https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/mental-mishaps/201908/joe-biden-and-the-case-false-memories

Today in history: Aug. 30

1780: American revolutionary Gen. Benedict Arnold makes a secret pact with the British to surrender the American fort at West Point, N.Y. The plot failed, but Arnold escapes to fight for the British. 1901: British engineer Cecil Booth patents the first commercially produced vacuum cleaner. His gigantic creation was mounted on wheels and parked outside the houses being cleaned. One of its first jobs was to clean the aisle carpet of Westminster Abbey for the 1902 coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. The King was so impressed that he ordered vacuum cleaners for both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. 1950: The first Canada-wide railway strike ends when Parliament orders 125,000 members of 17 striking unions back to work. The strike begins Aug. 22 after negotiations break down over union demands for higher pay and a shorter work week. The strike nearly paralyzes long-distance communication and causes layoffs in industries dependent on railways, such as mining, food packing, and wood and chemical processing. 1963: The Hot Line communications link between Washington and Moscow goes into operation. 1967: The U.S. Senate confirms the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as the first black justice on the Supreme Court. 1993: The federal government turns over control of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport to the private sector.

You just might learn a thing or two by hang­ing out with older peo­ple

• Montreal Gazette, Canada
• Aug 29, 2019
• Page: C3
• By: ZOE STRIMPEL

When so­ci­ety is quick to dis­miss older peo­ple, we lose out on all the wis­dom that comes from life ex­pe­ri­ence.

Some young, or youngish, peo­ple love noth­ing more than a rag­ing night out — sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I love noth­ing more than tea and cake with some­one over the age of 80.

Old peo­ple, so of­ten dis­re­spected and ig­nored, can be iras­ci­ble, it’s true. But as well as hav­ing as­ton­ish­ing sto­ries of the past, many are charm­ing, thanks to real man­ners and a (now) long-for­got­ten sense of the deco­rous that was drilled into them.

It makes me ashamed when I see mem­bers of my own rude gen­er­a­tion com­pla­cently sit­ting on the bus play­ing Candy Crush, while an old per­son hov­ers nearby pa­tiently hang­ing on with shak­ing hands — and not be­ing of­fered a seat.

It’s clear that so­ci­ety has a prob­lem with ageism — a pa­tron­iz­ing, blink­ered and plain rude ex­cep­tion in our oth­er­wise fu­ri­ously cor­rect cul­ture. Af­ter #MeToo, plus on­go­ing cam­paigns to root out anti-fe­male dis­crim­i­na­tion and a new ex­treme ded­i­ca­tion to an­ni­hi­lat­ing racism, ageism seems to be the fi­nal fron­tier.

Well-known Bri­tish tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Carol Vor­der­man cer­tainly thinks so. The 58-year-old re­cently wrote an im­pas­sioned at­tack on her na­tion’s prob­lem with older folk. Now fronting an anti-ageism cam­paign for in­surer SunLife, Vor­der­man re­called be­ing de­scribed as “mut­ton dressed as lamb” when, 20 years ago, she pre­sented the Bri­tish Academy Film Awards in a skimpy blue dress, at the ripe old age of 39. A nasty press frenzy over the vis­i­bil­ity of a fe­male pre­sen­ter’s legs wouldn’t wash to­day, she pointed out, but as so­ci­ety hur­tles to­ward the stamp­ing out of ev­ery other “ism,” she in­sisted that ageism re­mains “the fi­nal taboo.”

Not all older peo­ple have Vor­der­man’s self-de­clared ca­pac­ity for the breezy dis­missal of ageist in­sults. Two-thirds of those sur­veyed by SunLife said they were reg­u­larly hurt by be­ing called grumpy, bit­ter, over the hill and past it.

Of course they are — at 37, I al­ready live in fear of neg­a­tive ref­er­ences to my ad­vanc­ing years, but un­like them, can just about still pass my­self off as young(ish). I shud­der to think of how I’m go­ing to cope in my later years if be­ing grumpy and wrinkly is still a rea­son to toss some­one into the garbage can.

