Enotes

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm 51 years old. I only tell you this because, when she was my age, Jeralean Talley was living in the year 1950. And she continued to live, some 65 more years, until passing peacefully the other day in her home in Inkster . Jeralean was 116 years, 25 days old when she slipped away, ending her two-month reign as the world's oldest living person. I wonder what it would have been like to be my age now, in 1950. Harry S. Truman was president. Television was still a relatively new thing and lots of folks didn't even own one. And if they did. it broadcast everything in beautiful, gorgeous, vivid...black and white. The NHL had six teams. Major League Baseball had all of 16. The NFL was still finding its audience as teams were experimenting with something called the forward pass. The NBA was four years old. The only phones we had were mounted on our kitchen walls. You had to actually read the hands of a clock or wristwatch to tell ...

This may be shocking to read, but it's not over the top to say that Valerie Harper was supposed to be six feet under now. Instead, she's going to be dancing up a storm. Harper, beloved to this day for having played the sassy, tough Rhoda Morgenstern on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda," was diagnosed with brain cancer earlier this year. Her doctors gave her three months to live. Maybe she couldn't pay her bill, and the docs are giving her six more months. With apologies to Henny Youngman, whose joke I just bastardized, have you noticed what's been going on with Harper? The most recent news is that she's going to be one of the celebrity contestants on "Dancing With the Stars" this fall. Before that, Harper appeared on an "MTM Show" reunion on Nick at Nite, and filmed a movie role. Not bad for someone who was supposed to be gone by now. Cancer is a funny thing, and never before has the word "funny" b...

It's said that, ideally, you'd take your weight, cut it in half, and the resulting number is how many ounces of water you should drink per day. I'm secure enough to tell you that my number is approximately 100. I'm not afraid to indirectly tell you my weight, because for the past several months, water has been my beverage of choice, by far. I have a 20-oz plastic tumbler that has been seemingly attached to my left hand with invisible string, always filled with ice and frequently being drained of its clear H20. I like Aquafina when it comes to bottled water, but I can subsist on tap water, too. I don't know how many times a day I am drawing more water into the tumbler from the refrigerator dispenser, but it's enough to give my thumb a nice workout. At work, we have an unending supply of bottled water (Ice Mountain, but it's fine), and I kill about two of those 16.9-oz bottles per day. So that's 34 ounces right there, plus all the tumblers during...