immolation.
On October 22, cycling’s governing body formally stripped Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles due to alleged involvement in a doping scandal, and on November 1, the International Olympic Committee opened an investigation into the cyclist’s bronze-medal-winning performance in 2000.
Call it premature, or irrational, or morbid, but I’m convinced that I’m destined to get breast cancer. I’ve accepted it, figuring it’s better to prepare myself mentally—and take precautions like self-exams—than be caught off-guard like my great-aunt Barbara was, when she was diagnosed at the age of 39. That was back in the ’60s, and even though it was only a small lump, they lopped off her whole breast, so primitive were the treatment options at that point.
You can buy chairs at the drugstore. Granted, the selection consists of remote-controlled lift chairs for the old or infirm, but still. They are chairs, they cost $799, and you can buy them at the drugstore. On my last visit, I was tempted to try one just to see how far it would launch me, but I was afraid someone I knew might see. So I moved on to the “walking sticks”—canes, for crying out loud—and blood-pressure cuffs. Those devices I expect to see at the drugstore, but chairs? That blows me away.
