Under My Hat

I've been on a walking kick to lose weight.

It seems to be working. It'd work much better if I'd stay away from fruit pies, but treats are important. Walking is good for the health, but too much of a good thing becomes bad. When I tried walking 10 miles, I developed blisters on my feet. So I came to the conclusion that too much exercise isn't a good thing. Or course, too much pie isn't a good thing either.

And so I've learned to balance walking with eating pie. I've developed my own system of rewards. Each person needs to figure out what works best.

Writers strive to find the most accurate way to tell stories and describe things. That's our job.

We use words as our basic tools, just like mechanics use wrenches.

We build sentences to convey thoughts, just like chemists concoct formulas.

We come up with words and phrases and string them together in ways we hope will work.

It's both an art and a science and not always easy. The art can be abstract and the science not exact.

Add to that our own limitations and you can see why mistakes happen.

Alone in the world, Jean Stevens did the unthinkable.

She decided to live with her dead loved ones.

The 91-year-old Wyalusing woman was found to have in her house and garage the embalmed, mummified bodies of her late husband and her twin sister.

The discovery last week sent shock waves across the country, partly because of the circumstances: Jean Stevens is perfectly normal. She does not have dementia.

"She has all of her mental faculties," say social workers.

Pennsylvania State Police say both bodies had been there for quite some time.

Do you remember when television was described as a vast wasteland?

It happened during a speech delivered to the National Association of Broadcasters. The criticism was leveled by an attorney named Newton Minow. At the time, he was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Minow felt that TV was not living up to its potential to serve the public interest.