Tra­di­tion­ally, ageism has been di­rected at women, thanks to the old chest­nut that a woman’s worth re­sides in her phys­i­cal beauty. How­ever the ta­bles have been turn­ing, and in re­cent years, it’s older men that have been in the fir­ing line. The po­lit­i­cally cor­rect denizens who run our in­sti­tu­tions, in­clud­ing uni­ver­si­ties and the me­dia, have been hol­ler­ing to re­move the “pale, male and stale” from read­ing lists and tele­vi­sion list­ings.

On TV, men are still just about tol­er­ated, in­clud­ing white men, but re­spect for those above a cer­tain age has been rapidly dwin­dling.

The dom­i­nant sense has been that we should sim­ply toss them out on their ear to make way for younger, more “di­verse” sorts that TV bosses in­sist have far more to of­fer a mod­ern view­ing au­di­ence.

This is silly. Hav­ing been around a long time, they have what you might call wis­dom. And I can re­late a lot more to el­derly peo­ple talk­ing about their mil­i­tary ca­reers dur­ing the war than I can to an In­sta­gram in­flu­encer with 10-inch acrylic nails lec­tur­ing me about di­ver­sity.

Could we have reached peak ageism, at least in the me­dia? There are promis­ing signs. Dur­ing a re­cent lec­ture at the Ed­in­burgh TV Fes­ti­val, Dorothy Byrne, the head of news and cur­rent af­fairs at Chan­nel Four, called for the preser­va­tion of older male pre­sen­ters.

“We … need to re­sist the idea that we don’t need older white men any­more and that they should be crushed out of the way,” she said. This may sound like ba­sic ci­vil­ity, but these days, it takes courage to say it.

“As some­one who sticks up for the rights of old ladies,” Byrne con­tin­ued.

“I need to stick up for old gents, too.”

Byrne also linked the dearth of fresh ideas in TV with lack of “di­ver­sity” among edi­tors, writ­ers and head hon­chos. She clearly meant di­ver­sity in the usual sense of skin colour, sex­u­al­ity and so on.

But the re­al­ity is that when we dis­miss older peo­ple, what­ever their sex, sex­u­al­ity or skin colour, we lose out on a more im­por­tant piece of the puz­zle: that which comes from the wis­dom of real ex­pe­ri­ence.

https://www.bookbub.com/ebook-deals/free-ebooks

Lundi 2 septembre, la plupart de Ville De Mtl seront fermées : bibliothèques, bureau Accès Montréal, Centre de loisirs, Maison culturelle et communautaire, piscines et arénas.

Make the Challenges of Growing Older Less Challenging.

Learn from our explorations. Share your explorations.

https://www.techenhancedlife.com

Welcome to Tech-enhanced Life Don’t let growing older get in the way of life

Welcome. Thank you for signing up for Tech-enhanced Life’s monthly Newsletter. Our newsletter summarizes the new content on Tech-enhanced Life each month, and contains insights, tools & technology tips that help postpone the time that growing older gets in the way of living life to the full. If for any reason you don’t want to continue to receive this newsletter, you will find a simple Unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email. There is already a great deal of meaty content on Tech-enhanced Life about topics like Fall prevention, Medical Alert Systems, Apps for Older Adults, and Medication Management. And there are numerous discussions from our Longevity Explorers about the “best” gadgets and widgets and everyday objects that improve daily life. We encourage you to browse at www.techenhancedlife.com.

What to expect …. For the first few weeks of your subscription you will get a weekly email introducing you to the topics, articles and reports that other readers have found especially useful. After these introductory emails you will get one or two emails each month highlighting new content on the site. If you have already been on our mailing list for a while, you will not get the introductory emails again, but you will get the monthly newsletter.

Why are products for older people so ugly?

