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TidbitsonThoughtfulThinking Philosophy is often a general and abstract way of thinking about the world, the universe, ourself and society. It works by asking very basic questions about the nature of human thought, the nature of the universe, our existence, self awareness and the connections between them. The original meaning of the word philosophy comes from the Greeks, with the roots philo- meaning "love" and -sophos, or "wisdom." ... In other words, they wanted to know the meaning of life. This tells us something about the nature of philosophy, but not all, because many other disciplines seek wisdom as well. How does philosophy differ from these other disciplines? A brief look at the historical development of the field. A standard way of telling the story is this: Humanity’s first systematic inquiries took place within a mythological or religious framework. From the time that first person asked "why am I here" and got a satisfactory answer, wisdom was at least acknowledged. It then derived from sacred traditions and from individuals who were thought to possess privileged access to a supernatural (and, presumably, honest and error-proof) realm. The legitimacy of these traditions or access of these individuals to this devine'd wisdom generally was not questioned. However, starting in the sixth century BCE, there appeared in ancient Greece a series of thinkers whose inquiries were comparatively secular (earthly, non spiritual, of this world). You’ve heard some of these ancient names. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Phythagoras, Protagoras, Archimedes and there were many more. Supposedly, these thinkers conducted their inquiries through reason and observation instead of relying on tradition or supposed revelation. For this reason, they are considered the first philosophers. Although this picture is simplistic, the basic distinction has stuck: philosophy in its most primeval form is nothing less than secular inquiry itself. To say that philosophy is secular does not mean that it is anti-religious, but only that it is independent of religion. If one needed to be anti-religious or even nonreligious to do philosophy, the history of philosophy would be very slim indeed. To say that philosophy is secular also is not to deny that there are many thinkers, even the ancient ones, for whom it was or is not always clear even today as to whether they were doing philosophy or theology: philosophy, like any other discipline, has gray boundaries. There are many forms of secular inquiry, so what distinguishes philosophy from them? In the beginning, there was no distinction, but, as civilization advanced, two parts of philosophy became so powerful in their own right that they separated off, claiming the status of independent disciplines. Mathematics was the first, and split off very early in the game; science (or natural philosophy, was the second, splitting off much later. Todays modern philosophy is left with whatever questions these two disciplines cannot solve (at least at a given time). Philosophy, of course, is best known for these first 2 classes of questions, which includes some of the most difficult and important inquiries there are: questions such as whether or not there is a God, how one can know anything at all, and how a person ought to live. The character of Philosophy comes as much by its methods as by its subject matter, speculating on issues that generally cannot be investigated by experimental test; therefore, it is a more conceptual than scientific study. Nevertheless, philosophy properly done is not mere speculation. Just like scientists, philosophers formulate hypotheses which ultimately must answer to reason and evidence. Despite it not being a science this is one of the things that differentiates philosophy from poetry and mysticism. The four main branches of philosophy are logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and axiology:

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▲ On April 7, 1776, Navy Capt. John Barry, commander of the American warship Lexington, makes the first American naval capture of a British vessel when he takes command of the warship HMS Edward off the coast of Virginia. The capture turned Barry into a national hero. ▲ On April 1, 1877, prospector Edward Schieffelin begins his search for silver in southern Arizona. Later that year, Schieffelin discovered one of the richest silver veins in the West. He named it the Tombstone Lode. ▲ On April 2, 1972, silent film actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin prepares for his first voyage to the United States since 1952, when he was denied a re-

