Within these paragraphs there is a lot of hogwash, including the usual pseudo wisdom that people over age 90 like to present to us KIDS. But at least 40% of this strikes me as sound and half of that as very illuminating. Where have you gotten such a high percentage of solid advice before?

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Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, Japan, turned 101 on 4th October 2012

As a 97 year old Doctor, he was interviewed, and gave his advice for a long and healthy life.

Shigeaki Hinohara is one of the world’s longest-serving physicians and educators. Hinohara’s magic touch is legendary: Since 1941 he has been healing patients at St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo and teaching at St. Luke’s College of Nursing.

He has published around 15 books since his 75th birthday, including one “Living Long, Living Good” that has sold more than 1.2 million copies. As the founder of the New Elderly Movement, Hinohara encourages others to live a long and happy life, a quest in which no role model is better than the doctor himself.

Doctor Shigeaki Hinohara’s main points for a long and happy life:

* Energy comes from feeling good, not from eating well or sleeping a lot. We all remember how as children, when we were having fun, we often forgot to eat or sleep. I believe that we can keep that attitude as adults, too. It’s best not to tire the body with too many rules such as lunchtime and bedtime.

* All people who live long regardless of nationality, race or gender share one thing in common: None are overweight. For breakfast I drink coffee, a glass of milk and some orange juice with a tablespoon of olive oil in it. Olive oil is great for the arteries and keeps my skin healthy. Lunch is milk and a few cookies, or nothing when I am too busy to eat. I never get hungry because I focus on my work. Dinner is veggies, a bit of fish and rice, and, twice a week, 100 grams of lean meat.

* Always plan ahead. My schedule book is already full until 2014, with lectures and my usual hospital work. In 2016 I’ll have some fun, though: I plan to attend the Tokyo Olympics!

* There is no need to ever retire, but if one must, it should be a lot later than 65. The current retirement age was set at 65 half a century ago, when the average life-expectancy in Japan was 68 years and only 125 Japanese were over 100 years old. Today, Japanese women live to be around 86 and men 80, and we have 36,000 centenarians in our country. In 20 years we will have about 50,000 people over the age of 100…

* Share what you know. I give 150 lectures a year, some for 100 elementary-school children, others for 4,500 business people. I usually speak for 60 to 90 minutes, standing, to stay strong.

* When a doctor recommends you take a test or have some surgery, ask whether the doctor would suggest that his or her spouse or children go through such a procedure. Contrary to popular belief, doctors can’t cure everyone. So why cause unnecessary pain with surgery I think music and animal therapy can help more than most doctors imagine.

* To stay healthy, always take the stairs and carry your own stuff. I take two stairs at a time, to get my muscles moving.

* My inspiration is Robert Browning’s poem “Abt Vogler.” My father used to read it to me. It encourages us to make big art, not small scribbles. It says to try to draw a circle so huge that there is no way we can finish it while we are alive. All we see is an arch; the rest is beyond our vision but it is there in the distance.

* Pain is mysterious, and having fun is the best way to forget it. If a child has a toothache, and you start playing a game together, he or she immediately forgets the pain. Hospitals must cater to the basic need of patients: We all want to have fun. At St. Luke’s we have music and animal therapies, and art classes.

* Don’t be crazy about amassing material things. Remember: You don’t know when your number is up, and you can’t take it with you to the next place.

* Hospitals must be designed and prepared for major disasters, and they must accept every patient who appears at their doors. We designed St. Luke’s so we can operate anywhere: in the basement, in the corridors, in the chapel. Most people thought I was crazy to prepare for a catastrophe, but on March 20, 1995, I was unfortunately proven right when members of the Aum Shinrikyu religious cult launched a terrorist attack in the Tokyo subway. We accepted 740 victims and in two hours figured out that it was sarin gas that had hit them. Sadly we lost one person, but we saved 739 lives.

* Science alone can’t cure or help people. Science lumps us all together, but illness is individual. Each person is unique, and diseases are connected to their hearts. To know the illness and help people, we need liberal and visual arts, not just medical ones.

* Life is filled with incidents. On March 31, 1970, when I was 59 years old, I boarded the Yodogo, a flight from Tokyo to Fukuoka. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and as Mount Fuji came into sight, the plane was hijacked by the Japanese Communist League-Red Army Faction. I spent the next four days handcuffed to my seat in 40-degree heat. As a doctor, I looked at it all as an experiment and was amazed at how the body slowed down in a crisis.

* Find a role model and aim to achieve even more than they could ever do. My father went to the United States in 1900 to study at Duke University in North Carolina. He was a pioneer and one of my heroes. Later I found a few more life guides, and when I am stuck, I ask myself how they would deal with the problem.

