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2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, In the News

All the news that’s also news in the midst of a pandemic

April 8, 2020 No Comments

There must be other news out there. Out there in the universe. Something new. News stories that aren’t solely focused on the one item that none of us seem able to escape or get away from for one merciful minute: “Tiger King!” No … I mean coronavirus.

But either one, man. Try to find a station, newspaper or media feed where those two aren’t dominating. And I don’t mean to make light of it. I know it’s serious business, but we all need a break. We need a chance to catch our breaths and read something else – to know that there is a world out there that isn’t only about death rates, what the president said or why the greatest country on the planet STILL can’t put more toilet paper on grocery store shelves.

I mean, seriously! We have developed phones that will video-conference us anywhere in the world and vehicles that are road-tripping around Mars, but even the single-ply stuff is impossible to come by!

So for you, my loyal readers (all eight of you), I made it my focus, my challenge, my duty to search high and low for the best news that isn’t getting to you. The news that is still happening, but gets buried under the constant barrage of coronavirus/Tiger King coverage. Consider this your escape – your few minutes of relief and sanctuary before you return to the maelstrom that surrounds us 24-7:

• Story No. 1: … OK, hold on …

2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, Florida, Health, In the News

Worried eyes and healing eyes as we all come to terms with coronavirus

March 18, 2020 No Comments

The two women in the grocery store checkout line were buying pudding packs. Lots of them.

“We’ll eat these first,” said the younger of the two women reassuringly. The older woman seemed frail. From a pocket, she pulled a tissue and dabbed her nose. The other woman took out a bottle of hand sanitizer and squeezed it into her hands. She rubbed them together.

The woman slowly turned her head and looked up at me. The older woman.

I was standing there with a cart full of groceries. This was the weekend before things got really “interesting.” Before you couldn’t find chicken or toilet paper or stuff you never thought stores would run out of. Or at least, not when there wasn’t a tropical cyclone spinning off the Florida coast.

That weekend, things were only slightly off-kilter. Slightly hushed. Slightly concerned. The reality wasn’t setting in yet. People who went to the grocery store that early in the morning looked at each other in ways I haven’t fully come to terms with. They jumped when they heard someone cough. They walked the aisles solemnly. They paused near the cleaning supplies or the respiratory relief pills and stared. Did they need them? Were they overreacting?

Sometimes they just looked at each other, like they didn’t know what to say.

Like the older woman dabbing her nose.

2020 Nutshells, Family, Getting old ... er ... older, In the News

When the ‘angries’ come to roost

March 12, 2020 No Comments

Don’t you round up my age, mama!

Boy, that makes me angry. And I was already a bit perturbed.

I had just canceled a trip to New York for a conference over concerns about the coronavirus.

I was reporting this to my mother, who thought it was for the best. For once in my life, I agreed with her … until she said something I wasn’t ready for: “You know, Brian, you’re 50 now, and they’re saying older people are at higher risk.”

Wait a minute … WHAT did you just say?!?

Fifty!

FIF-ty!

FIF-@%$&#-TY!!!

Hold on for just 47 seconds, because … I AM NOT 50. I am 47 years of age. Just turned 47. A whipper-snapper, when measured against the age of the galaxies. If you carbon date me – I dare you to try … I fight like a 17-year-old! – I wouldn’t even register. Well, maybe back to caveman days, but still pretty darn young.

2019 Nutshells, Animals, In the News

The power of that K9 inner eyebrow raise

June 19, 2019 No Comments

I’m on to you dog, you wrinkled-brow dung weevil. I get what you’re doing. You and your ancestors. Centuries of evolving to this perfectly effective state. Diverging from your cousins, the wolves, thanks to a little muscle in your forehead that gives you super powers. Able to mimic our human emotions, and prey on our generosity and gullible-ness and the fact that we find woodland critters with personality utterly irresistible. Mirror images of us, but like cartoon characters.

And we’re suckers. We’ll give you anything when you pull off that wrinkled-brow cute stuff. Another snack. A spot in our bed. The keys to the car. A place in the will. I once grilled you a steak with graham crackers on top!

But I’m wise now, buddy. I’m on to you.

It’s thanks to new research I read about the other day. Scientists studied the differences between dogs and wolves, and found that man’s best friend has a special muscle along their noggins that allows them to do an “inner eyebrow raise.” Wolves don’t have it, and so they just look like they’re going to eat our faces when they stare at us. But dogs can raise their eyebrows, looking super cute and even human-like … right before they eat our faces off.

2018 Nutshells, Florida, In the News

Searching for answers after the midterms

November 7, 2018 No Comments

Farewell midterm elections. You were exciting, you got us all out to vote and you boosted our blood pressure, which truthfully, none of us can actually afford. But now you’re gone, and doesn’t matter who won or what side lost, we are all just so glad we can go back to our normal lives and be rid of you. But post-midterms, there are still a couple of issues I’m wrestling with like: • Can’t we make the ballot experience easier? I mean, I graduated from college for one simple reason: So I would never, EVER have to take stressful, pressure-cooker exams again. I hate cramming until midnight in preparation for tests. And what was I doing the night before the election? CRAMMING!!! And I wasn’t the only one. Figuring out the ballot was truly the one thing that brought us all together as Floridians. Didn’t matter which party or candidate you supported. Everyone gathered together begging for tips or hints. “How do I vote on Amendment 92 allowing everyone to call the International Space Station collect?” “Who is judge so-and-so and do you think he would let me off if I get a speeding ticket?” “Why are there so many extra candidates running for governor, and how do I get a gig like that?”