As the market for products aimed at older users explodes, some entrepreneurs are turning to a radical idea: actually get the customers involved.

by Andy WrightAug 21, 2019

Richard Caro (center) with some of his Longevity ExplorersCHRISTIE HEMM KLOK

On a drizzly Tuesday afternoon in San Francisco, people are filtering into a small conference room appointed with a whiteboard and subdued black-and-white photography. As the seats fill up around the long white table, a woman dressed mostly in red, with sparkly silver nail polish, invites everyone to her upcoming ukulele performance. A man in a blue plaid shirt passes around a container of heavily iced hot cross buns. A woman in a green turtleneck chitchats about the presidential power struggles in Venezuela. They’re here to talk about technology—a scene that should be entirely unremarkable in a city filled with small white conference rooms where people are doing exactly the same.

“Okay, everyone ready?” asks Richard Caro, the meeting’s leader, an Australian with neatly cropped silver hair, alert dark eyes, and the demeanor of a kind professor. “Let’s start with you, Lynn. You’ve got one here”—he glances down at his notes—“that says ‘hearing aids.’”

Lynn Davis, a 71-year-old retired project coordinator, says her sister-in-law recently talked about a pair of $300 hearing aids she’d bought online and loved. Excited, Davis had Googled the product, only to find a lengthy blog post that “ripped it apart.”

“Ha!” chortles the woman sitting next to her. “A piece of junk!”

The comment sparks a spirited back-and-forth about hearing aids. Caro, at 63, is one of the youngest people in the room: the average age of the 11 women and five men gathered here is somewhere in the mid-70s. A retired computer programmer says she has considered buying hearing aids that can be programmed at home. A man with an iPhone sticking out from the pocket of his flannel jacket talks about the signal-to-noise ratio. A redhead wearing a hand brace describes her stereophonic pair, which affords her surround-sound hearing.

“Wow, you’ve got the Cadillac!” one woman cracks.

“For the money,” the redhead responds, “I have the Ferrari.”

They are the Longevity Explorers, part of Caro’s experiment to improve the way technology is developed for older adults. They’ve been meeting here since 2014. Throughout most of the meeting Caro sits quietly at the head of the table, hands clasped together, and just listens. He wishes more people—especially entrepreneurs—would do the same.

Elizabeth Zelinski has a story she likes to tell. It’s about the company that made a wearable pad to prevent people from hurting their hip if they fell. “They couldn’t sell the thing,” says Zelinski, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. “Because, guess what? You know why? Nobody wants to have a big butt.”

Presented with products that are “brown, beige, and boring,” many older people will forgo convenience for dignity.

If they had just done some user testing, she says, “they would have saved themselves from a lot of heartache.”

It’s a familiar tune to engineer Ken Smith, director of the mobility division of the Stanford Center on Longevity. He says one of the biggest mistakes designers make is to assume that around the age of 60 people lose interest in aesthetics and design. This can have dire consequences for products meant to help people with their health. No one wants to stick a golf-ball-size hearing aid the color of chewed gum in their ear, any more than they want to wear a T-shirt that reads “SENIOR CITIZEN.”

Similarly, there’s a common perception that people of a certain age simply can’t or don’t want to learn about new technologies. There is only a kind-of, sort-of, not-really kernel of scientific truth to this. Zelinski, a specialist in neuroscience and cognition, says aging causes changes to the medial temporal lobe—the part of the brain associated with new learning. And your white matter, or myelin, which helps speed the transmission of information from one brain cell to another, is going to get funky, she says. “People just need longer … they need more exposure to something to learn how to use it. It’s not that they completely lose the ability to learn.”

Experts say older adults who still work, or who spend time with younger family members who use technology, are more apt to pick it up. Also, says Zelinski, “a lot of the technology that older people are interested in has to be something that they find easy to use, that’s affordable and compelling.”

That sounds like what anyone would want. And yet the list of lousy products for older people is long. Smith describes clunky walkers, ugly canes, and institutional-looking grab bars—although he adds that he’s recently seen some cleverly disguised to look like towel racks or other household objects.

