Funny Video - Trying to Get that Dang Thing to Work
Bruce and Esther Huffman, who live in Oregon, were playing with their new laptop and trying to figure out how to use its camera function. They ended up inadvertently making a video that's been watched more than 8 million times since a granddaughter put it on YouTube recently.
He sings, burps and makes faces — and gets a little frisky. She keeps trying to find out how the dang thing works.
Technology . . . . we've all been there.
Jim Klobuchar: Finding a Lost Virtue on a Ball Field
In ancient times, let’s say as late as the 1950s, the sight of a football stadium in autumn stirred the glands of millions of people who were still able to confess a measureable level of sanity.
The players they watched in the big college games could actually be observed in classrooms during the week. In the professional leagues most of players spent the winter and spring working in steel mills to pay their bills, or they stayed home changing diapers.
This is 2011. It’s not necessary to document the corporate status that pro football has achieved. The game and its promoters have wrapped it in gold and spawned millions of disciples who play fantasy football with the fervor of actual head coaches and with most of their inside knowledge. America goes bonkers on Monday night. Add Sunday night. Add six hours Sunday afternoon. Click on the TV on game day and you get splashed with flying confetti and ten American flags; after which you are overwhelmed by a country western guitar plucker with a cast of thousands inviting you to get ready for some football in surround sound and HD. By then, how can you not be ready? And the country laps it up. Why? Often it IS a good show. The perfect game for television.
But partly because of the omnipresence of pro football, college football has risen with the tide in television exposure and now has created a monster. To compete in the big leagues of the major schools, where the big money is in television and bowl games, they have enlisted the best there is from the high schools. In thousands of homes across the country college scouts become part of the core family, sometimes outranking grandpa. Agents are on the horn the day they can do it legally. Television money into the millions of dollars is now available to the major universities that win football games, and to their lesser competitors who scoop up the leftovers in a classic demonstration of trickle down economics. Coaches who win in the big leagues of college football pull down millions of dollars. To keep pace with each other they send out droves of scouts, who sometimes have to battle the droves of agents who hover on the fringes. They also have to compete with college boosters, the most frenzied of whom eventually embarrass the school with illegal gifts to the players, as we have seen played out in the scandals this year.
So a friend who knows all about this invited me to watch a practice of his own school, one of the private colleeges in St. Paul. He introduced me to the coach, who said his players might be interested in a few thoughts from somebody who wrote pro football for years as part of his exertions as a daily columnist.
It was a lovely day on campus, the fall coming in, sunlight engulfing the field, making the water cooler a popular destination. Something like 55 or 60 young men were on the field, running plays, scrimmaging, slapping each others’ behinds when the play worked, or the defense doing it when the linemen made a stop. It was the football atmospheric I remembered from my high school years. They were football players for sure, getting ready for the games on Friday nights or Saturday. The coaches moved in their midst, upbeat, teaching, clapping their hands, changing a lineman’s stance, laughing at the kid’s rebuttal. I saw very few out there who were going to get acquainted with an NFL scout. What I saw were college students playing football and playing it well enough to compete.
When the coach ended practice he introduced the visitor. He said I had known the pros up close, and that they might be interested in some of my thoughts.
I told them I could have spent all day watching. It restored the football I knew, the random horsing around, but also the hitting, the satisfaction of making a good tackle, faking out the linebacker, but doing it with the kids who were my classmates. It was the same mix of laughs, a little goofing around, and the coaches putting a damper on that in a hurry. What else was it? It was still something close to family; it was practice, and then grabbing the books from your locker and bicycling home.
I told them what playing the game had meant to me. I talked about the idea of it, Team, the hours they’d shared reaching for a goal, they would not forget: the nuttiness of some of the days and the characters on the team—their faces and quirks, some of the tears, the coach who taught and supported them. It was their special community.
But it was something beyond that. They would discover later in life that whatever their success and rebuffs, the relationships in their lives would be the most important part of their lives, and one those relationships that would really not end grew right here on the field.
Does the game matter? I remembered a football player named Walter Payton, a Hall of Fame running back of the Chicago Bears. Everybody who played football, teammate or opponent, loved Walter Paton. He played a football of joy. Once after being tackled, he was caught untying the shoe laces of the referee, Bernie Kukar, who was busy pulling bodies off the pileup.
