The NCAA made news on Oct. 29 when they decided “…to let student athletes profit from their names, images.” It's about time.

This is certain: Things will not stay the same as they are right now. This will be the startling lesson for the younger generations who think the world they live in now will be the one in which they grow old. Change is constant, and despite a trip down memory lane as I have described here, change will continue to happen. We don’t have to embrace it, but we must be cognizant of it.

You may recall our dog, Fred, who succumbed to congestive heart failure in the spring of 2018. He was the poet laureate of The HCP before his untimely death at age 11. Immediately on the heels of Fred came Broc, despite my declaration of “no rebound dogs.” We went to get Fred’s ashes at the vet’s and came home not only with his ashes, but also with Broc.

Since the beginning of recorded time, humans have been incorrectly interpreting phenomenon in nature as notice of impending doom. Eclipses, earthquakes, tsunamis and other naturally occurring events have been declared by learned people of their time to be signaling the end of time.

If I have not made my point by now, I’ll make it again just to be sure: I resent paying for socialists’ feel-good projects.

Sir, you and your kindred in the liberal media have brought this on yourselves. You do not present news in a fair and balanced way. The (NYT) editorial page has crept into your so-called news stories, without notice. Your staff has a strong left-leaning political bias and likely is not good at math (see my column last week).

Time and again, journalists give us numbers that are completely out of line and provided in such ignorance that it is patently obvious they know not what they are talking about. Spoiler alert – this will lead to climate change at the end, so if you want to jump to there, just go ahead.

One way to mitigate the risk would be for people on a mass basis to change their hearts so they want to be helpful to their fellow human, not belligerent or non-caring. Unless we have a nationwide, old-fashioned revival, that doesn’t seem likely.

The summer solstice has passed, and we are facing six months of ever shorter days. I don’t like short days. I really don’t like fall, for it portends the cold days of winter. Although it is now 52 Septembers since I faced winter in a cold and drafty old farmhouse, those memories have never gone away.

When I think over conversations like the ones I just shared, this is only reinforced for me. I cannot begin to move to a point of reconciliation with the opposite side. For this example, I have just relayed, like many others I see, show a movement, a party, that is determined to obfuscate and falsify the narrative.

From my point of view, however, the biggest source of hostility in speech comes through my phone. You will identify. It is these insane computer voices that ask me endless questions in order to “promptly help me with my issue.”

In 2017, the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration attributed 9,717 fatalities on U.S. highways to speeding. According to the World Health Organization, this does not put the U.S. in the top 25 countries in the world for traffic deaths due to speeding by any measure (per capita, distance traveled, etc.). Also, in 2017, according to PEW research, there were 14,542 homicides in the U.S. by firearms. This places us 30th in the world. There were 879,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2017, ranking us as the number 10 country in the world for this practice.

Monday evening, I called up a friend of mine to talk about a business matter. He was in the midst of taking out the trash at his girlfriend’s house. She lives in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Georgetown. He was grousing about the precision of can placement required by sanitation crews.

There is an answer to all of this. I recommend a book to you written by the good Dr. Seuss. It is the “Sneetches.” This book comes closest of anything I have ever read to describing the despicable condition we find ourselves in today. Read it, then resolve to be a better person yourself, a better person as Dr. Seuss might describe.

Laura’s and my parents died between 1998 and 2017. I just got off the phone with a friend who is going through the process of transitioning his parents and his wife’s parents from their own homes to assisted living. I shared a number of experiences with him and thought these would make a good column, too.