Smith’s division has helped bring to market a number of products for the older consumer, like a line of Stanford-designed shoes for people with knee arthritis. One of the options even looks like a slick running shoe, rather than a Frankensteinian orthotic.

Engaging older people in designing for older people “is a good thing,” says Smith. “Because younger people do tend to have this picture of designing things that are functional for older people, but not really understanding what makes them happy.” Presented with products that are “brown, beige, and boring,” many older people will forgo convenience for dignity.

That’s why last year, as part of an annual global design challenge he runs at Stanford, Smith brought in the Longevity Explorers so that the designers could actually meet some older people. Smith said the workshop helped—his young finalists came away thinking of older consumers as less of a stereotype, and more as individuals with heterogeneous tastes and needs.

A handful of major companies are trying to set an example by doing something similar. Design heavyweight IDEO brought on Barbara Beskind, then 89, as a designer in 2013 to help it create products for older people. Hazel McCallion, former mayor of Mississauga, Ontario, was 98 when Revera, one of Canada’s largest providers of assisted living, hired her as its chief elder officer in 2015.

But progress is incremental, perhaps because aging still gives people the heebie-jeebies.

“Unfortunately, the first thing you hear when you say ‘Well, so much of the population is aging, they’re living older’—people will say, ‘Oh my God! What are we going to do about this problem?!’” says Smith. “And you know, if you back off a step, you realize this is, like, one of the great accomplishments in human history.”

Caro has an adventurous streak—he once heli-skiied the Himalayas—but he is not brash. He gathers his thoughts before he speaks, and when he does, he uses his hands judiciously for emphasis. He’s mastered Silicon Valley Neat Casual: Button-ups under top layers that suggest athletic activity, dark jeans, an Apple watch.

He arrived in California from Melbourne, with a stop to study lasers at Oxford University as part of a doctorate in experimental physics. After a job at a pioneering laser eye surgery firm in Boston, he spent the 1990s at startups and medical-device companies in Silicon Valley and ended up going solo as a management consultant and angel investor. Then, five years ago, he decided to take on the problem that had been nagging him for years. For older people, he says, “all the existing products were ugly and stigmatizing. It just seemed there was a fertile opportunity that was being missed.”

After he’d conducted about 100 interviews with people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, one thing stood out: many of the people he met missed feeling useful. “There’s this huge demographic of people who have sort of been put aside and told to go off and play bridge and bingo and not contribute to society,” he says. Zumba and lectures were fun, but not fulfilling.

An idea took shape: Why not get people together to talk about aging and use those discussions to pinpoint problems technologists should tackle? It would be a resource for product developers, as well as giving the target audience some influence over the companies gunning for their dollars.

“We weren’t sure we could make it interesting to them so they’d want to come back,” he says. “We weren’t sure anything useful would come out of it. We weren’t sure of anything.”

It turned out to be an experiment that paid off. Today there are eight Longevity Explorer “circles,” as Caro calls them: five in Northern California and one each in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. There are about 500 members, most of whom are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, although there are members in their 60s as well. He often gets emails from people who want to either join a group or start one, and he is gradually greenlighting circles throughout the US, run by volunteers. The circles are enabled by Caro’s company, Tech Enhanced Life, a public benefit corporation.

Circle meetings go like this: Members start by writing down topics they want to cover (like hearing aids) on sticky notes and passing them to Caro, who cycles through those suggestions before introducing a discussion topic. He uses the same topic at multiple circles, and it’s usually from a theme that has cropped up at more than one meeting. (The day I was there, the topic was “What do we do about the fact that the world seems to be shrinking around me? I’m not ready to just sit in my armchair and wait for the end.”)

Practical demonstrations are encouraged. At one point during my visit, a woman whipped out a tool she liked for opening packages (plastic clamshells are even more maddening when you have arthritis). Explorers recommend and review gadgets and digital tools—everything from ride-share apps to jar openers—and those conversations get turned into guides on techenhancedlife.com.