* It’s wonderful to live long. Until one is 60 years old, it is easy to work for one’s family and to achieve one’s goals. But in our later years, we should strive to contribute to society. Since the age of 65, I have worked as a volunteer. I still put in 18 hours seven days a week and love every minute of it.

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Contributed to this journal by Leonard Carrier.

Happy Mother’s Day

THE Yiddish Classic – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-__YSeg2uA

For Arabs – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZcBdgdhCY

Irish kids – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oDMzJiPUdE

Italian Style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W28r7Y7mIBU

For and from Mothers everywhere – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpFW4Yhy08k

For Dr. Doolittle and all creatures great and small – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EfTFz8KaDE

IN MEMORIAM

Ronald Dworkin

1931 – 2013

“Without dignity our lives are only blinks of duration. But

if we manage to lead a good life well, we create something

more. We write a subscript to our mortality. We make our

lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands.”</blockquote>

*********************

Excerpted from Ronald Dworkin’s final masterpiece, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS

Tuition at public colleges jumped last year by a record amount as state governments slashed school funding, the latest sign of strain in the U.S. higher-education sector.

The average amount that students at public colleges paid in tuition climbed 8.3% last year, the biggest jump on record, according to a report based on data from all public institutions in all 50 states. There are reasons for this but not mentioned in the report is greed. Salaries of college administrators rose for the 11th consecutive year. Someone’s got to pay for this. College administrators are like bankers and CEOs of major corporations: Hey, we don’t care; we want MORE. Meanwhile, as in nearly all years, tuition rises far exceeded the cost of living. Only Harvard can say, “Who? Not me” because it has so much filthy lucre obtained from other sources, it has stopped bothering the poor. Families with incomes under $40,000 have been excused from the “Pay now, die next week” syndrome. In fact, they no longer pay any tuition. The theoretical costs at Harvard are Tuition $33,696 and Room & Board $11,856. That applies only to the preppies from Exeter and other such money-grows on trees factories. Is Harvard big-hearted? Maybe. In part. But by sparing itself the bother of charging the poor schnook, it reduces its accounting burden.

1. More than 450 teachers and other school employees applied for 24 spots in a free Ohio firearms training program.
The Columbus Dispatch reported, via Free Republic. More than 450 teachers and other school employees from around Ohio have applied for 24 spots in a free firearms-training program being offered by the Buckeye Firearms Association.

“We’re pleasantly surprised, but it’s not shocking,” Ken Hanson, legal chairman for the association, said today of the response since the group began taking applications on its website 10 days ago. “The demand has been there for quite some time.”

The issue of arming school employees to protect students has been “on the radar” of school boards in Ohio for several years, he said, but the organization decided to launch its training program after the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

“That was the breaking point,” he said. “We decided it’s time to quit talking about it and move forward.”

2. The Dow Jones industrial average hurtled downward 1.2% today losing 158 points to finish below the 13,000 threshold, at 12,938.
The Dow dropped nearly 70 points in the last half hour during Barack Obama’s fiscal speech.

3. President Barack Obama issued an executive order to end the pay freeze on federal employees, in effect giving some federal workers a raise. One federal worker now to receive a pay increase is Vice President Joe Biden. According to disclosure forms, Biden made $225,521 last year. After the pay increase, he’ll make $231,900 per year.

Members of Congress, from the House and Senate, also will receive a little bump, as their annual salary will go from $174,000 to 174,900. Leadership in Congress, including the speaker of the House, will likewise get an increase. Meanwhile… For the rest of America, median household income has dropped $4,520, or about one month’s average wages, since President Obama took office.

4. American Heart Association on the job: The American Heart Association offers these guidelines for exercise:

Exercise only if your doctor says it’s safe.
Begin each workout with a gentle warm-up and end with a cool-down.
Monitor the intensity of your activity, making sure it’s within the recommended range.
Monitor your heart rate and blood pressure.
Be aware of warning signs that you’re pushing yourself too hard, including chest pain, lightheadedness or feeling out of breath.

5. President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed off on a controversial bill that bans U.S. citizens from adopting Russian orphans.
The U.S. State Department said later in the day that it “deeply regretted” the measure.

Effective from Jan. 1, the ban is part of Russia’s lightning response to the Magnitsky Act that President Barack Obama signed earlier this month. The U.S. legislation seeks to punish Russian officials suspected of committing human rights violations.

6. Murders in New York have dropped to their lowest level in over 40 years, city officials announced on Friday, even as overall crimes increased slightly because of a rise in thefts — a phenomenon based solely on robberies of iPhones and other Apple devices.

There were 414 recorded homicides so far in 2012, compared with 515 for the same period in 2011, city officials said. That is a striking decline from murder totals in the low-2,000s that were common in the early 1990s, and is also below the record low: 471, set in 2009. [In an extraordinarily stupid proclamation, Mayor Bloomberg said, “The essence of civilization is that you can walk down the street without having to look over your shoulder.”]

