Daylight saving
Roughly some 65 percent of the year is under daylight saving time. This alone should tell us how popular it is. From what I’ve read, it’s even the ancients who were pushing the idea of a religion that said, “Let there be light.”
I see no reason at all why we can’t establish the daylight saving time that we have as a permanent institution.
What we now do is wait until the days are already getting longer by themselves before we wait to introduce our system to make them ever longer. Tell me that makes sense. If we wanted longer days with more daylight, shouldn’t we have introduced it when the days were really short? One would think so.
We’re told that this was originally established to coordinate the time with the periods of time that youths from school would have to be working in the fields, with activities like planting, weeding, harvesting, etc., etc. Tell me that’s what the youth of today is spending their time doing.
And why don’t we change to a total daylight saving time now?
I’ve heard that a few people now are reviewing the whole system to see if we ought to be part of another time zone. Let’s hope they’re set on finding something that makes a little more sense than what we have now.
Your own health care
The cost of health care keeps on increasing, and will obviously keep on doing that forever. But there’s a way to drastically reduce the cost of what I’ll call your own health care. One you made yourself.
It’s been a few hundred years since someone first said, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The problem is that one doesn’t get to be healthy just by reading about how to do it. One gets healthy by actually doing it.
Like drinking only reasonable, healthy amounts of wine. Like avoiding the hundreds of tons of unhealthy foods in the supermarket. You know which ones they are. They’re always in the aisles and shelves that are easiest to reach. They’re right in the middle of the store. In the center aisles. And in those aisles, never way up high, or way down low, or behind some post. No. Right at some convenient level. Easy to reach. You didn’t really think that was by accident, did you?
You can do pretty well just by staying at the outside edges of the store. Walk and shop along the far right-hand side of the store. Then shop along the very back of the store. Then shop along the far left-hand side of the store. Then get out of there.
In the convenient center of the store was everything you wanted. The things you wanted are all the things you don’t need, if you want to be healthy. Buy what you need.
Pain pills are said to relieve your pains. They are also for making someone a profit. At making profits they are considerably better than at relieving pain.
People who live in Okinawa stop eating when they feel about 80 percent full. They are often studied by people throughout the world to determine their secret for longer life.
Incidentally, you might be able to end up being a better doctor than the doctor that you have. Doctors tend to be among the heaviest smokers in the world. It wouldn’t take much to beat that!
And lastly, find a meaning and a purpose for your life. Wake up looking forward to doing something and looking forward to learning something new. Like a foreign language.
I’m old now. I intend to get older. A lot older.
REGUT
(Robert E. Regut is a graduate of West Point and a teacher with 20-plus years of experience in the teaching of foreign languages, specializing in the teaching of spoken German. He can be reached at P.O. Box 101, Nobleboro, ME, or at robertregut@gmail.com.)
