-
Lee Lynch’s Amazon Trail: Covid 19 Pioneer
Photo by Sue Hardesty By Lee Lynch
The Amazon Trail: Covid 19 Pioneer
As a seasoned Polio Pioneer, sixty-odd years later, it strikes me as funny that I felt a little proud, just as I had in grade school, to be part of this mass health effort. There’s a bond now, between my neighbors and myself, that we went through the unknown together, that we believed in the science and the medicine and did our patriotic duty to keep America safe.
Now that President Biden and Vice President Harris are in office, I’ve been able to have my first Covid 19 vaccine shot. It was no big deal. I went to our county fairgrounds expecting to be injected through my car window, the way I was tested. I thank my lucky stars the test was negative. I’m grateful to the medical profession that persisted in making tests and vaccines available despite the disinformation and profiteering of our former leaders.
Turned out, the vaccines were administered in the same exhibit building that’s used for our winter farmers’ market, a very familiar and reassuring space. The six-foot tables that usually serve to display crafts or local mushrooms and goat cheeses, were now place markers.
-
Q Audiobooks: A Queer History of the United States, by Michael Bronski, Narrated by Vikas Adams
A Queer History of the United States
By: Michael Bronski
Narrated by: Vikas Adams
Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
Release date: 06-12-18
Publisher: Random House AudioAbout ‘A Queer History of the United States’:
Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction
The first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.
-
The Twist Podcast #151: Calm in Gilead, Coup Fighters, Boo to Re-Boots, and This Week’s Listicles
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we marvel at the calm after the storm, discuss the need for impeachment, thumbs-down most TV reboots, and offer our own Twist listicles. Fasten your headphones!
Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, SoundCloud, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.
Copyright 2020 MadeMark Publishing
Join Mark’s email list for updates, podcasts, giveaways, and his monthly newsletter!
-
Guest Column: Dave Hughes of RetireFabulously.com – 100 Ways to Enjoy Your Life for Less Money
By Dave Hughes, RetireFabulously.com
This article first appeared at RetireFabulously.com and is reprinted with permission. Join me for a conversation with Dave on next week’s One Thing or Another Podcast.
Living a fabulous retirement – or enjoying your life at any age – does not necessarily require having a large amount of money to spend lavishly. It means designing a life for yourself (and your spouse, if you have one) that is happy and fulfilling.
This doesn’t require a lot of money in many cases. On my list of 100 Things You Can Do After You Retire, 62 of those are things you can do for little or no money. Some might actually make money. It’s true that the best things in life are free; for others, there are discounts.
-
An Early Kickoff for Monthly Newsletter Videos
I’ll be including a short video with each monthly newsletter. Those go out the last week of the month (I just sent out January’s a couple days ago). This one was to kick it off, and because we finally got a real snowstorm here in rural New Jersey.
These will give readers and subscribers a chance to see who I am in ‘real life,’ what I look like, sound like, and a general sense of an author they enjoy. I’ll be updating subscribers on projects, podcasts, life events and giveaways, with a tease or two of what’s coming up.
See you again the last week of February!
– Mark
-
One Thing or Another: It’s About Time
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
Time is not so much an arrow as a comet we ride, streaking across the sky. We only think it drags because we’re on it, like riders saddling imaginary horses that stand stock still while the ground moves beneath us.
The good news is that I’m old enough to collect Social Security. The bad news is that I’m old enough to collect Social Security. When I was twenty, I never imagined being forty. It seemed so far away from that youthful ground I stood upon with naive bravado. Then when I hit forty, I thought fifty would be the last milestone to publicly mark, quietly retiring birthday observations with the exception of a few close friends and family. And finally, when I approached the age when referring to oneself as a senior becomes culturally appropriate, I decided I could at minimum look forward to collecting a monthly stipend for my troubles. We should all be paid for getting old, at least those of us lucky enough to live that long.
-
From the Wayback Machine: My ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit (2014)
I came across this online recently. It dates back seven years, to when I’d just had a silly video go viral on YouTube (1.9 million views) about my life as a cubicle dweller. That’s all changed, but the memories remain.
I was asked shortly after that to host an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on Reddit, where people who logged on could ask me anything. I’d just finished the third installment of my Kyle Callahan Mysteries and I talked about that, as well as some things about my personal life. The newest Kyle Callahan Mystery, Reservation for Murder, just came out a few months ago (the sixth in the series), and I’m narrating it myself with brief introductions as the first of many planned narrations on the Mark McNease Mysteries Podcast. I’ll also be releasing it as an audiobook on SoundCloud once I’ve finished recording all 56 chapters. I’m up to 40 now, so it won’t be long.
Check out my ‘Ask Me Anything’ from 2014
-
The Twist Podcast #150: Damage Control, Sex and the Pity, Headlines and Listicles
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we discuss Post Traumatic Trump Syndrome, the Sex and the City cast clash, this week’s headlines, and our own Twist listicles. Fasten your headphones!
Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, SoundCloud, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.
Copyright 2020 MadeMark Publishing
Join Mark’s email list for updates, podcasts, giveaways, and his monthly newsletter!
-
Buck’s County Herald Runs Article About Local Author – Me!
-
Book Review: Eleanor, by David Michaelis
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez
“Eleanor” by David Michaelis
c.2020, Simon & Schuster
#35.00 / $47.00 Canada 698 pagesLife, as they say, is an open book.
When you’re born, someone else starts writing it for you, but it doesn’t take long for you to be your own author. Through the years, you’ll scribble ideas, compose thoughtfully, add chapters, and crumple pages. Your life’s book might be a series of quick notes, long essays, one-liners or, as in “Eleanor” by David Michaelis, you could build an epic story.
In today’s world, we might call Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother abusive: Anna Hall Roosevelt never had a kind word to say to her daughter, often mockingly calling little Eleanor “Granny.” It’s true that Eleanor wasn’t lithe and beautiful like her mother; she was awkward and stern, a Daddy’s girl for an often-absent, alcoholic father.
-
Q Audiobooks: Charity and Sylvia, by Rachel Hope Cleves, Narrated by Kristin Kalbli
Charity and Sylvia
By: Rachel Hope Cleves
Narrated by: Kristin Kalbli
Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
Publisher: Audible StudiosConventional wisdom holds that same-sex marriage is a purely modern innovation, a concept born of an overtly modern lifestyle that was unheard of in 19th-century America. But as Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates in this eye-opening book, same-sex marriage is hardly new. Born in 1777, Charity Bryant was raised in Massachusetts. A brilliant and strong-willed woman with a clear attraction for her own sex, Charity found herself banished from her family home at age 20. She spent the next decade of her life traveling throughout Massachusetts, working as a teacher, making intimate female friends, and becoming the subject of gossip wherever she lived.
-
One Thing or Another: Are We There Yet?
By Mark McNease
It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.
This column was always intended to be lighthearted, even in its most serious moments. Sure, I look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all. I even ponder death now and then, since it’s pretty much the end point for all of us. Where we go after that, if we go anywhere, is not something I spend much time thinking or worrying about. I have appropriate clothes for any destination, or none at all, in case it’s especially hot.
But 2020 was so difficult, so groundbreaking, like a sledgehammer outside my bedroom window, that it stands unique among the years of my life. And now, two weeks into a new year, it’s still here! The same election we would normally have moved beyond by now, accepting it as part of the political bargain we make for living in a country where people are allowed to vote, keeps hold of us as if to prevent our escape. The frustrations of lockdowns and limited interactions and one-way grocery store aisles and the politicization of absolutely everything has us frayed within an inch of insanity. And that’s just Tuesday!
-
The Twist Podcast #149: Capitol Offenses, Crazytown USA, and This Week’s Twist Listicles
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we survey the wreckage of a failed coup, celebrate entertainment birthdays and anniversaries, troll the headlines, and offer some quotes for the apocalypse.
Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, SoundCloud, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.
Copyright 2020 MadeMark Publishing
Join Mark’s email list for updates, podcasts, giveaways, and his monthly newsletter!
