The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
Sorted by date Results 26 - 35 of 35
I dread the coming of Sunday, March 12. At 2 a.m. that morning our clocks will “spring forward.” That means that my yellow Labrador, Thurber, who wakes me at exactly 6 a.m. every morning, will begin waking me at exactly 5 a.m. every morning. He’ll do so because that’s when his Labradorian clock tells him it is time for me to feed him and take him outside for Number 1 and Number 2. Which means I’ll be in a perpetual stupor for weeks until the two of us finally get used to the clock change ...
It’s at once amazing and troublesome. I speak of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence application that was launched last November by OpenAI. In a matter of seconds, it can write apparently accurate articles or answer questions on a multitude of subjects. When I asked ChatGPT what it is, it responded this way: “I am designed to understand and generate human-like language based on the input I receive . . . My purpose is to assist and communicate with people in a variety of ways, from answering gen...
All my father ever wanted as a young man was to marry my mother and start a family — plans that were interrupted when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean conflict. As he served in Texas, Germany and other parts of the world, there was only one affordable way to stay in contact: writing letters. Every single day, seven days a week, my mother told me, he wrote a letter to her and she wrote one to him. Some letters ran four pages long. Some days, they wrote two! They shared their h...
Groundhog Day cannot come soon enough. It’s the thick of winter. Cabin fever is setting in. Incivility is worse than ever. A delightful, silly diversion is what we need about now, and Punxsutawney Phil has been delivering needed joy this time of year since 1887. As you know, every Feb. 2, on Groundhog Day, Phil is pulled from a tree stump on Gobbler’s Knob, a few miles outside of downtown Punxsutawney, Pa. If he sees his shadow, his Inner Circle organizers allege, there will be six more wee...
I love my gas stove — almost as much as I love my Weber gas grill. So I became curious this past week when I heard that a commissioner in one of our ever-expanding federal-government agencies discussed a possible ban on natural gas stoves. As the story goes, Richard Trumka Jr., a U.S. Consumer Product Safety commissioner, told Bloomberg that gas stoves are a hidden health hazard and that “products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” Bloomberg says that 40% of America’s homes use gas stove...
“Half of that goes to the bank for your college fund!” That’s what my father told me in the 8th grade, when I got my first paycheck for waking up at 5:30 a.m. to ride my bike a few miles to Cool Springs Driving Range before school, where I plucked golf balls for a dollar an hour. My dad had six kids to feed on a single income, after all. Paying my full college tuition bill was never going to be an option. There was only one option for me: work. When I got a little older I started mowing lawns...
A long time ago I watched a documentary about poet Emily Dickinson's life and writings. One thing that I never forgot about that film is that she lived at a time when death was regrettably common - and therefore the subject of many of her poems. "How are you doing?" is a polite way of introducing ourselves to each other now. But as I learned in that documentary, this greeting during Dickinson's times meant, "Are you healthy and well and going to be with us tomorrow?" Until modern times, dying co...
Here’s a trend that may not bode well for the future of our country: According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 40 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds have summer jobs — down from 75 percent of teens a generation ago. As it goes, according to the NerdWallet website, teen summer employment has been declining for decades. Why? One reason is that jobs typically tailored for teens are either shrinking or being taken by older folks. Another is that more teens are attending summer sch...
My mother and father keep our old photos in their hall closet in a sturdy old Pabst Blue Ribbon box. Sifting through old photos is a glorious experience - one, we now know, that relieves aches and pains by calming the brain, according to a recent study. The last time I looked through the box with my mother, we came across a black-and-white photo of a little girl. That photo was taken 82 years ago, when the girl had her whole life before her. She didn't know yet that one of her sisters would be...
Hello, 2022. We hope you’re not expecting to get the honeymoon treatment that most new years have gotten throughout history. You see, 2022, most of us are very cranky here in the USA and we have our eyes on you. It’s nothing personal, 2022. It’s just that our hopes for the last two new years have fallen far short of our expectations. We remember the high hopes we had for 2020 — which seems many decades ago. That year got off to a really great start. The economy was thriving. Employment was hig...