2018 Nutshells, Florida, In the News

Mysteries of the Winter Olympics

February 14, 2018 No Comments

I grew up in Tampa, Florida, where if the temperature dipped below 76 degrees, the entire city moved to an evacuation shelter in Miami. Anything performed on ice or snow — or more clothes than a loin cloth — was pretty foreign to me. We didn’t ski or ice skate or launch ourselves off ice ramps. If we could get an ice cube in our tea before it melted, that was a winter sport. It’s much the same today, which is maybe why the Winter Olympics is so fascinating to me. I find myself hooked, staring at the screen, marveling at these sports I’ve never tried, or didn’t even knew existed. There are so many mysteries. For instance: • In any sport I’ve ever watched — or for that matter, anything that has ever moved — I’ve rooted for a massive crash. Cars. Poker games. Anything involving pom-poms. But in winter sports, I sit in fetal position peeking through my arms screaming, “Please Lord, don’t let that guy wipeout!” Winter crashes are terrifying, horrid and cataclysmic. On slick ice with no friction to stop them, they could go on forever, jumping barricades and shooting through town like a cartoon catastrophe. I get spasms in parts of my body I didn’t even know existed and can’t look at ice cubes for weeks.

2018 Nutshells, In the News, Technology

Ideas for Amazon’s grocery store of tomorrow

January 24, 2018 No Comments

Amazon opened something truly revolutionary the other day: A grocery store in Seattle without a single checkout line. Lined with cameras and sensors, you walk into the Amazon Go store, scan an app, pickup what you want and leave. No lines. No loud calls over an intercom for Herb to do a price check on aisle 8 for your corn remover. No trying to pretend that the tabloid story about Prince Harry being a space alien doesn’t actually interest you. Personally, I love the idea of a store like this. I hate checkout lines. But this only solves a couple of my biggest annoyances. So, in hopes that a bright Amazon engineer might read this, here are a couple of things that should also be incorporated into a high-tech grocery store of tomorrow: • We need sliding floors. Let me explain: This would come in handy in situations where someone has decided to park their cart right in the middle of the aisle so they can read the ingredients on a box of crackers. First off, who reads ingredients on a box of crackers!?! Any way you look at it, they’re bad for you! But to the point, I’m so polite that I hate asking someone to move. So, I stand there for 20 minutes while saying in the softest voice, “Uh, excuse me … Um, pardon me, but I can’t get through …” Sliding floors, though, could use sensors to spot this and gently “slide” that person out of […]

2017 Nutshells, In the News, Technology

Never trust your smart-phone

October 11, 2017 No Comments

It read like a horror movie: “How smart-phones hijack our minds.” That was the headline of a piece in the Wall Street Journal — an article that immediately got my attention, and caused me to curse my phone: “Aha! It was YOU who caused me to eat all those candy corn pumpkins!!! I TOLD my daughter I had nothing to do with it!” The article gave some pretty shocking statistics: We pull our phones out 80 times a day … our phones are actually making us less focused and sloppier … their mere presence makes us dumber and we’re willingly letting these devices “commandeer our brains” … if there is anything resembling candy corn in the house, they will force us to eat it. Stuff like that. Truth is, if aliens wanted to invade Earth, all they need to do is buy a bunch of iPhones and pass them out for a free on a street corner. “Keys to the planet for a free smartphone? Eh … sounds like a fairly good deal! Does it come with unlimited data?” We are willingly letting ourselves get hijacked.

2017 Nutshells, In the News, Travel

If I were a rich man … with no passion for fishing

June 5, 2017 No Comments

I guess “horrified” isn’t the right word, but I would definitely say “dumbfounded” comes close to capturing it. It was an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “How the Rich Fish.” Its subhead read, “In their quest for the best fishing, avid anglers are spending $200,000 to $750,000 to create and stock personal streams with computer-controlled conditions.” Yes, my friends, there is no end to the excess! First off, if you’re that rich, you can certainly afford to get some robots to do the fishing for you, and even dress them up in funny party hats and animal costumes. But you sure don’t need to go wading into the water yourself. Go eat ice cream instead. The story spotlighted a retired energy executive who had created 2 acres of man-made streams and ponds at his Wyoming home. He said his two passions in life were “playing golf and fly fishing.” Second off, if you have enough money to dig computer-controlled fish ponds, you can certainly afford to go out and buy yourself better passions!

2017 Nutshells, In the News, Running

Running to a ridiculously longer life

May 3, 2017 No Comments

Sometimes a news article comes along that is just what you need, at just the right time. Like this one from The New York Times: “An hour of running may add 7 hours to your life,” the headline practically screamed. “Seven extra hours for every hour I run?!?” I thought. “Shoot, I’ve already banked enough to live to 307! I’m practically immortal!!! I can start drinking beer for breakfast and eating pretzels dipped in bacon fat, just like I’ve always dreamed!” As some of you may recall, I recently wrote how I had fallen into a running rut after completing a marathon last fall. And in that column I advised, more or less, to swear off advice columns that promise to help you wake up early or get back into super-fancy exercise regimes. They were failing me as I tried to break my funk and re-engage my lost love for running. But I want to amend that: Skip advice columns, BUT … in their place, read only the headlines of stories on health studies that make grandiose and overly-general claims. (The key here is ONLY read the headlines, never the full story. Life is best when you gloss over the facts and skip the fine print.)