Doris O'Brien is a retired college Speech teacher and banker. She has published two books of humor (Up or Down With Women's Liberation and Humor Me a Little) and for many years contributed light verse to the Pepper 'n Salt column of the Wall Street Journal. She is an avid writer of letters to the editors.
Doris celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary in the same year she welcomed her first grandchild. She now lives in Pasadena with a great view of the San Gabriel mountains — and the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.
She can be reached by e-mail: witsendob at (@) gmail.com
How Many Kinds of Birds Are There and Why Does It Matter? Gifting at the American Museum of Natural History
For the new work, Joel Cracraft, George Barrowclough, and their colleagues at Nebraska University, Lincoln and Washington University examined a random sample of 200 bird species through the lens of morphology — the study of the physical characteristics like plumage pattern and color, which can be used to highlight birds with separate evolutionary histories. This method turned up, on average, nearly two different species for each of the 200 birds studied. This suggests that bird biodiversity is severely underestimated, and is likely closer to 18,000 species worldwide. more »
My Mother's Cookbook's Holiday Desserts: Pumpkin and Pecan Pies, Gingerbread Men and Christmas Cookies
Margaret Cullison writes: Other than my two grandmothers, we didn’t have any relatives living nearby. Most of my parents’ families had moved away from Iowa. This was not the norm in our small town of Danish and German families whose gatherings ran to thirty or forty family members. It made me feel slightly deprived not to enjoy the closeness of a large family like my friends did. But my parents had developed a circle of friends with whom we got together for family dinners. more »
The National Trend Toward Pushing Cannabis into Mainstream Culture; Seniors Increasingly Getting High
Benjamin Han, assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine and the study’s lead author, fears that marijuana used with prescription drugs could make the elderly more vulnerable to adverse health outcomes, particularly to falls and cognitive impairment. "While there may be benefits to using marijuana such as chronic pain," he said, "there may be risks that we don’t know about." Study participants said they did not perceive the drug as dangerous, a sign of changing attitudes. more »
Pharmaceutical Executives Charged in Racketeering Scheme: In Exchange for Bribes, Practitioners wrote Large Numbers of Prescriptions of Subsys for Patients
Several pharmaceutical executives and managers, formerly employed by Insys Therapeutics, Inc., were arrested on charges that they led a nationwide conspiracy to bribe medical practitioners to unnecessarily prescribe a fentanyl-based pain medication and defraud healthcare insurers. The Massachusetts indictment alleges that these executives conspired to bribe practitioners in various states, many of whom operated pain clinics, in order to get them to prescribe a fentanyl-based pain medication. The medication, called “Subsys,” is a powerful narcotic intended to treat cancer patients suffering intense episodes of breakthrough pain. In exchange for bribes and kickbacks, the practitioners wrote large numbers of prescriptions for the patients, most of whom were not diagnosed with cancer. more »