One of the site’s most popular pages is a roundup of toenail clippers—it turns out the difficulty bridging the distance between your hands and toes is a common side effect of gaining years. Content for older adults and their caretakers is free; a small fraction of the information deemed of more interest to companies or researchers lives behind a $45-a-month paywall.

Today the company is funded mainly by Caro, two other cofounders, and a handful of investors, but eventually Caro wants it to pay for itself. In 2017, after feedback from Explorers that they would like to weigh in on product development, not just the finished goods, he introduced “sponsored explorations”—a paid service for companies designing products for older adults. Each Explorer gets a fee, usually in the range of $100 to $500, for taking part in focus groups, information–gathering sessions, and other projects. They’ve done them with early-stage companies, venture-backed startups, and “humongous companies that everyone in the world has heard of,” Caro says. He’s evasive, though, about who those clients are and how many sponsored explorations have been conducted, saying only that the number is “more than 10 but less than 100.” The products have involved everything from robotics to fintech—and frequently, he says, the companies come away realizing that their assumptions were “completely wrong.”

Charles Mourani met Caro at a conference in Palo Alto when he was two months into building Mason Finance, a service targeted at older adults interested in selling their life insurance policies for cash—the kind of thing many turn to when they’re hit with large, unanticipated expenses, like medical bills.

Mourani’s team still hadn’t tested its product with users beyond their own parents and grandparents: “It’s not like you can just simply show up to a retirement home,” he says. So he hired the Longevity Explorers. Over the course of 2018 they ran three different projects, and the results, he says, were “eye-opening.”

Frequently, Caro says, the companies come away realizing that their assumptions about older adults were “completely wrong.”

Among the things that surprised Mourani was the Longevity Explorers’ proclivity for reading the terms of service. Younger users breeze through this step on most websites by simply checking a box, ignoring the text, and clicking “next.” But older users want to read the small print. A 30-second application quickly becomes 10 minutes when someone reads every single condition.

Lots of designers have had similar “aha!” moments after talking to their older users. Take Nick Baum, who created StoryWorth, a subscription app and website that allows family members to prompt each other to tell stories about themselves. Launched in 2013, the site has collected well over one million stories, Baum says, the vast majority of them from people over 60. During the early years, Baum handled a lot of the customer support himself and often fielded phone calls from older users. Once, an unanticipated problem popped up.

“We quickly ran into this case where couples were sharing an email address,” he says. “At first I thought, ‘Well, that’s crazy. Who would share an email address?’ Then I realized that 50 years ago people didn’t have cell phones, and they had a shared phone number, right? And so of course you get email—why not have shared email?” Rather than force people to change their behavior, he adjusted to allow more than one account under the same email address, so that people sharing a single email could get individual communications from the company in the same in-box.

Designing for older users doesn’t only benefit older users, says Caricia Catalani, a design director at IDEO. The company recently worked with Los Angeles County to revamp its voting machines, with an eye toward older people who were robust voters in their youth but had stopped showing up at the polls. It turned out that designing for them led to “good design decisions for everyone,” says Catalani.

Those with weak or no vision liked having audio prompts, for instance. But so did people with low literacy and young people who had never voted before, because the audio program acted as a host and guide. They also found that larger, more legible text was “desirable from everyone’s point of view,” not just for older voters with poor vision. The new machines are currently being manufactured and will be rolled out soon.

I asked Catalani if she sees companies showing more interest in incorporating the viewpoints of older adults in their design process.

“I wish that was true,” she says. While some are starting to see older people as a demographic defined by more than age, many just see “the financial opportunity,” she adds. It’s a revenue stream they may never tap if businesses continue to see their elder customers as a monolithic pocketbook instead of as individuals.