Mr. Bloomberg acclaimed the accomplishment during a graduation ceremony for more than 1,000 new police officers at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. He attributed the low murder rate to the department’s controversial practice of “stop, question and frisk,” in which people are stopped on the street and questioned by officers, and aggressive hot-spot policing, in which officers are deployed to areas with crime spikes. Shootings are also down for the year so far. The number of murders is the lowest since 1963, when improvements in the recording of data were made. Killings have dropped to such a low level that more New Yorkers now commit suicide than are the victims of homicides. About 475 New Yorkers kill themselves each year, according to the city’s health department.

Mr. Bloomberg praised Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, saying the 19 percent drop in homicides compared with 2011 was achieved despite a shrinking police force and an increasing population. Mr. Kelly said he believed that relatively new policing strategies, including adding more police officers dedicated to curbing domestic violence, and monitoring social media to thwart gang-related murders, were working. “We’re preventing crimes before someone is killed and before someone else has to go to prison,” the commissioner said.

Of the 414 murders, 14 deaths from previous years were counted as homicides for the first time… Of the 400 murders in 2012, 223 were .gunshot victims, 84 victims were stabbed to death, 43 died of blunt trauma and 11 died of asphyxiation.

The majority of the 400 homicides occurred on a Saturday, followed by early Sunday morning. Most occurred at 2 a.m. People were more likely to be killed outside than in. Nearly 70 percent of the victims had prior criminal arrests, the police said. Domestic-related homicides dropped to 68, from 94 in 2011. In Chicago, killings are on the rise.

7. Goodbye Mr. Tom Regan. This announcement must be intended to re-confirm Mr. Regan’s view that friendship with me is a serious mistake. He broke with me in 2009 because of a similar announcement and my defense of Bolt’s selection over Michael Phelps.

Triple Olympic champion Usain Bolt, the 2012 World Athlete of the Year, has been named the best athlete of 2012 by the International Sports Press Association (AIPS). In a poll of 450 sports journalists from 100 countries, Bolt was the overwhelming winner, amassing more than a third of all votes to beat US swimmer Michael Phelps and tennis star Novak Djokovic.

Cindy Hollander will celebrate her next birthday on December 31. Send her a Happy Birthday card c/o the Hollander Stores in Kerrytown, Ann Arbor.

Cindy came to Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, in the 1970s from Lima, Ohio to study piano with Dady Mehta, the cousin of the more illustrious Zubin Mehta. She met and fell in love with Tom Hollander and that changed my life forever. Maybe theirs, too.

Tom Hollander was an import from Hamden, Ct., a near neighbor of the notorious Kagan clan, persons he never actually met. Tom’s life was dedicated to running, and EMU had a splendid track program and he fit right in. At age 19, he set an American teenage record for the marathon and during his years at EMU won many honors, including All-America mentions. In retrospect, those things don’t mean much. Today, Tom has more important things on his mind – a miserable leg that prevents him from running, two kids of whom he is justly very proud and at least one grandchild who I predict will go on to great things because Oliver is the son of a great mother.

What I want to tell you is just this: the friendship between Tom and me has grown steadily over the last three decades and he is one of the best reasons for me to remain living in Ann Arbor. Although running is now pretty much a thing of the past for him, he is not agonizing over that. He has become what we Yids call A MENSCH, a person in the fullest and best sense of that word. What I think is that he never could have become the man he is without the guidance and love of Cindy. She strikes me as an unassuming Rock of Gibralter. Every family has secrets and I suppose Cindy and Tom have theirs and I don’t need to know them. I know enough of them to know they are truly a “right on couple.” They brighten my day whenever they visit us. JoEllen and I don’t get around much any more because J goes nowhere without her scooter – God’s feeble effort to make up for the polio he gifted to her when she was thirteen years old.

Once upon a time I had little in common with Tom other than our joint passion for track and field. Today, Tom and I have moved on, and Cindy plays NO small role in this – our friendship is without limits. Is it all Cindy’s doing? Almost certainly not. Who cares? The Hollander family is part of us and, if I exaggerate Cindy’s role, that’s nobody’s business but mine. Not even Cindy’s, who asks only that I accept her dishes of food when she comes calling.

************************
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLMvH92KjQ

At 3 A.M. today, I sprung from my bed with the wild, inchoate feeling that at long last I had some inkling of what religious people mean when they say they cannot be shaken from their groundless faith in God. I was at that moment experiencing an epiphany of sorts of my very own.