When Walter Payton he died of cancer not long after his career ended, one of the networks did a program bringing together some of the men he played with and against. It was a remarkable testimony. These were aggressive people who made a living beating on each other for big money, scheming against each other in a concussive game. But in remembering Walter Payton, all of these people came together in a solidarity of grief and gratitude for his life. He was the rare football player who could reach a willful man like Mike Ditka and touch him with humility; an undemonstrative man like Bud Grant and touch him with tenderness; an uncompromising competitor like Mike Singletary and touch him with peace.
Sometime, it’s still a kid’s game, which we tend to forget.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
91-Year-Old Gertie Crosses Skydiving Off Her Bucket List
The 2007 movie “The Bucket List” has inspired millions - both young and old - to tackle their list of fun and exciting “things to do” and bring more joy to their lives. Ecumen Parmly LifePointes resident Gertrude “Gertie” Nelson checked skydiving off her list after her 91st birthday. WCCO’s Jason Derusha was on-hand to capture the story of how Gertie is changing aging in this WCCO video.
Ecumen Honors National Alzheimer's Day
Pictured: Hazel Eng, 89, who lives at the Ecumen nursing home in North Branch, Minn., sharing a laugh with her daughter, Jane Lynch.
It's National Alzheimer's Day today. In the United States, an estimated 5.4 million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease, and unless something changes, as many as 16 million Americans will have Alzheimer’s in 2050. Alzheimer's is one of the most serious challenges faciing our aging population -- and caregivers. In 2010, 14.9 million family members and friends provided 17 billion hours of unpaid care to those with Alzheimer's and other dementias -- care valued at $202.6 billion!
Ecumen is proud to join the fight against Alzheimer's in many powerful ways. Read about "Awakenings", our nationally recognized initiative to improve the lives of our care center residents who live with memory loss. Through Awakenings, we are reducing or eliminating the use of anti-psychotic drugs widely prescribed to "calm" the sometimes challenging behaviors of residents with dementia. We are literally Awakening our residents from the effects of their medications. More information about Awakenings can be found on our website here. Also, this month, our senior living communities across the state are joining the Walk to End Alzheimer's. Hundreds of Ecumen employees and friends are raising thousands of dollars to support research and education through the Alzheimer's Association.
We're in this together. We're proud to be leaders in Changing Aging.
Kudos to Minnesota's Outstanding Senior Citizens!
Out of a pool of nominees from each county in the state, two Minnesota's Outstanding Senior Citizen winners are chosen for their outstanding commitment to community service since reaching the age of 65. This event is sponsored by the Minnesota State Fair, the Minnesota State Fair Foundation, and the Federation of County Fairs. Our sincere congratulations to Joan and Ronald for their valuable contributions to their communities. Read more about it HERE at the Grand Rapids Herald Tribune.
Skydiving with your Grandpa?
The Roers' three-generation skydiving group included (left to right) George Roers, son; Marvin Roers; Anna Roers, granddaughter; and Aaron Roers, grandson.
Each jumped from the plane at 13,000 feet, free-falling 120 miles per hour for just under a minute before drifting another two-and-a-half minutes under open parachutes. “I thought it would be a little bit of a jolt, but it wasn’t,” admitted Marvin.
Read the full story in the Echo Press HERE.
Jim Klobuchar - Coming Back to Earth
Atlantis touched down smoothly and historically, the last of the shuttle flights. Standing in front of my television screen I applauded, joining unseen millions of others across the country.
I also experienced at that moment a wistful might-have been in my own life, a prospect almost too good to be real, a flight into space and infinity for which I was suddenly eligible.
But here was Atlantis rolling along the runway, its crew relieved and proud. It astronauts had flown superbly and accomplished one last mission. The crew was safe. Over their more than 40 years of exploration, most of the space flights had been touched with a fairy tale quality that appealed not only to our pride of country but to our sense of wonderment that we could now actually reach for horizons that were once of the province of sorcerers and science fiction.
But now, the adventure was ending to allow some serious re-examination and search. It will be renewed when the country’s rattled economy can afford it, undoubtedly with goals even more exotic than orbiting space stations and far beyond the moon. They would carry Americans perhaps to the planets and even deeper into space. But like millions of others welcoming the safe arrival of Atlantis, I remembered the spaceship Discovery, disintegrating less than an hour from home, and years earlier the explosion of the Challenger. They reminded all of us once more that the underside of adventure and exploration is risk, and neither the finest scientific minds on earth nor trillions of dollars in technology and research can guarantee success when we lift ourselves into an hypnotic but still alien world, on machines that are marvelous but imperfect.
