HMPRESENTLY|in the Pagosa Daily Post
This first article is for the fun of it. The second article is serious:
HMPRESENTLY: Brain Health and Belly Fat
by Harvey Radin | May 27, 2021 | Essays/Fiction
Heaven help anyone for ‘liking’ certain articles and other things they’re seeing online! Because when they do that, they keep getting more and more articles related to the articles they happen to like.
You’d think there’s nothing wrong with liking things.
My wife, who likes reading healthful living tips, clicks ‘like,’ and then gets a daily dose of tips in the newsfeed on her phone, and she shares them.
I did not know the difference between lapses of memory and cognitive decline. Her newsfeed had a healthy dose of tips on getting a good night’s sleep. This was at around 2:30 in the morning, she was letting me know about this.
I did not know about the four things that can affect brain health, or about saturated fat in cheese, and what you need to know about sodium content in foods.
Paunch! There was quite a lot about that in her newsfeed, that she shared with me. Paunch… or Belly fat… whatever you choose to call it… I’ve got some of that, even though I walk a lot and ride a bike.
She had strength-training tips on her phone, and jumping rope routines. Even kick boxing. I’m not sure this body of mine is designed for kick boxing. All these body-strengthening, health- and mind-enhancing tips, as I was almost dozing off at that early-morning hour, worrying about the sleep disturbance tips she’d shared, even earlier.
Stop me, if I mentioned this, before, but when we were living in London, years ago, chatting with a British couple, discussing quirky things about our respective nations, we, somehow, got around to discussing healthful living, chatting about roughage in food, and such. And the British gentleman, weighing our commentary, said to us:
“You’ve got to watch all that healthy stuff. It can be very bad for you.”
I should have a disclaimer, here, because my family and I do focus on diet and exercise, with the exception of kick boxing and jumping rope. We’ll add a pinch of salt to food, occasionally, because no salt at all — or, for that matter, no fat at all — might be very bad.
Wasn’t there something about that on my wife’s phone, a few weeks ago?
HMPRESENTLY: Patriot? The Pronoun?
by Harvey Radin | May 28, 2021 | Essays/Fiction
I was going to hold off writing about politicians, I swore to myself, to give them some benefit of the doubt. Maybe we expect too much of them?
But then, Lauren Boebert, Colorado’s 3rd congressional district representative, was quoted in several media, saying:
My pronoun is patriot.
And my — goodness! — with that, I fell off the wagon, so to speak. My typing fingers were quivering. I broke out in a sweat. I had to write something!
Maybe with the crush of work on Capitol Hill, it slipped her mind that ‘patriot’ is a noun? Pronouns, according to Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries, are “substitutes for nouns or noun phrases.”
But — benefit of the doubt — pronoun and noun do sound a bit similar, and Rep. Boebert must be juggling so much in her new role, representing Coloradans in the state’s 3rd district.
So, let’s see. What’s been on her plate, lately?
Just last month, she took time to brand Joe Biden as a “tyrant,” according to MSN. ‘Tyrant’ is a noun, by the way.
Also last month, she spent time spreading what appeared to be a “mylar sheet over her lap,” and tweeting “more than 25 times,” during President Biden’s speech to Congress, according to Business Insider.
Trying to get the rules changed, so she can pack a gun in the halls of Congress, she seems to be spending time on that, too.
Search as I may, unless I’m missing something, that seems be about all I could find about Rep. Boebert’s political initiatives. But we must keep the faith! It’s still early days. We’ve got to allow politicians a little time to get their feet wet.
That’s an idiom, by the way, ‘getting one’s feet wet.’ Not a noun or a pronoun.
