I’m hearing a lot about Long-Term COVID these days. LP lost his sense of smell for nearly a year. JP has been getting headaches. JM is fatigued and sleeping more than ever. The CDC website lists it as a medical condition, identifiable by these and other symptoms.

I had COVID once, almost two years ago, and it was pretty strong, like a bad flu. It stayed bad for about 48 hours, and then lessened considerably to the sniffles, which lasted a few days more. And that was it. I tested clear. I had the antibodies. I was deemed fully recovered.

I didn’t notice any lack of smell. But I never had a good sniffer to begin with. I had no headaches, but I did have joint pain and muscle soreness and fatigue. The fatigue lasted for a month or so. The joint pain and muscle soreness is still with me.

I don’t think of any of that as Long-Term COVID. The seeming reduction in smell I attributed to psychosomatic brain malfunction. The fatigue was real. And I could have blamed it on the COVID. Instead, I attributed it to the week I spent in bed and the three weeks after that I went without exercising. At my age (71), losing lung capacity and muscle strength happens much quicker than it does when one is younger. And prior to getting COVID, I had acquired a very high level by putting in two hours of high-intensity training every day. And so, when I went back to that same level of training, I couldn’t keep up. But I tried. And that left me feeling exhausted.

I remedied it by doubling up on my cardio training and lifting heavier weights. And within a few months, I was in better shape than I was before my bout with COVID.

As far as the joint pain and muscle soreness, I still have that. But so does everyone else that does my sport. Even the 20-somethings.

Yes, I’m skeptical about this phenomenon of Long-Term COVID. I’m not disputing that the virus can leave its victims with physical symptoms that linger. But I do believe that, except for patients that have other health issues, the post-virus effects are nothing to worry about.

There is a big difference between the coronavirus, which is a recognized and legitimate disease, and Long-Term COVID, which is a description of maladies ex-COVID patients are reporting.

The former is an actual biological thing that can be scientifically detected. The latter is a set of symptoms that are connected to COVID only by subjective reports. The CDC accepts Long-Term COVID as a legitimate medical condition. But there is absolutely no empirical evidence that it exists independent of the subjective accounts.

The most common symptoms of Long-Term COVID are headache, fatigue, brain fog, achy joints, and shortness of breath. These are the same symptoms people experience after a cold or the flu. They are also very similar to the symptoms associated with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and PTSD – two medical conditions that are recognized by the medical establishment and covered by most health insurance plans.

If people want to believe they have Long-Term COVID, and want to get whatever social, psychological, or medical benefits might accrue from making that claim, I say, “More power to ya.” But if it’s a friend or family member that would like to get over it and get back to full health, I’d tell them to consider doing what I did. Begin with the idea that you are healthy, but out of shape. Get plenty of rest. Eat lean. Exercise with increasing vigor. Set goals. Strength goals. Heart-rate goals. And blood-pressure goals. Check your numbers as you go. Don’t expect miracles. So long as you see improvements, be happy.

This is a case I’ve been following from the Innocence Project. Click here.

Lessons From TV Land: What Makes a Good Show Last?

I was having a conversation with a friend last night about a TV series. Which was it? I think it was Godless. I said I had liked the first few episodes but gave up before the season ended.

We were speculating as to why that happens.

My thought was that the answer is simple: It’s difficult to make an hour or 90 minutes of good drama. Making six to 10 episodes (a typical season) of good drama is nearly impossible. The wonder to me is how anyone can make even a single season work well.

In fact, it happens all the time, which is a credit to the enormous talent in Hollywood and the Big Apple. So, it’s not surprising that more often than not episodic series burn themselves out, either by losing steam or attempting to “jump the shark.”

What I want to know is how do some series go on and on without flagging? I’m talking about Friends at 10 years (1994-2004), Big Bang Theory at 13 years (2007-2019), and Curb Your Enthusiasm at 22 years (2000-present)?

Let’s see…

* All three are comedies. Situation comedies.

* They feature strong, compatible ensemble casts.

My theory was that they are about ordinary, flawed people struggling with the mundanities of quotidian life.

How does that make them more timeless or enduring?

I didn’t know. So, I did a bit of research. And what I discovered confused me even more. It turns out that Curb Your Enthusiasm’s 22 years is nothing compared to the longest-running TV shows in history. Here are the top 20 as of May 2021 (some of them still producing new episodes)… none of them (unless you count The Simpsons) sitcoms:

1. The Tonight Show – 67 years
2. Coronation Street – 61 years (British soap opera)
3. General Hospital – 58 years
4. Guiding Light – 57 years
5. Days of Our Lives – 56 years
6. As the World Turns – 54 years
7. Sazae-san – 52 years (Japanese children’s series)
8. Sesame Street– 52 years
9. Emmerdale – 49 years (British soap opera)
10. The Price Is Right – 49 years
11. The Young and the Restless – 48 years
12. Saturday Night Live – 46 years
13. One Life to Live – 45 years
14. Doctor Who – 42 years (British science fiction series)
15. All My Children – 41 years
16. Wheel of Fortune – 38 years
17. Jeopardy – 37 years
18. The Bold and the Beautiful – 34 years
19. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood – 33 years
20. The Simpsons – 33 years

Milestones in Television History 

Here’s something else I found in my research – a brief compilation of milestones in television history from Seth Berkman, writing for Stacker, made briefer by my editing:

 1920s 

In 1926, John Logie Baird gave a public demonstration of a television system in London. Two years later, the first television stations launched.

1939

The opening of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York introduced television to a national audience, thanks to RCA and a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. NBC soon began nightly broadcasts.

1940s

As black-and-white TVs became more common in American households, the finishing touches on what we would come to know as color TV were refined. Pro sports were first broadcast on American stations and ABC was formed.

1950s

Morning television was revolutionized with the debut of NBC’s Today in 1952. Elvis Presley made his first TV appearances in the middle of the decade, and became proof that television presence could create a worldwide star.

1960s

Political discourse and global ambitions were elevated to a new level. The 1960s began with Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy going against each other in a split-screen televised debate. Three years later, breaking news coverage forever changed with Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas.

1970s

HBO became available in 1972, changing the pay cable format with exclusive movies, groundbreaking original programming, and live sports.

1980s

In 1981, MTV launched and played its first music video, the aptly titled “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, and changed the entertainment industry. Combo TVs, featuring a TV and a VCR, gained popularity.

1990s

NBC’s “Must See TV” block of shows created the zenith of sitcom television, spinning out a slew of hits, including  Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, Will and Grace, and Golden Girls.

2000s

Reality TV became all the craze, with shows like Survivor, American Idol, and The Amazing Race. In 2007, Netflix began offering a streaming option for its library of TV shows and movies. Flatscreens begin to all but replace the bigger, cube-shaped, cathode-ray tube TVs.

2010s

Streaming services became even more popular, with HBO, NBC, and even the WWE creating their own monthly subscription services. Smart TVs become more prevalent, allowing viewers to stream music, skim through YouTube, and watch their favorite shows all on one device.

How to Destroy Your Wealth… and Your Family 

It’s a well-accepted (and reasonably-well documented) fact that most family fortunes are dissipated within three generations.

The first generation creates the wealth and then hands it to the second generation. The second generation accepts it happily. Then they fight about it, make whatever adjustments they can, which usually fractionalizes the fortune, and pass the remaining pieces on to the third generation, which pisses it all away.

The most popular way to leave your wealth to your children – dividing it equally among them at your death – is often seen as a solution to this problem. But as anyone who’s read about the history of the Vanderbilts can tell you, that approach destroys wealth faster than keeping it together, which is what the Rockefellers did. There are several good reasons for this. The most important one: Regardless of how “fairly” you apportion your assets among your heirs, some of them will not see your distribution as fair. (There’s a great book you should read on this topic: Splitting Heirs by Ron Blue.)

It is disappointing to think that the wealth you’ve worked all your life to accumulate will be destroyed after you die. But what is much worse is the fact that leaving your fortune to your loved ones can push them apart. Even make enemies of them.

I have friends that don’t speak to their siblings as a result of inheritance issues. I know families that are no longer families because of disagreements about how to apportion and/or manage estates.

What I Believe: This problem is not limited to families. It occurs whenever any form of wealth is given away freely and without conditions. Free love is a bad idea. Free money is worse. That is true for every kind of “giving” situation – from dividing a hundred-million-dollar estate to social welfare to private charity to giving money to beggars on the street.

It feels good to give away things – most especially, money. The giver is instantly rewarded by feelings of righteousness and seeing someone else’s need quickly and easily met.

But charity is a double-sided coin. There is the good you do in giving someone something of value. And the bad you do in creating in the recipient feelings of entitlement and dependency.

The good is usually temporary, but the bad endures. Sometimes for a lifetime. It debilitates the recipient and ultimately damages his/her relationship with the giver.

I am not saying that charity is bad. I’m saying it is dangerous. It can be done well, but only if the donor is willing to give away more than just money. To “do less harm than good” (the motto of my family foundation), the donor must take responsibility for the possible negative effects of the charity. The work does not stop with the giving. On the contrary, it begins with the giving. The rest of the obligation is to see to it that the recipient isn’t harmed by it.

The objection to this line of thinking is that it is paternalistic. And it is. I believe that the only moral way to be charitable is to take on the responsibility that all good parents assume with their children. They want to help them succeed in life and be happy – but in return for their help, they know that they must also demand respect, gratitude, and disciplined behavior.

That’s what I believe. It’s a big subject. Big enough for a book. In fact,  I’m in the middle of writing it (working title: The Challenge of Charity). If you have comments on my thoughts on charity, or books or articles on the subject to recommend, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

The last time this happened was 20 years ago, when Congress granted President George W. Bush the power to launch a military attack against Iraq.

The theme was “a war on terror.” The excuse was “weapons of mass destruction.” The investment for the US was $2+ trillion and the deployment of more than 100,000 troops.  The result was the death of as many as 700,000 Iraqis, the displacement of millions more, a civil war between Shias and Sunnis, and regional instability that is still a problem today.

