The big news on Thursday was Elon Musk offering to buy Twitter at a 38% premium. What will happen?
Twitter employees were given a day off to rest last week because of the stress of learning Musk bought 9.2% of their company and was offered a seat on the board. Imagine how they felt Thursday!
During the brief time the world thought Musk was going to be on the board of Twitter, he tweeted some funny stuff including this:
Musk said in a Ted Talk yesterday that he doesn’t have an economic motive but believes in free speech. I read that people at Babylon Bee, a satirical site, were contacted by Musk before he purchased shares. He asked if they had been banned and why.
Personally I’m against censorship and banning people unless they are breaking the law. I’m all for free speech.
I think Musk is one of those polarizing figures who people love or love to hate. I have taken the temperature of my immediate family to attest to this fact.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Twitter should be owned by Musk? What are your thoughts about censorship and free speech? Do you use social media? If so, which ones?
Another funny tweet during Elon’s one or two days of being named to the BOD.
My daughter featured on a women’s swimming meet poster for her University.
You’ve all heard about the controversy swirling around transgender Lia Thomas winning events at the Ivy League and NCAA championships.
First, as Kaitlyn Jenner said, Thomas isn’t breaking any rules — she followed NCAA stated rules. Jenner also said it’s not fair for someone who went through male puberty to compete against women. They are taller and stronger. They have bigger hearts, lungs, feet and hands. Those things don’t change with hormone suppression.
The swimmer who got bumped out of finals by one place (she was 17th and there are only 16 spots) wrote a letter to the NCAA. She’s supportive of Thomas but thinks the NCAA rules are not fair. I read she was banned from Twitter for expressing her opinion.
I know several women swimmers who competed against Thomas at the Ivy League champs and NCAAs. I watched them when they were young race against my daughter. The woman who got second place at the Ivy Leagues Champs to Lia Thomas in the 1,650 (the mile) used to race my daughter in So Cal. She was younger and would be in the lane next to my daughter, drafting at her hip. My daughter couldn’t shake her but would touch her out in the end and say “Who is that?!”
I feel for this young woman who lost the title of Ivy League Champion. I wonder how her parents feel?
Prior to 1972 and Title IX, there were few opportunities for women in college sports. Since then, we’ve taken women’s athletics for granted. Yet 50 years ago, most colleges didn’t have women’s sports.
I’ve interviewed swimming stars and coaches for my website socalswimhistory. One story is about Bonnie Adair, the Loyola Marymount head swim coach who as a swimmer held 35 National Age Group records. She talked about when she was college age and there weren’t many teams for women swimmers.
Her freshman year of college was pre-Title IX, and there were limited opportunities and college programs for women. She was training with Jim Montrella for the ’72 Olympic Trials and didn’t want to change up her training regime, so her freshman year she was a commuter at UC Irvine and lived at home with her parents. She said during those days she swam 11 practices a week and lifted weights.
Looking back, she said it was unfair that the women stayed at home and didn’t get to experience college life.
“All of a sudden when school began, there would be all girls in our training group. The fast guys went off to swim at UCLA and USC. We were freshmen and sophomores in college, and we stayed with our club team to train. We lost that experience of being a freshman away at college.”
Prior to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, women weren’t allowed to compete in the marathon.
When I was in high school, one of my friends and I joined the Boys Golf Team because there wasn’t a girls team. We went to practice every day, but we never once got to compete in a match. We were not the worst players, either.
My daughter and her friends who swam, put in years of hard work and sacrifice beginning at age five. They benefitted so much from swimming and being part of a team. I’m glad my daughter had that experience. I hope that other women get the same experience, too.
What are your thoughts on women’s sports? Did you know how limited the opportunities were 50 years ago?What are your experiences with women’s sports as a mom or competitor?
Yesterday’s Wordle. Not my best attempt, but I got it done.
Have you been caught up in the latest viral craze? My son introduced me to Wordle last week. I struggled to solve the puzzle. You get six guesses to solve the five-letter word of the day. Then I noticed Wordle was trending on Twitter. Then one friend and fellow blogger sent me a link to play. Everywhere I looked there was Wordle.
The topper was a blogger I follow, “Tater,” who was interviewed by the Washington Post in an article about Wordle. You can read the story called “Wordle is our New Drug” HERE and visit his blog “The World’s Common Tater” HERE.
What makes the puzzle so much fun? I think it’s the simplicity and that it’s only one word per day. It’s much easier than a crossword. And it only takes a few minutes.
My son came up with a surefire winning strategy. He looked up the most common letters used in the English language. It was a list of 15 letters and he came up with three words: earnt (which is a word in the UK), coils and dumpy. You type those words in and presto! You get four out of five of the letters — or at least enough to solve the Wordle.
I found that to be almost like cheating, so I came up with two words that cover all five vowels and the letter Y. Yearn and moist. I still solve the Wordle, but it’s a little harder.
Here’s an excerpt from from a Wall Street Journal article byJoseph Pisani called “What Is Wordle? How to Play the Viral Word Game and Tricks to Impress Your Friends: Everything you need to know about the online game that has taken the internet by storm.”