Lynn Davis—who had debunked the $300 hearing aids at the Longevity Explorers meeting I attended—first joined the group about four years ago. She’s an Apple devotee who recently learned how to use Google Docs and describes her tech aptitude as “low to middle.” But those who have worked with the Longevity Explorers know that is not exactly true of the group as a whole.

“When I’m in a room with 85-years-olds on average who all have an iPhone in their pocket, the question remains as to how representative that actually is,” says Mourani.

Caro acknowledges this. Most members are white and middle class, and many are former professionals. He describes the consulting groups as just one tool—suited to understanding early adopters, for instance, rather than all consumers. “When we have more circles in other places, we’ll be able to do even more sorts of projects,” he says.

When Davis meets me to talk about the group, she’s wearing chic purple-framed eyeglasses and guitar-pick earrings. She says she dreams of exoskeletons that will improve mobility, and cars that come on their own when you call, but for her, Longevity Explorers isn’t just about better products—it’s about better relationships. Receiving advice from, and commiserating with, her peers is a major draw.

“It’s just nice to know there’s a room full of people who also get stuck,” she says. Often, tech talk segues naturally into what she calls the “hard work” of discussing things like hospitalization and loneliness.

It’s no secret that older adults like Davis can be a boon for companies—but people I spoke to for this story told me that although businesses are eager to sell them things, they’re slow to include them in the design process.

Caro is betting this will change. He is in talks to start about 10 more circles nationwide—the beginning of what he calls a “movement”: groups all over the world where older consumers are telling developers what they want, and not the other way around. But ultimately, like the Explorer meetings, it’s not really about physical things.

“It’s about being in control of your own destiny,” he says.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614167/why-are-products-for-older-people-so-ugly/?utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=76169117&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9hYYyTf7PmVj-TcHnBjBRAe1Q3K_yM5N7VblZ-mDNohgEXUrZz7DTstG-xofAGJX4nY67Buy3csQUAhT2s40B_sHf9Dg&_hsmi=76169117

How to be the very best un­cle, aunt or god­par­ent

They walk a nar­row line be­tween par­ent and friend and are of­ten a child’s first hero

• Montreal Gazette, Canada
• Aug 26, 2019
• Page: A3

It hap­pens to even the most re­laxed and fun-lov­ing of par­ents: fun turns into a funk as they’re caught in a swell of hockey prac­tice and home­work dis­agree­ments, tran­sit headaches and work frus­tra­tions.

It’s not dan­ger­ous. It’s not an emer­gency. It’s or­di­nary life. Yet in very for­tu­nate homes, there is a su­per­hero for par­ents to call. That hero, lib­er­ated from the mun­dane and or­di­nary, is free to be ex­tra­or­di­nary.

It’s the favourite aunt.

Or it’s an un­cle, a god­par­ent, or a friend so close they’re fam­ily. They love that kid like their own, but with (what ap­pears at first glance to be) none of the re­spon­si­bil­ity.

They of­ten share our val­ues, but more im­por­tantly, they share our his­tory. They lis­ten with­out judg­ment, yet when it’s time to say, “Hey, kid, that was a stupid move,” they do it with­out the bur­den of ev­ery­day rule-mak­ing and reg­u­la­tion.

Blessed with four of the best aunts (and very neat un­cles), I had my ears pierced long be­fore my par­ents thought I should, and learned things about my­self I might not have if I hadn’t been re­flected through their eyes. “You fold tow­els ex­actly like your mother,” an aunt once laughed, and I rolled my eyes — I am noth­ing like my mother. Un­less you know my mother as a sis­ter and as a pre­cise towel-folder.

“She al­ways had the neat­est gifts,” says my niece Tiffiny Co­radetti of our Aun­tie Ginny. “Just tiny trin­kets, but they were so fun. I had a la­dy­bug ring. The la­dy­bug was on a mag­net so you could put it on some­thing and se­cretly make it move with the ring. I still had it as a teenager. We used to race in the mall with her wheel­chair. Or ride the wheel­chair with her. When I stayed over, she would go through Meals on Wheels and or­der ev­ery­thing I wanted to eat.

