Commentaries

Never before has the flush of a toilet sounded so lovely. Like the burbling brook after weeks of drought, running water is a welcome gift on the first evening of the New Year.

No water? A voice at the other end of the line told us repairmen were working overtime to fix the problem but they didn’t know how long it would take. My heart went out to the crews repairing the line in the bitter cold on a holiday.

I find it disturbing that people who rely on the Meander Reservoir for their drinking water aren’t outraged by ODNR’s permitting of frack wells in our protected watershed. I suppose it is possible that they don’t know where their water comes from. Heads up, people of Canfield, Boardman, Austintown, Youngstown, Niles, Jackson Township etc. It’s more likely that they drank the industry and ODNR Kool-Aid, and believe that unconventional shale gas hydro fracking is safe—it is not. They no doubt believe there are plenty of regulations in place that will protect them.

The human brain, which weighs only three-pounds, is on duty round the clock whether we're awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious. Electrical and chemical messages fly around it constantly. It regulates all the other organs in our body and makes possible every action that we perform.

Fortunately, there are steps that we can take to make and keep our brain fit. In fact, as science writer Guy P. Harrison points out in his new book entitled Think, they are the same steps that benefit our overall health. (1) According to Harrison, here is what we should do for our brain:

In popular culture there are two sharply contrasting views about religion and the founding fathers. One is that the founders were devout Christians who read the Bible and prayed daily. The other is that they were products of the Enlightenment who abandoned religion for reason and science. So, which view is accurate? Neither! If we could take a snapshot of religion in the colonies in 1770, here is what we would find: