Where did all the magazines go? I’m not talking about the news stores either, those phantastic places where you used to be able to go and browse through Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, Outside, Bicycling and so many more magazines people actually read.
 
No, though the newsstand is a goner, I’m talking about waiting rooms. Where did the magazines go in our doctor, dentist, physical therapist, workout facility lounges, chiropractor waiting rooms?
 
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, Covid killed the magazines. All those germs waiting around on the pages planning to annihilate your immune system. That’s over though. It’s been over for years.
 
So, where are the magazines in our waiting rooms today? Why haven’t they returned?
 
I’m slightly puzzled by this. On one hand, once something changes, people and systems often don’t readjust to a new reality. In this case, the decision was made to eliminate magazines due to health safety reasons. Though that threat is currently minimal at best, since the new system is in place, no one clamors to change it.

The other reason we haven’t reverted to spending time perusing mags while we wait to get worked on is because we’ve changed. It’s probably slightly more accurate to say: the reading habits of the citizens of the United States (and world) have decreased to the point that almost nobody purchases and reads magazines. This is the more valid argument.
 
The smartphone has supplanted many things in our lives. In particular, books that you could open and page through and magazines where you could flip through pages have suffered if not downright disappeared in favor of online venues. They are published less often than 15 years ago, if not downright disappeared.

This came home to me in the past 6-7 years or so. I’d subscribed to Sports Illustrated (SI) for decades. Then, it didn’t seem to be coming as frequently. I had to go online to figure out what happened (in all fairness, I probably overlooked any snail mail they sent telling me they were reducing the number of weekly editions they published).
 
This didn’t just happen once. Over a period of 3-4 years, SI again reduced its published number of issues. At some point they went to once a month, then to once every other month. Sadly, because I always liked that they put extra time into their writing to give perspective on sports-related issues, I finally canceled the subscription because I wasn’t getting the magazine often enough to even care about it.
 
They are an example of the death of magazines (the ones you hold in your hands and page through). There are (at a minimum) hundreds of other examples of magazines that lost readers or found the reading public with a shorter and shorter attention span.

Maybe this is influencing the doctors, dentists and chiropractors of the world. Because they or their employees or their patients don’t read and dump their old issues on the waiting room tables, we’re left with nothing but to pull out our phones and stare blankly into them. Ouch.
 
Covid killed the waiting room table magazines. But we could have brought them back. The tide has gone out. Will it come back? It doesn’t appear so at this point in history.

​Our education system misses the boat on many classes students could use in our rapidly changing world. If you’re a thinking person, you’ve probably thought of classes that every student could use to better adjust to society and prepare for complexity and tough situations they might encounter in the years ahead.
 
Having discussions with friends and colleagues on these types of issues, I often hear “financial management” as a necessary class that is not taught (investing, preparing for retirement, balancing your checkbook/budget; little and big stuff). Another one that arises during conversations is comparative religion – teaching all the world great religions so teenagers enter the adult world with a more rounded perspective on the beliefs of others.

The potential subjects are almost endless. I’m confident you have thought of your own.

Here are three of my favorites that roll around my head. Two are relatively new to my thought processes (one in the last few months and the other in the past year or so), while the other has bounced around my brain for 3-4 years.
 

1. Artificial intelligence (AI): This one has cropped up most recently. We need to teach what AI is, how it acts, what it means for jobs, how it will change the workforce and our REALITY. The implications are so thorough that we can’t afford not to teach our youth in-depth about AI. Whether you like it or fear it, AI is going to affect all of us for many years to come. Being prepared is critical for each of us.
2. BS detection of memes and deep fakes: This one has arisen over the past year or so. I keep telling a good friend he needs to create a business where people send him deep fakes and he analyzes them (he has the skills to do this professionally) to determine true or false, manipulated or accurate. We are living this world. We are crushed with images and phrases that have been changed and charged to cause you to feel something that’s not true. The only way to understand these types of is to have a BS detector. A well taught class would prepare us, and this is a survival skill in our ever-more-digitized world.
3. Anger/conflict management: This is a personal favorite and one I’ve discussed vehemently with many people over the years (more on that in a sec). This mandated class for high school students would be designed to help identify angry people and situations and give you the tools on how to mitigate the conflict, dial back rage.

Several years back, I wrote extensively to all my elected representatives, suggesting this as an important course for high school students (and their lives as they continued to mature and grow through the years). Given the number of school shootings in the United States, it is a realistic and doable alternative to mitigate some of the mass shootings that occur far too often in our society. It would arm students with tools to understand and identify when someone is going off the rails, and step forward with solutions.

Alone, it is not going to cure the world. But it is a step. None of my federal or state elected officials responded to my emails suggesting they develop and push for this type of legislation to build an anger/conflict management program in our schools. That sadly says something about the state of our elected officials. While I didn’t expect an immediate “yes, this is great and I’m going to adopt everything you wrote and sponsor a bill,” I did expect a rational response that supported the intent of what I’d written to them.
 
Those are three worthwhile classes if we’re going to have a next generation adaptive to changing technology, visual manipulation, outright lies and people who struggle to handle complexity without popping a blood vessel in their foreheads. Let’s hope someone listens. Feel free to share this column with your elected officials. Maybe something will happen.

​Weird how quickly movies disappear from the theaters these days. This is not new. Probably, if you pay attention, you’ve noticed this has been the case for 10 years or more.
 
You see an ad. You decide you want to go with your partner. You talk about it. Somehow you agree that you both want to see the flick. This process takes three weeks. You go online to check times for the coming weekend, and what the heck, it’s gone. Poof. Disappeared.
 
It’s called the disappearing movie syndrome (DMS). DMS affects most, but not all, movies. Identified blockbusters (who chooses to apply that mantle to a show is anybody’s guess, but it’s not you and me) stick around longer. Sometimes three or four weeks.
 
Though I exaggerate that point about how long a great (or high attendance) movie stays in theater, I’m not exaggerating by much. If you even think you want to go see a movie in the past decade, you pretty much need to decide that first week or two and then GO. If not, DMS takes over and it’s gone. You forget about it. And, you’ll likely never take the time to look it up on a streaming service and give it a viewing. There are far too many other entertainments options and our small brains don’t have the capacity to care or catalogue the flicks you want to watch enough to make that effort.
 
A couple of months back, during some daydreaming time, I looked up the current movie suite in our local theater. “Whoa, I’d like to see this. Man, this one sounds good, I should check it out. That’s a unique sounding plot; I should go.”
 
I selected several that charged my batteries. I wrote them down (and, of course, still have that list, hence this incredible column). They included: “Novocaine”; “Black Bag”; “The Monkey”; “Riff Raff”; “Queen of the Ring”; “A Working Man”; “Mickey 17.”
 
How many did I see? I’ll give you a moment to realistically consider this. Think about what else you do in your life, what grabs your attention, what stops you from even going out to the theater, other things that clutter your life. Now, out of those seven movies, how many did I watch?
 
You probably guessed right: two. “Mickey 17” and “Riff Raff” were the two I went to. What did this depend on? Was it convenience in terms of time and theater location? Did I rank them and go to the best first?
 
Quite frankly, for me, time and location became an initial deciding variable. Then, it became apparent that the others weren’t going to be around and other things in life took over, and poof, there they went to the ether. “Queen of the Ring” gone the day after I first looked. “Novocaine” gone in one week. “Black Bag” gone in two weeks. “The Monkey” disappearing in three weeks.
 
My life is not a failure because of this. But it makes for interesting observations about popular culture and why we don’t have as much of a shared culture as we did 30-40 years ago. Because of the fracturing and hyper intensity of the movie market, they come and go astoundingly fast. Blink and you miss one.
 
When I graduated from college, the movie “Grease” was in our theater in Ottawa, IL. I AM NOT KIDDING YOU, but that movie stayed in town the entire two years I lived there. Yeah, great movie, but there must not have been a lot of other flicks hitting the market.
 
A few years earlier, I remember “Jaws” hanging around our Kankakee, IL downtown theater for months and months and months. It was a great movie, no question about it. But in today’s world, it would get a month run, maybe.
 
We can’t keep up. The speed of entertainment options exceeds our capacity to observe, absorb and handle (make a decision to go or not to go). We’re all slammed by this. Most of us turn personal filters on. Or we completely ignore numerous movies and other entertainment sectors promoted towards us. It’s the only way to survive. Walls up. Block them out. Forget they exist. Move on, pick up a book.

​Over the past five years I’ve been playing old man baseball on two teams. That’s hardball. The two leagues, one for players ages 55+ and the other for 62+, are loaded with athletes wanting to continue competing despite sometimes compellingly told by our bodies to cease and desist.
 
I say that because of the injuries which occur every season. So far – keeping fingers crossed – I’ve avoided major injuries. One year, I tugged a hamstring, but soldiered on. Another year, while batting, the force of the fastball upon making contact with my bat contorted my right elbow in a direction it didn’t want to go. Icing, Advil, and an arm sleeve for compression allowed my continued participation, but it was excruciatingly painful for several weeks.

The body does not agree with what your heart desires. It tells you to rest, quit or retire. Most of the players in both leagues deal with these types of season/career-defining injuries. Resting and rejuvenating are critically important to keep yourself on the active playing list.
 
Each year (as the oldest player on our 55+ team) for the past three seasons, I advise newcomers on physical survival. I speak from experience, and wanting new teammates to stay healthy playing the game they love.
 
Here are the tips: Stretch before every at bat; don’t try to sprint (instead, taking baby steps before slowly accelerating as you run the bases or chase a ball); if at all possible, avoid sliding and diving; take it slow.
 
My teammates nod their heads. They understand. They agree. Mentally, they recognize the need to follow this advice. But, do they? Of course not.

Instead, competitive instinct and the heart take over as players repeatedly try to beat out a ground ball, steal a base, or make a spectacular diving catch on the outfield grass. Is this a good idea? Again, of course not.
 
What happens in these situations? You can predict the outcomes – torn rotator cuffs; ACL tears; pulled and torn hamstrings; twisted ankles; torn ligaments. You name it.

Of the new teammates each season, typically three get injured and are either out for the season or must miss 5-6 weeks rehabilitating an injury. Most recently, as we started this season, four of the 12 players on our roster got hurt during our opening game. One popped his hamstring in the following game and appears out for the season, despite being urged to take it slow and easy, and to be careful. He dove back to third on a play, and that was that. We all felt his pain as he lay face down on the dirt.
 
As this information was related to two good friends, they amusingly said we should change the name of our team to “The Arthritics.” We all laughed at this. We kicked around other names, including, “The Cracked Bones,” “The Sore and Grouchies,” “The Strained Muscles,” “Muscle Tearers,” “Leg Benders,” and “Ankle Crushers.” We had a good laugh batting these around on email.
At one point the suggestion was made to approach someone of decision-making power at a local Milwaukee area hospital to see if they would sponsor our team. Maybe an orthopedic practice. They could make some money off us.
 
The injuries will not go away because almost every player loves the game too much and won’t retire until the pain is non-negotiable. It happens to everyone at some point.
 
We slog it out. We have fun. We beat ourselves up. We cheer for our teammates. We agonize over their injuries, and our own. We take the field again and again for love, the joy of being on the field, the spring breeze, smelling fresh cut grass, the eternal mashing of the ball and watching it soar, flinging a pitch past a flailing hitter or making a diving catch to secure a victory.
 
The body retaliates. But love keeps resurfacing.