entry visa amid questions about his Animals (ASPCA) is founded in New leftist politics. Chaplin returned to York by philanthropist and diplomat accept an honorary Academy Award. Henry Bergh after he witnessed and later wrote about work horses beaten by their ▲ On April 3, 1996, at his cabin in peasant drivers in Russia. Montana, Theodore John Kaczynski is arrested by FBI agents and accused ▲ On April 11, 1945, the American of being the Unabomber, the elusive Third Army liberates the Buchenwald terrorist blamed for 16 mail bombs concentration camp, near Weimar, that killed three people and injured Germany. Among those saved by the 23. “Unabomber” was an acronym for Americans was Elie Wiesel, who would university, airline and bomber. go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. ▲ On April 5, 2000, Lee Petty, an early star of NASCAR, dies at the age ▲ On April 9, 1962, President John F. of 86 in North Carolina. Lee Petty won Kennedy throws out the ceremonial first more than 50 stock-car races during pitch in Washington D.C.’s new stadium, his career, including three NASCAR called simply “D.C. Stadium.” He championships and the first Daytona continued a tradition that began in 1910 500, held in 1959. when President William Taft threw out Major League Baseball’s first opening▲ On April 10, 1866, the American day pitch in old Griffith Stadium. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

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▲ On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hits his 715th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers. Aaron would hit 40 more home runs for a career total of 755. ▲ On April 14, 1986, the U.S. launches airstrikes against Libya in retaliation for its sponsorship of terrorism against American troops and citizens. The attacks were mounted by Navy attack jets in the Mediterranean and Air Force bombers from bases in England. France refused to allow the bombers to fly over its territory, forcing them to make a 3,000-mile detour. (c) 2019 Hearst Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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CRYING (Continued) • The basal tears that continuously bathe the eyes are made of three layers in a sort of “fluid sandwich” with a mucous-laden layer next to the cornea; a fluid middle layer; and an outer layer containing oils that prevent the tears from evaporating too quickly. The water layer is the thickest and contains electrolytes (such as sodium and potassium), proteins (mostly enzymes), glucose, and other substances. • Basal tears are produced by a series of about 20 small tear ducts called lacrimal glands. Another gland secretes a type of mucous called mucin that hugs the cornea. A set of 46 glands in the eyelids excrete oily lipids that prevent evaporation. Basal tears kill bacteria because they contain lysozyme, a fluid that can kill 90 to 95 percent of all bacteria. • The eye’s “drain pipe” is called the puncta, located in the corners of the eyes next to the nose, draining directly into the nasal cavity, which is why your nose runs when you cry. When tears are produced faster than they can be drained through the puncta, they spill over the eyelids and run down the cheeks. • When crying begins, blood flow increases to the eyeball, turning the eyes red. This causes the eye muscles to contract in order to protect the veins and arteries from increased pressure. The contracted muscles squeeze the tear ducts, forcing fluid out, which cools the overheated eyeballs down.

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• So why do eyes get puffy after crying? Emotional tears are more watery and less salty than basic tears and the tissue in your eye. Through the process of osmosis, the water moves into the saltier ocular tissues, which makes them swell up. • Emotional weeping triggers the “fight or flight” response. Breathing accelerates and blood flow increases. The opening in the throat called the glottis, which allows air from the larynx to the lungs, opens wide to facilitate greater air flow and easier breathing. This is why you often feel as if you have a lump in your throat when you cry. Swallowing forces the glottis to close, fighting against the reflex that is trying to force the glottis open and straining the throat muscles, producing the feeling of a lump. • When you are crying due to irritations such as onion fumes, you’ll shed about 5 tear drops, equal to about 100 microliters. But during a good hard emotional cry, you’ll shed as much as an entire milliliter of tears, amounting to a third of a fluid ounce. • Not only are emotional tears far greater in volume, but they also have a 20% higher concentration of protein than irritant tears, as well as being loaded with hormones such as prolactin. In addition to being self-soothing, shedding emotional tears releases oxytocin and endorphins. • Baby boys and baby girls cry at similar rates, but adult women cry more often than adult men. The gap widens beginning between the ages of 13 to 16. It’s been shown that women have up to 60% more of the hormone prolactin in