Wordle, an online word game, seems like it is everywhere these days. Here’s what you need to know.
Who brought this on us? Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, a software engineer from New York. He created a prototype in 2013 and dusted it off during the pandemic for his partner, who likes playing word games.
Wordle is simple: You have six chances to guess the day’s secret five-letter word. Type in a word as a guess, and the game tells you which letters are or aren’t in the word. The game is free and has no ads. The aim is to figure out the secret word with the fewest guesses.
What do the green and yellow squares mean? When you make a guess in the game, the letter tiles change colors to show how close you are to the secret word. If you guess “weary,” and the “W” turns green, that means the secret word starts with a “W.” If the “E” turns yellow, the letter is in the word but not in that spot. Any letters that aren’t in the secret word turn gray.
Of all the social media platforms, I spend more time on Twitter than others. I rarely use Facebook. I use Instagram occasionally. But I look at Twitter every day. It’s my way of keeping up with current events. By seeing what’s “trending,” I learn about earthquakes, elections and breaking news. I also look up how my sports teams are doing and can find out almost instantly if they are winning.
I follow a few writers and other people I like on Twitter. I never comment or get involved in the many Twitter feed fights. My WordPress shares my blog posts automatically to Twitter and I get a few readers that way. When I wrote for SwimSwam weekly, I’d retweet my stories they tweeted as well as other ones that caught my interest — like my daughter’s college swim team results.
In a short snippet from Investor Business Daily (IBD) on their To The Point page, under the Trends column I read:
Tweeting to the Converted
Most Americans do not use Twitter, and of those who do, a minority of active users produce nearly all the tweets, a new study finds. A quarter of U.S. adults use Twitter, and among users, the most active 25% produced 97% of all tweets, a study from Pew Research Center finds, confirming similar findings in 2019. Among highly active users, most tweets are either retweets (49% of the total) or replies (33%), with original tweets just 14% of all posts…
IBD A2 To The Point, Week of November 22, 2021
I would have added a link, but this newspaper is one of our old-fashioned paper types that lands on our driveway.
My takeaway from the article above is that people who take Twitter as a pulse of the nation shouldn’t. It’s a tiny slice of the pie and most likely doesn’t reflect anything more than the opinion of a very vocal few.
What is your favorite social media platform? Do you use Twitter to follow news, sports or current events or are you hands off?
For my plant-based friends, this post offered a tasty recipe. This is what my tweets from my blog look like.
I remember when my kids’ only high tech device was this ipod to listen to music and the computer below that was not hooked up to the internet. They used disks with children’s activities for the Mac.
I was interviewed by a journalist last week for a survey about the state of American families. She reads my blog and interviewed me for a story a few years ago about parents hiring coaches to improve their parenting. You can read her article called Why some parents — including Prince Harry and his wife — are hiring parenting coachesHERE.
Last week, she asked me about major problems facing families today. I mentioned the rising costs to raise a family and also worries about the digital world, screen time and depression. I’ve read so many articles about how social media and screen time is causing depression and anxiety in our kids. The numbers are skyrocketing. Add that to the pandemic and kids literally had a year of isolation and not being with their peers.
Immediately after the interview, I ran across an article in the Wall Street Journal called: Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine. The article gives a scientific explanation for what is happening to our brains. I found it fascinating and thought I’d share it with you, too.
Here’s an excerpt:
Rising rates of depression and anxiety in wealthy countries like the U.S. may be a result of our brains getting hooked on the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure
—Dr. Lembke is a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University. This essay is adapted from her new book “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,” which will be published on Aug. 24 by Dutton.
A patient of mine, a bright and thoughtful young man in his early 20s, came to see me for debilitating anxiety and depression. He had dropped out of college and was living with his parents. He was vaguely contemplating suicide. He was also playing videogames most of every day and late into every night.
Twenty years ago the first thing I would have done for a patient like this was prescribe an antidepressant. Today I recommended something altogether different: a dopamine fast. I suggested that he abstain from all screens, including videogames, for one month.
Over the course of my career as a psychiatrist, I have seen more and more patients who suffer from depression and anxiety, including otherwise healthy young people with loving families, elite education and relative wealth. Their problem isn’t trauma, social dislocation or poverty. It’s too much dopamine, a chemical produced in the brain that functions as a neurotransmitter, associated with feelings of pleasure and reward.
The article helped me understand the physical issues with screens that are affecting us — as much as the emotional problems with feeling left out, bullied, comparing yourself to the make-believe social media world. Although these issues with mental health affect mostly young people, I’m sure it’s not limited to their generation entirely.
To answer my own question, “Is it time for a digital detox?” I say yes. I’m trying to find little ways each day to put down the phone or other media and do something healthy. Whether it’s sitting outside listening and watching birds, or taking time to stretch, there are ways to make it a better day and improve mental health.
Here’s another excerpt:
As soon as dopamine is released, the brain adapts to it by reducing or “downregulating” the number of dopamine receptors that are stimulated. This causes the brain to level out by tipping to the side of pain, which is why pleasure is usually followed by a feeling of hangover or comedown. If we can wait long enough, that feeling passes and neutrality is restored. But there’s a natural tendency to counteract it by going back to the source of pleasure for another dose.
If we keep up this pattern for hours every day, over weeks or months, the brain’s set-point for pleasure changes. Now we need to keep playing games, not to feel pleasure but just to feel normal. As soon as we stop, we experience the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance: anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria and mental preoccupation with using, otherwise known as craving.
I like to sit outside and enjoy listening to and watching birds.
What do you view as the major issues facing families today?
What are your thoughts about the physical and chemical changes in the brain causing an addiction to social media, screens, video games, etc.? Have you heard about this before or is it a new concept to you?
How much time do you spend on social media like facebook, pinterest or other news sites?
One of my daughter’s good friends from her club swim team gives up social media each year for Lent. I’ve been reading all these stories about how Facebook is causing stress and anxiety in young people, and I applaud this friend for taking a break each year.
I mentioned to both my kids that I thought I should give up social media for Lent as well. Their overwhelming response was “Great!” and “Thank goodness!” I have decided to give up Facebook because I am beginning to believe that if social media is causing young people distress, is it that good for us older folks? I’m going to continue to blog and my posts show up automatically on FB, and I will continue with that. But, I’m going to make a conscious effort to really connect with my friends live. I’m going to call and talk, visit in person and hey—one of my favorite things—go out to lunch!
It’s going to be an interesting experiment and I’ll let you know how it goes. Perhaps it will free up more time for my writing! I mentioned to my daughter that I still want to use Twitter because it’s where I get my news. I like to see what’s “trending.” She’s telling me that if I give up social media, I need to go all the way!
I’m a convert to Catholicism and I really knew very little about the faith and I had no clue what Lent was until I took a nine-month course called Right of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). I did this after my son was born and before I had my daughter. My husband and I wanted to raise our kids with religion, but he was Catholic while I was Protestant. We visited several churches to see where we felt at home. I believed we needed to be on the same page if we were going to raise our kids with religion, so I signed up for RCIA. I was totally moved by our former pastor and the church we decided to join.
Exactly what is Lent? I found an article called “When does Lent 2018 start? Key dates, how long it lasts and the meaning behind the Christian tradition” that explains it pretty well on the mirror.com. Here are the basic facts:
Here’s everything you need to know about the beginning of Lent, when it ends, Christian prayers and fasting as the tradition is marked between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday
When does Lent begin?
For Western churches Lent begins every year on Ash Wednesday, the day after Shrove Tuesday .
This year it begins on February 14.
The date varies from year to year, starting in either late February or early March.
However, for Eastern Orthodox churches it begins on Clean Monday (February 19 this year), two days before Western churches.
What is Lent?
Lent takes place every year in the 40 days leading up to Easter, and is treated as a period of reflection and a time for fasting from food and festivities.
It symbolises the days which lead up to Jesus’ crucifixion and subsequent resurrection, when Christ spent 40 days and nights alone in the Judaean Desert being tempted by Satan.
Hanging out with real live friends at last year’s Masters swim meet.
What are your thoughts about taking a break from social media?
A year ago, we adopted the cutest little boy pug Waffles. He was a Christmas present for our daughter, but I fell totally in love with him. I got the tough few months of potty-training, getting up in the middle of the night to get him outside–plus dealt with the constant chewing. Now he’s living life with my daughter and is loved by her Swim Team, has his own Instagram, Wafflezworldwide, and has gotten more than his fair share of attention on the twitter account WeRateDogs.
Here’s what I wrote last year about our new pup:
I think we bit off more than we can chew! We thought it would be nice for our daughter to have a companion in the form of an animal. She’s out of state in college and busy with academics plus D1 swimming, and for some hair-brained reason, we thought a puppy would bring a lot of joy and fun into her daily life.
She asked permission of her landlord, and even though her lease says “no pets,” he agreed to a small dog. We decided the puppy would be a present for Christmas.
Waffles turns into a pancake when I try to walk him.
Our daughter wanted a pug and thinks they are so cute. They are. I’ll agree to that. We looked into suitable breeds, and besides the two negatives of snoring and shedding, pugs appear to be an easy going breed requiring very little care.
But the puppy thing. I’m on day five and I think puppy is winning the battle. It’s like having an infant again. I have to watch him constantly. He doesn’t sleep through the night, and when he’s crawling on his belly through the yard, I never know what is going to end up in his mouth. I knew we were in for trouble when we drove Waffles home for an hour and a half drive. He was squirming all the way, nipping and licking my neck and fingers. Finally, as we drove into town he fell asleep. That’s what my son would do in his car seat during long drives.
I’m crate training, potty training and my daily life suddenly got very busy and tiring. Why we think our daughter can handle this is beyond me. Of course, she does have youth on her side. And Waffles is so darn cute!
Olive the cat is not sure about any of this. What did we do???
One of my daughter’s good friends from her club swim team gives up social media each year for Lent. I’ve been reading all these stories about how Facebook is causing stress and anxiety in young people, and I applaud this friend for taking a break each year.
