Lawrencia Ann Bembenek was a tall, striking young woman. She could have chosen nearly any career, but she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps. He had briefly worked for the Milwaukee Police Department, and from a young age she wanted to become a police officer.

The youngest of three girls, she grew up Catholic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1960s. She ran the hurdles on her high school track team and took up the flute, graduating in 1976. For a couple of years, she attended junior college before working as a waitress and model. …

“How’d you sleep?”

“Great! I only got up twice to pee, and slept all the way till 5 a.m.!”

“Wow! That’s good.”

“What about you?”

“Meh. The usual.”

This is the scintillating dialogue that may rule your marriage in the later years. This is what we Olds must discuss over porridge. Why? We know not.

Perhaps because sleep, like digestion and surprises, comes less and less often. Whatever the case, I’ve tried everything to win back the full-night’s sleep I once thought was my God-given right.

Except a chill blanket. That one I’ve only heard about.

My last good night…

OPEN LETTERS

Dear People Around 26,

It is a truth often acknowledged that when my husband was 22 and got his first full-time paycheck as a teacher and saw the year “2017” printed on it as his retirement date, he burst out laughing.

2017 was space-age, Jetsons territory. It was 1974. Why, in 2017 our space program would be free, legal, and open to every citizen.

We’d all be riding in monorail cars, and working 10-hour weeks.

But why does this matter to you? Because the two things you should be paying attention to are your dental hygiene and your money. For…

I write about climate change and am painfully aware it’s caused by first-worlders, particularly Americans. It’s not our nationality but our lifestyles, especially those who have more resources.

We have more, we consume more, we waste more.

I own a house, two rentals, and two old cars. The rentals are cheap, an investment strategy.

No, I mean cheap. They each cost about $60K. Do they have floors and roofs? Yes, but the economy here is different…I live in Arkansas.

We need to replace one of our cars before it comes down with a catastrophic or terminal problem.

And someday we…

CLIMATE CATASTROPHE

The fake controversy about whether global warming is real is officially over. Floods, fires, droughts, and hurricanes are winning and humans are losing.

The bogus opposition that shouts climate catastrophe isn’t human-driven is also dying a much-needed death, while the argument that “the climate has always changed” sounds like nothing more than an echo. But —

If you have an education.

If you understand basic science that explains the Greenhouse Effect.

If you grok the concept of a zero-sum game.

Then —

You know what Branson and Bezos and Musk are doing is wrong, and inexcusable. Instead of spending $20…

I’m filled with rage at the antics of Jeff Bezos, yet feel deeply hopeless that if it weren’t him burning massive amounts of rocket fuel to literally fuel a childhood fantasy, it’d be some other tragically wealthy white dude.

It’s possible he’ll snap out of it. Maybe the ghost of Christmas future will visit him, wearing a cowboy hat and a necklace made of human baby heads.

The daily routine of the uber-wealthy is a mystery, but when I awaken at 3am each night — because who can sleep given the cataclysmic apocalyptic disaster that is already here and will…

Near the town of Springfield, Oregon, a woman drove into the ER parking lot just before 11 pm, frantically pleading for help for herself and her three young children. All of them had been shot, but she had the mildest injury and was able to get her family to the hospital.

Her name was Diane Downs, and she was bleeding from a bullet in her left forearm. Her three kids were in the backseat, bloody from gunshot wounds.

As she was getting medical treatment, Diane told investigators she’d been driving around with the kids when out of nowhere, a strange…

According to The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos has come down from space and reported that his flight emphasizes his ultimate goal: space exploration to move heavy industry to space and keep the Earth for residents and “light industry.”

“What we need to do is build a road to space so that future generations can take all heavy industry and polluting industry on Earth and move it up into space. So that we can keep this gem of a planet as it is, instead of ruining it, which unfortunately we might do,” he said.

I knew it! I knew outsourcing was…