their bloodstream, a hormone released from the pituitary gland in response to stress. Prolactin is also responsible for stimulating lactation of nursing mothers. Men, on the other hand, have lower levels of prolactin and higher levels of testosterone, which inhibits crying. • Women cry an average of around 2 to 4 times a month, while men might cry once every other month, with crying defined as anything from moist eyes to sobbing. • The average crying session lasts six minutes for a woman, versus two to four minutes for a man. Crying turns into sobbing in 65% of cases for women, but just 6% for men. • When women cry, tears run down their cheeks about 50% of the time, but when men cry, tears run down the cheeks only 29% of the time, and the rest of the time the eyes just get watery. This is due to the fact that the male puncta, the tear drainage pipe, is larger than the female’s. • A newborn will cry without producing tears. Babies do not produce tears until they are around six weeks old. A typical baby cries between 30 minutes and 3 hours per day. • In one study, scientists videotaped 60 people as they watched sad movies. Of those 60 people, 28 cried during the screening, and 32 did not. The researchers found that directly after the movie, those who cried felt sadder than those who didn’t. However, 90 minutes later, those who had let their feelings out felt better than their dry-eyed counterparts. More importantly, they also felt better than

• In 1973, employees at United Canning in Ohio found that some cans of mushrooms looked swollen. This is never good news, and testing revealed that those canned mushrooms were contaminated with botulism, a disease that causes grave illness and often results in death. As per FDA regulations, the company issued a recall of the product. Then they had to track down other companies that had purchased the contaminated mushrooms for use in other products. And that led them to Mario Fabbrini. • Fabbrini had moved to Michigan from his native Italy after World War II ended. He and his wife began making pizzas, first in Detroit where they became one of the country’s first pizzarias to offer free delivery. After

they did before watching the movie. BLINKING FACTS • The average person blinks 12 times per minute or about 10,000 blinks per day. You blink on average 4.2 million times a year. • We blink more when we talk but less when we’re reading. Your eyes become tired when you read or stare at a computer because you blink less often and you are not relaxing the eye muscles. • The muscles that control the eyes are the fastest-moving muscles in the body and are also the most active muscles in the body. see more Eye Facts on pg 7

selling that business, he set up shop in Alpena, Michigan, where he began making and selling frozen pizzas. He supplied local bars with frozen pizzas and even included a small oven to cook them in. Business boomed and Papa Fabbrini’s Frozen Pizzas became very popular. • Then the Heinz Company approached Fabbrini, asking him to manufacture frozen pizza for distribution all over Michigan and Ohio. He set up a new, bigger factory in Ossineke, Michigan. • By the time he was told about the botulisminfected mushrooms, he was turning out 9,000 frozen pizzas every day, and employing 22 people at his factory. →→→→→→→→→→→→→→→→

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REMARKABLE PEOPLE

BAUSCH & LOMB • John Bausch was 18 in 1848 when he got a job in an optical shop in Switzerland, grinding lenses for cameras. The following year he moved to Rochester, New York, and opened his own optical shop. At the time, he sold products imported from Europe. Then he decided it would be better if he could manufacture his own lenses. All he needed was a little capital to get started. • His friend Henry Lomb made a $60 financial investment in the business (worth about $1800 today) and they became partners. Lomb handled sales and finance, while Bausch focused on manufacturing of monocles, spectacles, binoculars, magnifying lenses, and opera glasses. • One day Bausch found a discarded piece of Vulcanite rubber. Experimenting, he discovered he could make eyeglass frames from the material. At that time, eyeglasses were made from gold, tortoise shell, or horn. The Vulcanized rubber was far easier to work with and much stronger than any of those materials. It was also cheaper. When the Civil War started in the U.S., the price of gold and horn rose, and the demand for Bausch’s Vulcanite glasses skyrocketed. • In 1870 Bausch invented the first machine to produce spectacles. As scientific research gained momentum, Bausch and Lomb produced microscopes, telescopes, and camera lenses. • Bausch’s son William revolutionized the industry by inventing a new process of making lenses by casting them out of molten glass. Previously, the glass parts for the lenses had to be separated, ground, and polished by hand in a complicated and time-consuming process. • Another of Bausch’s sons, Edward, revolutionized photography by inventing a camera lens patterned after the human iris. • During the two World Wars, the company was