“You gave me in­sane amounts of free­dom,” Tiffiny says, be­cause I’d send her and her brother to the dé­pan­neur for bagels or milk — some­thing her mother would not have let them do alone. When Tiffiny, grown now, speaks of her brother, Michael, as an un­cle, she says he ex­cels be­cause he’s a step re­moved from her kids’ “ex­plo­sive per­son­al­i­ties.”

Favourite aunts and un­cles with the strong­est su­per­pow­ers of­ten come in the guise of a per­son who has reached that sweet spot be­tween rais­ing their own chil­dren and be­com­ing a grand­par­ent, or in the fresh, bouncy skin of some­one who doesn’t have their own herd yet. Though they’ll pre­tend it’s Mary Pop­pins-style magic, the tricks to be­com­ing a favourite aren’t that com­pli­cated.

Play. Be the first to take them on a roller-coaster. Let them skip school to see a movie in the mid­dle of the day — and pre­tend their par­ents don’t know.

Lis­ten. Be the one they come to with se­crets, re­grets and com­plaints. Keep their con­fi­dences in lit­tle things and when some­thing big hap­pens, they’ll know who is safe to talk to. Even if you’re no Dr. Ruth or Dear Abby, your ad­vice is likely to be more solid than that of their peers. Your house will be one they run away to, your num­ber the one they’ll call.

Tell sto­ries. Mom prob­a­bly won’t men­tion sneak­ing out at night as a young teen to put dish soap in the lo­cal foun­tain. It’s the aunt and un­cle’s job to share those lit­tle se­crets.

Be un­con­ven­tional. Don’t be crass, but show a bit of at­ti­tude. Laugh loudly. Clown around.

Make mem­o­ries. Have sleep­overs and stay up till mid­night, then have ice cream for break­fast. If you live out of town, tak­ing the train to see you could be their first big-kid ex­pe­ri­ence, some­thing they will for­ever as­so­ciate with you.

The aunt, un­cle and god­par­ents are role mod­els and a child’s first hero. They walk a nar­row line be­tween par­ent and friend. They are an im­por­tant part of the fam­ily sup­port sys­tem, es­pe­cially when the funk of an or­di­nary life sets in.

They up­hold a fam­ily’s val­ues and re­spect their rules while al­low­ing the nephew or niece to nav­i­gate the world free of their par­ents.

The truly gifted walk this line with­out alien­at­ing par­ents — they com­ple­ment them.

Today in history: Aug. 27

1917: Canada’s Military Service Act is passed, putting conscription into effect.

1928: The Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact is signed by 62 countries. The pact “outlawed” war, with the countries vowing to find diplomatic means to solve future world disagreements. U.S. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his efforts, but neither he, nor the pact, could prevent the start of the Second World War in 1939.

1973: The largest hailstone documented in Canada falls in Cedoux, Sask. It weighs 290 grams and measures 114 millimetres in diameter.

1979: Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Prince Philip’s uncle and the former chief of Britain’s defence staff, is assassinated when his boat is blown up on Donegal Bay. Thomas McMahon, a member of the Irish Republican Army fighting to end British rule in Northern Ireland, later receives a life sentence.

2008: Illinois Sen. Barack Obama officially becomes the Democratic Party’s candidate for U.S. president. The 47-year-old becomes the first black nominee of a major party in U.S. history.

2018: A U.S. judge in Seattle blocks the Trump administration from allowing a Texas company to post online plans for making untraceable 3D guns, agreeing with 19 states and the District of Columbia that such access to the plastic guns would pose a security risk.

Please note the following important key dates …

Sept 2, 2019 – Almage Rosemont will be closed for Labor Day Holiday – do not show up!
Sept 9, 2019 – Almage Rosemont will be holding a corn roast for the members .. so get ready!!!!!