| Crunch gets physical
Zenon Konopka had just finished his lunch of chicken and pasta and was preparing for his pregame nap Friday afternoon when he got a call from Portland coach Kevin Dineen. Dineen relayed the news that Konopka, a center, had been traded to the Syracuse Crunch. Talk about your pending indigestion and insomnia. Then, Konopka did something strange considering his immediate future. He looked at the bright side. And a couple of hours later, while packing his suitcase for a plane ride to Syracuse, he was still bubbling. "Tired but still wired," Konopka said of himself. "I was winding down when I got wound back up with the phone call?" And that's all the explanation needed for why Columbus was willing to pull off a stunner of a deal that cut the faintly beating heart out of the Syracuse Crunch offense.
Passage to Peru
It has been many months since my trip to Peru and I can still see the mountains taking shape at dawn, smell the bread baking in the local panerias and feel the warmth of the people who have smiles as authentic and bright as the colorful clothing they wear. .
New research suggestscholesterol can be too low
Q. What is considered low when it comes to cholesterol? My levels were always low, but now they are back down to 120, just like they were in my mid-20s. I am almost 49. The highest it has been is 142.
I am very forgetful, especially now with customers' names. I don't sleep well and have never been a great communicator because I have trouble remembering all the facts and have trouble finding the right words (usually technical or specific ones, like the name of a place). Is this related to my cholesterol?
A. Many doctors believe that cholesterol can never be too low. New research throws that concept into question.
The importance of cholesterol in neurological conditions like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease is controversial. A recent study in the Archives of Neurology (January 2007) concluded that, "A decline in serum total cholesterol levels may be associated with early stages in the development of dementia." Another study (Movement Disorders online, Dec.
Novel sings baby boomer blues
Guy Fontaine, a 72-but-looks-62-years-old transplant to California, is playing golf when he feels the ground shift. It's not an earthquake. It's a mind quake, and in minutes, Guy is happily piloting his 1958 Bel Air down a familiar Oklahoma road.But only in his imagination. In reality, the recent widower and former sportswriter is putt-putting along in a golf cart on the Harbor Freeway. Soon he's got traffic fouled up and a highway patrolman in his face.And soon after that, Guy finds his bewildered self in Mission Pescadero in Half Moon Bay, an assisted-living facility populated by aging hippies and run by a martinet who makes Cruella De Vil seem like Mother Teresa.So begins Tim Sandlin's darkly comic and disturbing novel "Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty," which is set in the year Hendrix would have hit that milestone, 2022 -- a year, in fact, that is not so very far away.The president is Jenna Bush, and the country is awash in elderly baby boomers victimized by indifferent offspring, greedy conservators and facility owners more concerned with making a buck than making a home for their clients.Guy snaps out of his waving-wheat reveries and scopes out the new home in which his daughter, to whom he naively gave power of attorney, has embedded him.It's not a happy place.
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