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Free Brochure Call: 320-200-4045 or visit www.americanatrips.com asked to provide troops with gunsights, periscopes, telescopes, target finders, and searchlight mirrors. The U.S. government became their biggest customer and the company grew very quickly. By the 1940s, military products represented 70% of their total production. • Because pilots suffered from high-altitude glare, the company produced sunglasses that used a polarized filter to absorb light. They had a large oval frame to shield an aviator’s eyes which needed to repeatedly glance down toward the instrument panel. These glasses were dubbed “Ray Bans” because they ban sun rays. They became enormously popular and are still sold today. • After World War II ended, the cinema industry grew by leaps and bounds, and the company began producing lenses for movie cameras and theater projectors,

eventually inventing the process that allowed theaters to double the size of their movie screens. • Although Lomb died in 1908 at the age of 79, Bausch led the company until his death in 1926 at the age of 95. His son took over the helm at that time. • In the 1970s they began selling contact lenses and are now one of the world’s biggest suppliers of contact lenses, as well as lens care products, glasses, ocular lenses, and eye surgery items. The firm became a Fortune 500 company in 1975. • Today Bausch & Lomb is one of the oldest continually operating companies in the U.S. The company employs about 12,000 people in 36 countries.

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For more information, please call 763-502-2941 • The FDA requested a few samples of his mushroom pizzas and fed them to mice. The mice died. Fabbrini was instructed to recall and dispose of all of his mushroom pizzas. There were 44,000 of them. • Fabbrini did not do so quietly. Quite the contrary. • He found a place to bury 44,000 pizzas on a farm nearby, and invited all of his friends, family, and neighbors to join him for a colossal pizza funeral, along with community leaders, bank presidents, reporters, and members of the Chamber of Commerce. Even the Governor of Michigan, William G. Milliken, attended, and gave a somber speech. A priest led the assembled in prayer. • Three bulldozers shoved 44,000 pizzas into an 18-foot hole and covered them with dirt. Mario Fabbrini then laid flowers on the grave: red gladioli to

represent the tomato sauce, and white carnations for the mozzarella cheese. The entire cortege then salved their sorrow with pieces of (non-contaminated) pizza. An article about the funeral appeared in the newspaper. Walter Cronkite mentioned the disaster on the CBS Evening News. • Just a few weeks later, Fabbrini got the word that it had all been a big mistake: autopsies on the dead mice showed they had not died of botulism after all. The pizzas had not been contaminated. • The cost of burying the pizzas had run about $30,000. Business was down because of the ding to his reputation. Competitors had moved into his territory. The business was on a downhill slide. • Fabbrini did the all-American thing: He sued the United Canning Company for $1 million. He won the case, but the judgement was for only $250,000.

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His lawyer helped himself to $150,000 and that left Mario Fabbrini with $100,000 to make up for the misunderstanding. It was not enough to rescue his business. In 1980 he sold the business and walked away with just $5,000 for his life’s work, retiring to San Diego, where he only made pizzas for himself and his wife Olga.

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in an average of 125 days. * If you want to appeal to the Board, you’ll have three choices: direct review, evidence or hearing. The VA hopes to complete direct reviews in an average of 365 days. (It used to take three to seven years!) Direct review doesn’t include new evidence; the other two options do. The VA’s budget includes 605 more employees who will establish decision-making centers in Florida and Washington, joining a third center in Washington, D.C. For decisions received Feb. 19, 2019, or later, go online to www. va.gov/decision-reviews for more information. You have one year from the date of your decision to ask for a review. For decisions received before that date, there’s a different process. See the information at www.va.gov/ disability/file-an-appeal. Make note of the phrase “a more experienced adjudicator” mentioned above. If you end up with a lawyer helping you, that phrase -the VA’s own words -- might come in handy if you can show that the previous adjudicator wasn’t up to the job.

