Justine Bateman Defends Her 'Old Face' (the Decision to Grow Old Naturally and Forego Cosmetic Surgery, Etc.)

She says she doesn't give a s***, but you know she does. Why is this even news?

See, "Justine Bateman confronts obsession with her ‘old’ face: ‘I don’t give a s–t’."

She appeared recently on "60 Minutes Australia."

Excerpts from the @60Mins Australia piece on being free of the fear of one’s face aging.
(Entire segment is on @60Mins’ YouTube channel)

Don’t be distracted from all the opportunities coming your way.
Read @FACE_the_book for more.https://t.co/qGDP9IDOxB pic.twitter.com/Chv012SJCy

— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) March 21, 2023

Prince Philip Stokes Debate on Older Drivers

This is really good, at the New York Times (two), and an extra hilarious tweet below:

The crash, involving as it did a famously headstrong and famously old royal, occasioned much discussion about whether Britain should clamp down on older people driving. https://t.co/Uq5BGiv0nw

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 18, 2019

Two days after Prince Philip was involved in a car crash that injured two women and sparked a debate on older drivers in Britain, he was photographed driving without a seatbelt https://t.co/E3f7bQCjTh

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 20, 2019

Journalists: "Brexit will monopolize the front pages for weeks!"
Prince Phillip: "Hold my beer...” pic.twitter.com/5oIq7oWosK

— Ross Baines Art (@RossBainesArt) January 18, 2019

Struggling with the Costs of Growing Old: Many Slip Out of Middle Class as Aging Takes Its Toll

A fascinating column, from Steve Lopez, at the Los Angeles Times, "Not rich, not poor, and not ready for the cost of growing old."

I've got a least 10 more years before retirement, and probably quite a few more, if I'm feeling well. I take the winters and summers off. Basically, I'm working eight months out of the year. I can hack it past the traditional retirement age, and meanwhile I can be socking away money into my retirement accounts. My wife's seven years younger, and healthy, so we've got a while to plan for those "drought" years (although, as noted, if things stay as they are, I think my family will avoid the "drought" years, thank goodness).

CHS Dept. Chair Steve Wallace addresses the "hidden poor" in today's @LATstevelopez @latimes https://t.co/ZDP4LFFfDh

— UCLA Fielding School (@UCLAFSPH) January 4, 2017

Boomers are crowding the retirement turnstiles just as safety nets may get a haircut from a Republican Congress fixated on an Obamacare repeal that could whack Medicare and Medicaid. And although President-elect Trump has defended entitlements, a key advisor once called for privatizing Social Security. California has been a national leader in supporting in-home care and expanding medical insurance to wider populations, but federal funding cuts could jeopardize those advances.

“Everything is a wild card right now,” said UCLA professor Steven Wallace, chair of the school’s Department of Community Health Sciences.

Wallace co-authored a report published last year on what he refers to as California’s “hidden poor,” approximately 655,000 older adults who are above the federal poverty level and ineligible for some government programs, but not wealthy enough to live comfortably in a region with such high housing costs.

I know those people. I’ve met many of them and written about some of them.

Doris Tillman comes to mind. She’s the South Los Angeles retiree who went nine months without running water after losing a job and falling behind on a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power bill she disputed.

“I’m going to write a book about how to survive in L.A. without water,” the 71-year-old Tillman told me at the time. She learned to get by on 50 gallons a week of water she purchased, lugging heavy five-gallon jugs into and out of her car and into her home.

Midweek Cartoon

I missed my Sunday cartoon blogging due to partying, lol.

So, check Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."




Also, at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Can’t Get Up."

Communities Struggle to Care for Elderly, Alone at Home

The other "Home Alone."

At the Wall Street Journal, "More people age at home, raising demand for support services":

STOCKHOLM, Maine—At least three times a night during much of the long, harsh northern winter, Aldea Campbell gets out of bed, steps into her slippers, and descends a flight of frighteningly steep, narrow wooden stairs to the cellar to fill her wood-burning stove. She’s 82, a widow, and has lived in her 102-year-old house near the Canadian border for almost six decades.

She burns wood because she can’t afford enough oil to get through the cold months. When her arthritis is bad, she gingerly maneuvers the steps sideways to keep from falling. But still, she slipped on the stairs twice last year, once badly hurting her tailbone. “It happened so fast,” she said.

Such predicaments are increasingly common in Maine: the grayest, most rural state in the U.S., with housing among the oldest in the nation. Maine has another distinction: it is among the first states to experience challenges from a growing number of seniors who are “aging in place”—remaining independent rather than relocating to nursing homes or moving in with grown children.

More elderly across the nation are aging at home for a variety of reasons: they prefer to and are healthy enough to stay; they can’t afford other options such as assisted living; and states in some cases have imposed policies to limit nursing home stays paid for by Medicaid, which is a major funder of long-term institutional health care for older Americans.

But aging in place is proving difficult in places where the population is growing older, supportive services are scarce, houses are in disrepair and younger people who can assist have moved away. As a result, elderly people who live at home are having to rely more on neighbors—who sometimes are elderly, too—and local nonprofits and public agencies are starting to feel the strain from increasing requests for help.

“It’s a huge issue—it couldn’t be bigger,” said Lenard Kaye, director of the University of Maine Center on Aging. “Ninety-nine percent of older adults say they want to stay right where they are until they’ve taken their last breath, but that doesn’t mean they are continuing to remain safe and remain well.”

Keep reading.

Back From the Colonoscopy

I mentioned my procedure this morning.

The test itself is a cakewalk. It's the bowel-cleansing preparations that were a pain. But I'm clean, no polyps, and I won't have to have it done again for ten years.