I remember listening to the coverage in the months leading to our attack. I was surprised at the common sentiment. It seemed like just about everyone in the media and in Congress was in favor of a military invasion.

For me, it was a lose-lose situation. But since everyone else seemed to feel a war was justified, I felt uncomfortable saying what I thought.

I feel the same way now about all the rhetoric about Russia’s plans for Ukraine. Biden was criticized by both sides for suggesting the US might respond to Russia’s actions in a measured way. His statement was seen as a capitulation and a sign of his weakness. I’m thinking it was one of the most sensible things he’s said since taking office.

Ukraine has no “strategic value” for the US. It means nothing to us if they are admitted to NATO. Have we not learned, from losing every war we’ve fought since WWII, that fighting proxy wars over “freedom” benefits nobody but the military-industrial machine?

What am I missing?

When You Are the Voice of Experience… 2 Questions to Ask Yourself 

When you are young, you have the liberty to take up futile causes. You have the time to spend on them, and more time to abandon them when they go awry. When you are older, you can’t waste your time on idea experiments you’ve already seen fail.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t voice your opinion. You should. But you must do so realizing that for some of the most important questions in life – questions about what will happen if you do this or that – most people can’t learn by listening to the wisdom of their elders. They must try out their ideas for themselves.

When this happens with a young employee, I have made it a rule to ask myself two questions:

1. “How important is this young person to the business?” If the answer is “not important,” I ignore the protest and insist on doing things my way. But when the answer is “very important,” I then ask myself…
2. “If I let him/her learn through experience, will it be a mortal blow to the business or just a setback from which we can recover?” If it’s the latter, I acquiesce, knowing I will have a smarter superstar employee as a result.

Old Man Humor 

Another indignity of old age is the disintegration of critical skills, particularly when it comes to humor. In between our yearly get togethers, the 12 of us stay in touch by email, exchanging what is commonly known as old man humor.

These are actual examples:

A Brief History of Nicaragua 

Nicaragua has always been an agricultural economy. Before the 1979 revolution, most of the productive farmland was owned by a handful of very wealthy landholders.

That said, Nicaragua’s GDP (gross domestic product, the total of goods and services produced) was among the highest in Central America.

After Somoza fled in 1979, the Sandinistas implemented the promise of confiscating these large farms and redistributing them among their supporters. Almost immediately, the GDP crashed. This was partly because private capital available to the large farmers dried up. But it was also due to the inefficiency of breaking the farms into smaller ones, and the disappearance of tens of thousands of managers and professionals that fled the country and resettled in the US, Costa Rica, and other Central American countries.

On the positive side, the ascendency of the Sandinistas was a welcome event for Russia and Cuba, which began sending foreign aid to the tune of half a billion dollars a year to buck up the declining economy.

Things were bad and getting better when, three years later, the US-supported counterrevolution began. Although the Contras (as they were called) were more interested in trafficking cocaine than fighting Sandinistas, the fighting that was done was an expense the Sandinista government could not afford.

Between 1977 (the year the Sandinista insurrection began) and 1989, when free elections returned the country to a democracy, the GDP declined by 33% and exports fell by half while the population increased by 30%. The purchasing power of agricultural wages – the most common form of income in this agrarian land – dwindled to one-fifth of its former level.

As for inflation: At the beginning of the Sandinistas’ rule in 1979, the córdoba was pegged at 10 to the dollar. By February 14, 1987, inflation was in the triple digits and there were five discrepant official rates of exchange. On the black market, córdobas were 40,000 to the dollar. To “fix” that, the government instituted new bills with familiar faces but different colors, exchanging them for old ones at a rate of 1 to 1,000.

Defamation, as mentioned above, comes in two flavors: libel and slander. Many people have a hard time remembering the difference. It’s actually very easy:

Libel is written defamation. Slander is oral defamation. Libel begins with an L, as does literary. Slander begins with an S, as does spoken. So, libel is literary defamation. And slander is spoken defamation.

Got it?

F-U-C-K! 

Since AS got me started on all this with his email, I shared the above with him to get his input before posting it here.

“That was great,” AS wrote back, “and quite extensive. I believe the origin of the word fuck, came from the English. They arrested people for being involved in sexual encounters that were, at the time, considered illegal.They were sent to prison for unlawful carnal knowledge. Get it? For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Or so I’ve been told.”

Fuck is also said to stand for Fornication Under the Command of the King, presumably a decree intended to repopulate England after it was depopulated by the plague.

Neither one is true.

In fact, there are many fake stories about the origins of certain words as acronyms.

“Posh” comes to mind. For many years, I not only believed but propagated the myth that it was for Port Out, Starboard Home, a term used for the best (and most expensive) cabins on sea voyages.

I didn’t want to give that one up until I actually looked it up. Reality:

Early 20th century. Perhaps from slang “posh,” denoting either a dandy or a coin of small value. There is no evidence to support the folk etymology that posh is formed from the initials of Port Out Starboard Home (referring to the more comfortable accommodations, out of the heat of the sun, on ships between England and India).

As for fuck, click here to read a short essay that sets the record straight.