After 18 months of being studied and readied, the Appeals Modernization Act of 2017 finally became official last month. You’ll now have more choice in how disability claim denials will be handled, hopefully with a speedier path through the process. You’ll have three choices: * With a Higher-Level Review, a “more experienced adjudicator” will do a new review of old decisions. The Department of Veterans Affairs hopes to have these claims completed in an average of 125 days. * With a Supplemental Claim, new information and evidence can be submitted. The VA will have a duty to assist in that process. It hopes to have these claims also completed (c) 2019 King Features Synd., Inc.

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• Eyes are the second most complex organ after the brain. • The only cells that survive from the time you are born until death are in your eyes. • One of the first recorded uses of the word “eyeball” was in William Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” • Doctors have yet to find a way to transplant an eyeball. The optic nerve that connects the eye to the brain contains over a million fibers, far too delicate and complex to connect. • About half of our brain is involved in the vision process. • On a dark night, a human eye can see a lit candle or a single match 30 miles away. • A fingerprint has 40 unique characteristics, but the human retina has 256 identifying characteristics, which is why retina scans are increasingly being used for security purposes. • Only 1/6th of the eyeball is exposed to the outside world. The rest is hidden behind the protection of the eye sockets. • Eyelashes have an average life span of 5 months. The entire length of all the eyelashes shed by a human in their life is over 98 feet. • Ophthalmologists are graduates of a medical school, whereas optometrists are not. • Cataract formation is a normal aging phenomenon, and most animals with corneas get cataracts if they live long enough. • The gel inside the eyeball is called vitreous humor. It’s a liquid in the center of the eye, and jelly-like towards the edges. It always bounces back into shape when compressed. • If the human eye was a digital camera, it would have 576 megapixels. • Theodore Roosevelt lost an eye while in office, during an impromptu sparring match with a boxing partner. • Possibly because he was kicked in the head by a horse as a child, Abraham Lincoln’s eyes often pointed in two different directions, especially when he was tired or excited. He suffered double vision at times, and his left eyelid tended to droop due to nerve damage. • Your eyeballs stay the same size from birth to death. Babies look especially cute because their eyes are so large in proportion to the rest of their face. • All babies have blue eyes in the womb because the dark pigment called melanin takes some time to develop. Many babies born with blue eyes will develop brown eyes over time, but the reverse is never true. • Brown is the most common eye color worldwide, though it varies much from region to region. In Northern Europe, there are far more blue-eyed people than brown; but in South America, Asia, and Africa, nearly everyone has brown eyes. The least common eye color is green. • Brown is the default eye color for the human species. Blue eyes are the result of a mutation to a single gene that happened in the human genome about 10,000 years ago. That means everyone with blue eyes shares a common ancestor dating back to that time. • All babies are color blind at birth. Color blindness is more common in men than women. Dogs can see some color but are red/green color blind. • The human eye can distinguish between about 500 shades of grey. • Newborn babies can see objects about 8-15 inches away most clearly.

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THOUGHTFUL THINKING Continued from Inner Front Logic is the attempt to put codes on the rules of rational thought, to explore the structure of arguments that preserve truth, to allow the optimal extraction of knowledge from evidence. More formally, logic is the study of the structure of arguments, and is one of the primary tools philosophers use in their inquiries. This them to cope with the subtlety of philosophical problems and the often misleading nature of conversational language. Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself. Epistemologists ask, for instance, what criteria must be satisfied for something we believe to count as something we know, even what it means for a proposition to be true. Two epistemological questions for heavy discussion would be; how we can know the future will or will not be like the past, or, how we can be sure about anything at all. Metaphysics is the study of the nature of things. Essentially questions on what kinds of things exist, and what they are like. It also attempts to reason about such things as whether or not people have free will or, in what sense abstract objects such as free will can be said to exist. It may attempt to reason on how it is that brains are able to generate minds, or whether or not there is a God. Axiology is an umbrella term for different studies that center upon the nature of different types of value. These different studies include aesthetics, which investigates the nature of such things as beauty and art; social philosophy and political philosophy; and, most prominently, ethics, which investigates both the nature of right and wrong and the nature of good and evil. Ethics asks theoretical questions about the foundations of morality, such as whether right and wrong should be understood based on the consequences of our actions or, in a deontological way, which is based on a series of rules. It also asks practical questions about the fine details of moral conduct, such as how much moral consideration one ought to give to non-human animals and how much one ought to give to the poor. There also are many “little” branches of philosophy (some of them truthfully quite huge) which address problems and questions that relate to specific other disciplines. There are, for instance, philosophers of religion, philosophers of psychology, philosophers of biology, and philosophers of physics. Aspects of each branch of philosophy can be studied in isolation, but philosophical questions have a way of leading to other philosophical questions, to the point that a full investigation