I'm reading Instapundit, who's blogged about his colonoscopies quite a bit. Here's the search link, but see especially, "I'M HOME FROM HAVING A COLONOSCOPY":

A colonoscopy isn't just a diagnostic test — if they find polyps, they can remove them, making it virtually certain that you won't get colon cancer. If you skip that because of squeamishness, well, you're just an idiot. Luckily, I was clean and don't have to go back for five years. By then, they may have replaced them with swallowable cameras, with actual scoping only when there’s something that needs fixing. At any rate, though, there aren't many simple safe procedures that can absolutely prevent cancer, and this is one. Don't forego it because you're squeamish.

I'm not sure why folks would be squeamish with the procedure; it was easy. After I was taken into the pre-op area, the nurses had me sign the final forms, hooked up my blood pressure monitor and chest nodes, and inserted the IV. The test itself took 10 minutes at most. The nurses gave me mild drug which was like a relaxant. I had no side effects and went out for a nice breakfast with my wife immediately after.

As noted, the preparation is unpleasant, and from reading around yesterday, avoiding the prep is one of the reasons people have skipped this screening. Perhaps the newer procedures will be coming available soon, like the miniature camera pill that takes images while traveling through your bowel. Until then, I'd do this again tomorrow if I needed to screen against colon cancer.

No More Colonoscopies?

Here's this, just as I go today for my first colonoscopy.

At WSJ, "New Ways to Screen for Colon Cancer No More Colonoscopies? Less-Invasive Methods Are Coming."

RELATED: At NYT, "Colon Cancer Screening Saves Lives." (Via Instapundit.)

Older Americans Find Community at McDonald's

Older Korean-Americans in New York, especially.

Here's the initial story from last week, at NYT, "Fighting a McDonald’s in Queens for the Right to Sit. And Sit. And Sit."

But see this interesting piece from doctoral candidate Stacy Torres, a today's op-ed pages, "Old McDonald's":

THERE’S an old Italian saying, “A tavola non si invecchia,” which means: At the table, you don’t grow old. All of us, of whatever age, need to socialize in public places to feel connected and alive.

That sense of shared conviviality was notably absent recently when police officers removed loiterers, many of them elderly Korean-Americans, from a McDonald’s restaurant in Queens. The slew of comments that followed a report of the dispute were unsympathetic to those who whiled away their hours there.

One New York Times reader commented, “It is only in the inner city that McDonald’s and Starbucks are the gathering places for the unwashed, elderly, incompetent and infirm. I suppose this is the price for being a city dweller. These people ruin everything!” Others offered proposals to “solve” the problem by making the seating uncomfortable or removing it altogether, suing the elderly customers or playing blaring rap music to drive them away.

Older patrons may test the limits of public dawdling, but this phenomenon — call it loitering or community building — is essential for the survival of many people 65 and older. According to the last census, seniors constitute 12 percent of New York City’s population. Many of them are single, sometimes far from family, and have lived in their localities for decades, their entire lives even. For the past four years, I have studied how neighborhood public places help older Manhattan residents avoid isolation and develop social ties that offer support, ranging from a sympathetic ear to a small emergency loan.

Like the teenagers who linger over sticky tabletops at Burger King and McDonald’s, these older people have reached a time when their lives do not revolve around work and family. In the absence of those, these public places can anchor routines and provide a sense of structure and belonging.

A Manhattan bakery I observed had served as a de facto senior center for decades. The owner allowed customers to linger; many stopped in more than once a day. The bakery hummed with conversation: It felt more like a social club than a business, with a cup of coffee being the modest price of admission.

Yet the elderly are often now hindered by the loss of neighborhood places that have closed because of gentrification and rising retail rents. When that West Side bakery was shuttered, its patrons were forced to regroup in other neighborhood locales, including a nearby McDonald’s.

For retirees on fixed incomes who may have difficulty walking more than a few blocks, McDonald’s restaurants remain among the most democratic, freely accessible spaces. Much of the appeal lies in the fact that, as an elderly patron said to me, “you can sit all day and nobody bothers you.” At the branch I observed, the tolerance for older New Yorkers also extended to the homeless, people who appeared mentally unstable and teenagers who congregated after school — even when they occasionally flung ice cubes at one another.

An afternoon at McDonald’s opens up a world of people-watching opportunities. One elderly regular I observed sat an entire day and greeted a changing cast of passers-by, acquaintances and friends — a welcome alternative to sitting alone in her apartment with worsening dementia.

Ray Oldenburg, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of West Florida, calls these gathering spots “third places,” in contrast to the institutions of work and family that organize “first” and “second” places. He sees bookstores, cafes and fast food joints as necessary yet endangered meeting points that foster community, often among diverse people. The Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson likens public settings such as Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia to a “cosmopolitan canopy,” where people act with civility and converse with others to whom they might never otherwise speak.

The care-taking performed by such places extends to all kinds of groups. A professor of sociology at Princeton, Mitchell Duneier, has found a Chicago cafeteria that supports older working-class African-American men in this way. I have interviewed people who tell me they don’t like senior centers because “they’re depressing”; in these cafes, they can form emotional attachments with a wider mix of people.

I'm convinced my dad would have lived longer had he not lost his mobility, which essentially forced my sister to move my dad move into a retirement home. He lasted there not even six months and then was placed in a hospice where he died. He was old and lonely. He stopped eating enough to keep his weight on. So, I can see why older people like to gather, to have some coffee and see others similarly situated. To see some friends and happy faces. It's a lifeline. And there but for the grace of God go I.

Keep reading.