And then I remembered a day late in 1985, and a notification I received from NASA, the country’s space agency. NASA had embarked on a program to add selected civilians to the professional shuttle crew. It was a candid effort to bring the story of space flight closer to the public by opening it to people representing a variety of civilian disciplines—like teachers, and journalists.
NASA had already selected a teacher, Crista McAuliffe, to inaugurate the program. Sometime while her flight was in preparation, NASA invited journalists in a wide range of media—newspapers, television, radio, magazine and more. In applying, I had never honestly considered the risk. The prospect was too enticing for that. You would be going not only as a passenger but as a performing member of the crew, broadcasting the experience, describing the sensation of space flight, weightlessness, interviewing the astronauts, and conveying the pure spectacle of space.
NASA received 1,700 applications.We wrote papers describing our conception of the role and what we considered our qualifications. I was a newspaper columnist and had been a host of television and radio talk shows, flew light planes for 10 years and parachuted recreationally a few times. NASA was looking for prior experience in stressful situations and so I added my years in mountain climbing. We also were asked to write a visualization of our role on the mission, what we thought would be of highest value to the public in our reportage. NASA conducted a series of eliminations to narrow the field of prospects, culminating in regional conferences in which the applicants were grilled by an interrogation panel made up of men and women drawn from a variety of academic and technical fields. The final eliminations were to be conducted in Houston. We were down to 34 applicants. Walter Cronkite, the great broadcaster so synonymous with space flight, was one of them, and the man who would have been my favorite hands-down. Some time before Houston, George (Pinky) Nelson an astronaut who had flown in space three times, visited the Minneapolis Star Tribune, for which I wrote, and gave me a glimpse from space. The one prominent earthly feature you could see, he said, was the 4,000 mile African Rift, spreading from Syria to South Africa—where I had hiked a few years before. He was encouraging. I was starting to think about Houston.
A few months later I walked into the newspaper’s photo lab where there was a television screen. The Challenger with Crista McAuliffe aboard had just launched. It spiraled upward, ignoring gravity, reaching into space. Beautiful , I said to a colleague. But moments later a thin column of smoke snaked through the sky from the top of the television set. The spaceship was breaking up. We stood and watched, unable to speak.
I wrote for the next day’s paper. For years, I said, we had convinced ourselves that telemetry and mission controls had introduced us to so many marvels ofthe human mind and spirit that somehow they were all going to have happy endings for smiling and modest heroes.
“The thought of risk and catastrophe rarely intruded on the show. It may explain why the country’s grief is so profound when it does. So far has the spaceflight technology progressed. The launch, the rocketry—so far that it was now possible to put ordinary people into the heavens and the unknown…”
I never did receive a formal notice from NASA that there would be no journalist in space. The reason was too obvious.
The DL Tribune Shares the Empowering Stories of Two Detroit Lakes Men Living with Memory Loss
The DL Tribune shared the stories of two Detroit Lakes area men living with memory loss. George Jernberg's transformation since becoming part of our Awaking Initiative at Ecumen's Emmanuel Community has been "like he's truly awoken from a sleep," according to his daughter. You can read the full article on-line. And a volunteer at Emmanuel Community was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's but maintains a positive attitude and stays active through volunteering and technology. Read Steve's story on-line. Visit Ecumen's website for more information about the Awakenings Initiative.
Great Employees Make Great Places to Work
Great people make Ecumen a great place to work! Congratulations to the nearly 4,000 Ecumen employees who are changing aging every day. For the seventh straight year, Ecumen has been named by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal as one of Minnesota's “Best Places to Work.”
Ecumen was recognized in the "Large Company" category and is the second-most tenured award recipient with one thousand or more full-time Minnesota employees. Ecumen ranked seventh on the list of large companies.
More than 220 companies vied for the award, with only 55 organizations being honored. The awards are compiled through anonymous employee online surveys on areas of work environment, innovation and new ideas, people practices, personal development, people in the organization and day-to-day work.
Senior Citizen - Should That Phrase Be Retired?
We have boomers, Gen Xers, Millenials . . . and for years America has used the phrase "senior citizens?" It's a phrase that just seems dated. What do you think? What other ideas do you have? You can read more about this here. Share your thoughts on this blog or here at the Star Tribune.