of any particular problem is likely to eventually involve almost the whole of the philosophical enterprise. for example; a philosopher considering how much one ought to give to the poor is asking an ethical question as well which might lead them to wonder whether or not standards of right and wrong are built into the fabric of the universe, which is a metaphysical question. If they claim that people are justified in taking a particular stance on that question, they are making an epistemological claim. At every step in their reasoning, they will want to use logic to minimize the chance of being led into error by the great complexity and obscurity of the questions. Many professional philosophers also double as historians, researching one or another aspect of the history of philosophical though particularly the writings of past philosophers to see how their brightest predecessors reasoned about a matter. Arguably, the history of philosophy may be considered a fifth main branch of philosophy. The Demands of Philosophy Philosophical inquiry is very demanding, suitable only for those who possess a modest amount of courage, humility, patience and discipline. Courage: because one never knows what one will find at the end of a philosophical investigation. Since philosophy can deal with the most fundamental and important issues of human existence, which are things that most people initially take for granted, genuine philosophical inquiry has the potential to unsettle or even to destroy one’s deepest and most cherished beliefs. To engage in genuine philosophical inquiry also is to risk isolation among one’s peers, both for the unorthodox views to which such inquiry may lead, and for the simple unpopularity of critical thinking. A philosopher must be able to face both consequences. Humility: because to do philosophy one must always keep firmly in mind how little one knows and how easy it is to fall into error. The very initiation of philosophical inquiry requires one to admit to oneself that one may not, after all, have all of the answers. Patience and discipline: because philosophical inquiry requires long hours of hard work, one must be prepared to commit huge amounts of time to laboring over issues both difficult and subtle. Indeed, people who avoid philosophy often complain that thinking about heavy philosophical questions makes their heads hurt. This is unavoidable: if the answers seem to come easy, inquiries almost certainly would be superficial. Those who value truth recognize that there is no shortcut to it: every advance must be fought for tooth and nail. The above three virtues always are imperfectly represented in any given person. Philosophy, like science, is best done in a community: the critical scrutiny of other thinkers provides a necessary check on personal defects, often invisible to one’s own eyes.

SENIOR NEWS LINE By Matilda Charles

NO DOG FOR ME? Three years ago I started thinking about getting a dog. Seeing neighbors out with their small dogs, I knew I wanted what I consider a real dog, a big one, not a dog that would fit in my purse. I made a pro-con dog ownership list, but over time the list of reasons for not getting a dog has gotten longer and longer. Maybe my story will help if you’re considering adopting a dog. Where I live there are a lot of rules, and one of them concerns the size of dogs. Specifically, the dog cannot top 25 pounds. The neighborhood rumor mill supplied this story: A woman was told to get rid of her dog after management showed up at her door with a set of scales and demanded to weigh the pooch,