My eight year old granddaughter is struggling in school but no one seems to want to admit it, least of all my wife. Anika is in 2nd grade, a year behind where she should be but even in this arrangement she is not keeping up. Will she ever catch up? I don’t know, and, for now at least, it doesn’t seem to matter. It would be fair to say it is actually impossible not to love her. She is the very paradigm of Love itself. Wherever she goes, people instantly fall for her. If she goes to the dentist, all the staff stops work to admire her and express their love for her. The same is true at her pediatrician’s office. My wife wants her to grow up happy and to hell with my mad delusion that one day she will vindicate my craziness and win a Nobel Prize in physics.

Because she has the most sparkling personality in the history of the planet, nobody notices her weak intellectual performance. Friends and family reassure me that she is intelligent to an extraordinary degree. They cannot get over how smart she is. That her genius is not borne out by academic performance means nothing. Of that, everyone but me is quite sure.

But what will happen if, by age 12, she is only performing at the level of a 9 or 10 year old in school? Will she herself care or will she continue to exude all the joy and contentment she now does? I worry. That worry woke me this morning, as it sometimes has on other mornings. This time, however, it was accompanied by that strange feeling that even I, the skeptic of skeptic, would not abandon my belief that she will triumph. And when she is 20, what then? I will be 90 and I don’t expect much will be left of my mind other than a blind faith that finally Anika will be The Success That Shakes The World. If I really am still alive, I know I will not have much left to sustain that primordial will to live other than that.

It is, I suppose, all due to the ineffable power of love. I have always felt contempt for people who cannot conceive of any experience that would awaken them from their dogmatic faith that there is a God. I am not renouncing the idea that such faith is the very quintessence of stupidity but I expect that soon enough I will relinquish my contempt. It is all about LOVE.

I am beginning to feel a wee bit like Scott Carey, the hero of the great sci-fi movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man. When Scott realizes he will never again be a part of the normal world, he thinks, “A strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I had ever thought before – as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light. I recognized that part of my illness was rooted in hunger, and I remembered the food on the shelf, the cake thredded with spider web. I no longer felt hatred for the spider. Like myself it struggled blindly for the means to live.” Don’t worry, I don’t believe my madness has anything to do with my passion for Chinese food,…but still. And finally, in his closing soliloquy, Scott announces [SG:to the ubiquitous viewer], “But suddenly, I knew they [SG: he refers to the small and the large] were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet – like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens….” The rest is trite garbage but I unabashedly love it all. Suddenly my epiphany closes with the realization it is just possible that I am not the smartest man in the world. I can handle it.

The mature Johnny had a voice somewhere between tenor and baritone. This might be his biggest hit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEH3uqbpsm8

The young Johnny could sing with a rich baritone. Kol Nidre is a prayer sung in Jewish synagogues at the beginning of the service on the eve of Yom Kippur. From an album recorded in 1958.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30HKyLhGCjk

In times like these, when one is feeling the crush of an economic slowdown, one must choose a getaway-from-it-all 2nd home with considerable care. However, I do think the home I am pushing this fine day will satisfy the needs of discriminating buyers who may sometimes worry about the vagaries of the market.

Our choice of home is partially dictated by the surrounding area, and many good houses are listed for under $40 million. Nearby public schools have the highest ratings. The home I am recommending is available for just $47.5 million and can be had with a down payment of only $10 million. Thereafter, monthly payments of an easy-on-the-budget $212,866/month will make it go down easier than a spoonful of sugar.

The home features 12 generous sized bedrooms and 15 bathrooms. Persons with a urinary infection never have to travel far. The total size of the house is 23,649 square feet, plenty of room for the family dog. Indeed, one of the 35 photos exhibiting the gorgeousness of it all, shows a dog lying on one of the floors. I cannot say for sure but it is possible that one can purchase the house for $47 million if one can forsake having the beast. The home is located in Aspen, Colorado and comes with an asphalt roof.

The Golden Leaf Half Marathon will be run on September 22 so bring your sneakers. It is one of the 14 most scenic races in the country. In its 32nd year, the Golden Leaf Half Marathon is for many a fall tradition. Aid Stations at miles 1.5, 5.5 and 10 but you can bring along your own medical staff to fill in the gaps. It really wouldn’t be an event in Aspen if it didn’t end with a great party. Locale for the party is the Sky Hotel. I hope to see many of you potential home buyers very soon. I’ll be there.

http://www.trulia.com/property/3092579836-201-565-Midnight-Mine-Rd-Aspen-CO-81611
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The House I Live In – Frank Sinatra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bUT73L0nhM

DON’T WORRY. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS, EITHER.

What I do know is that my mother knew what it meant. Sometimes, when somebody tried to get tough with her, she’d say “You don’t shtrasse me,” which roughly means, I think, “Hey, Bub, you don’t scare me. I’ll knock your block off, if I must.”

Now, why am I telling you this? You are asking because something gives you the insane idea that I know what I am doing. That is the sort of thinking that makes people go right. Therefore, I want nothing to do with it.

But the answer is, DAMNED IF I KNOW.