The Rewards of Philosophy If philosophy is so demanding, why should anyone even bother with it? In the first place, there is great utility in philosophical inquiry, even for someone who does not innately care about the pursuit of truth. Consider a random handful of classic philosophical questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of justice? What does it take for a belief to be justified? Is the world we see illusion or reality? Is there an empathic connection between the human subconscious? The answers to such questions cannot help but to have a critical impact on how one ought to live one’s life. Many philosophical questions are fundamental to human life; the only reason it often does not seem that way is that most people tend simply to assume they know what the answers to these questions are, without ever daring to make a serious inquiry. To be sure, one can perhaps be happy, at least in the same way as a wellfed dog is happy, if one manages to live one’s entire life without ever questioning anything. Philosophical inquiry can be disquieting, offering no guarantee that it will yield the conclusions one hopes for, or any conclusion at all: If one does philosophy, one may well have to learn to live with perpetual uncertainty, while others, in their ignorance, happily profess perfect knowledge of things they do not understand at all. To understand is ennobling and it is far better to understand, even if the main thing one understands is the limit of one’s own knowledge. A final reason for studying philosophy is that, for all the pains and difficulties associated with it, the pursuit and acquisition of knowledge is enjoyable. To be sure, it is a refined enjoyment, although from the outside it is often hard to see what the appeal is. However, once immersed in it, it carries its own immediate rewards, and can be addictive to the sheer pleasure of studying and investigating, and yes, sometimes even understanding. We live in an age of immediate and vast access to the wisdom of the ages along with the shared thought of peoples around the globe. The benefits of this will be dependent on how well, those who choose to, engage independent inquiry, how well we share our thoughts with humility, and how well we listen and integrate into our lives, that which we know is true and important. We are also in an age of instant perpetually varied physical and sensual satifaction which does not leave much time for the desire of deep questioning thought. Undeniably, this new digital age is forever joined to our future, and to the safety of our species, which, being held in the propinquity, is called the human race. Heavy stuff to chew on. Here's a question... do other animals in their existence have their own philisophical thoughts, and how could we possibly know?

which unfortunately came in at nearly 30 pounds. The owner moved out and took the dog with her. A size limit means I can’t adopt a young mixed-breed shelter mutt because there’s no real way to know how large the dog will be when it grows. According to a study, shelter staff correctly guesses a dog’s breed only 67 percent of the time. There are no sidewalks here. What we have for half the year are increasingly narrow roads with snow banks on the sides. I don’t have a fenced yard either, which means no place to let a big dog romp and play. By the time I got this far, I knew it was hopeless. I never even got to the part about potential veterinary costs, or the price of quality dog food and grooming, flea treatments and toys. I’ve found a partial solution, however. I’m thinking of signing up as a dog walker volunteer at the shelter. Maybe I’ll fall in love with a tiny, purse-size dog. (c) 2019 King Features Synd., Inc.

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Thought for the Day: “The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.” -- Walter Bagehot

● Those who study such things say that the European starling is one of the world’s great mimics. They have the ability to imitate a surprisingly wide variety of sounds, including a dog’s bark, a cat’s meow, a cow’s moo, the songs of 50 other bird species, the drumming of a woodpecker and a ringing telephone.

● At 140,000 square miles, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, located (unsurprisingly) in Hawaii, is larger than all the other U.S. national parks put together.

● Human skin is about 70 percent water, and the human brain is 80 percent water.

● Without a bottle opener, a drunk homeless man in Belgrade, Serbia, was at a loss as to how to open his beer. So he hit upon the bright idea of using a hand grenade to pop the top. A live hand grenade, as it turned out. He popped his own top as well, dying in the incident. It’s not known how he got the grenade to begin with.

● The Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt is so large that its base would cover 10 football fields.

● Fashion historians claim that England’s Queen Elizabeth I owned 3,000 of the elaborate dresses popular during her time.

● Before Charlton Heston became a famous actor, he earned cash by serving as an artists’ model -- and posed in the nude.

● Those who study such things say that 1 percent of the world’s lizard species have no males. The females reproduce by parthenogenesis, which produces offspring that are clones of their mothers.

● George W. Church, the founder of Church’s Fried Chicken, didn’t actually enter the restaurant business until after he retired. In his first career, Church ran a chicken hatchery and sold incubators.

● You might be surprised by: Samantha Weaver to learn that gravity makes you shorter. It’s true; gravity compresses your spine -- in a weightless environment, you would be 2 to 3 inches taller than you are here on Earth.

● According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, if you’re like the average American, you drink 22.7 gallons of coffee every year. The surprising thing about that statistic isn’t how much it is, though -- it’s how little. It seems that in the 1940s, Americans were drinking twice that amount of java.

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