Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i Zoomer Magazine

I t is said you can never go back but many will never be content unless they attempt to, however mixed the results. This is how I found myself participating in a two-kilometre swim in a choppy sea against the current. It was a trial run – actually a breaststroke – ahead of the main event two days later, a 5K, of the Barbados Open Water Swim. These are waters I had plied as a teenager when I lived on the island in the late ’70s – my memories mostly a sun-bleached haze of surfing days and beach cook-up nights with the neighbourhood gang, the self-dubbed South Point Riders. At one point, after I broke my toes skateboarding and wore too small a bikini, which she later burned, my mother…

New York University (NYU) college students save money by living with seniors with an extra bedroom The early-bird keg parties aren’t bad, but accidentally doing a shot out of the host’s denture cup is kind of a buzzkill. The world’s oldest person, Emma Morano, 117, credits part of her longevity to remaining single and living alone Though, she tells NYU students, “that doesn’t mean I don’t like to party!” Scientist attempting to reverse aging says new study shows “aging may not have to proceed in one single direction” His peers, though, aren’t convinced that his “study” wasn’t just him alone in the lab watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, 87, the second man to walk on the moon, is now also the oldest person to travel…

Where the hell is MacLean anyways?” shouts Don Cherry – not angrily – just impatient that we get on with a photo shoot that’s interrupting his normal Saturday routine and delaying a meeting to plan the line-up for tonight’s show. Resplendent in a baby blue floralpatterned jacket and matching tie, Grapes, who turns 83 in February, still cuts quite the figure, a vital and colourful force of nature who stands out even in a dimly lit studio just off the Coach’s Corner set at CBC’s Toronto headquarters. It’s 4:30 on a wintry Saturday afternoon, Don’s battling a head cold, he’s worn out from a busy week promoting his new book and is vexed that the absence of his long-time TV partner and beerdrinking buddy Ron MacLean is slowing down proceedings.…

THE BEST thing you can do to protect your money is to appoint a power of attorney. This gives power and permission to someone you trust to manage your money and property on your behalf, often when you’re no longer able to. Unfortunately, this decision can also backfire if the person you appointed decides to take your money and leave you penniless. But according to Goldhar, there are some things you can do to protect yourself. 1 Appoint more than one person If you’re not 100 per cent sure there is one person who is best to act as your power of attorney then appoint more than one person. For example, if you’ve appointed all of your children instead of one, they’ll all have to agree on decisions. “It’s not…

1 PURPLE REIGN The dye originally used to create this colour was hard to come by and expensive, which is why purple is associated with power, wealth and royalty. Even in a powder room, it can add an air of luxe – as shown here by walls in Brinjal No. 22 by Farrow & Ball. Hues of purple have been favoured in a number of 2017 colours of the year, including three of our favourites, so you can choose just the right “regal” for any room. 2 CLIMATE CONTROL Home monitoring goes beyond security with the Netatmo Healthy Home Coach (right; $120, netatmo.com). The small tower tracks air quality, humidity, temperature and noise – and sends “advice” to improve them via wireless messages. Take care of two-elements-in-one…

1 If income wasn’t a factor, how important would it be for you to keep working? 2 If a grandchild came to you for a significant loan to pay off bad financial decisions, would you give it to them? 3 Do you give financial assistance to your adult children? 4 If you came into a monetary windfall of $10,000, would you invest it for the future or splurge on a bucketlist experience? A penny saved is a penny earned 42.10% 5-star resort in Bali, here I come! 57.90% 5 How much do you spend a month on entertainment and eating out? 6 Would you rather have money left over when you die to leave as a bequest or would you rather spend it all while still alive (on yourself and/…

Literary Bad Boy On the Dec/Jan cover, you present a quote from Moses Znaimer about Leonard Cohen: “Deft, funny, profound and a little bad all at once.” Seventeen years old, living in Summerside, P.E.I., in 1967. My girlfriend and I wanted to read Cohen’s new novel, Beautiful Losers. It was not for sale in Summerside. My girlfriend made a weekend visit to relatives in Moncton and bought a copy. She started reading it right away. Her mother, a schoolteacher, found it on her bedside table. She burned the book. I did not get to read it until I went to university in 1968. I think “a little bad” is a little bit of an understatement. —Eric Cameron, Calgary Waxing poetic In late October 1964, I encountered in the University of…

Toronto-born America’s Sweetheart Mary Pickford famously declared, “Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo” – ironic given the silent film star (pictured above) won the Best Actress Oscar for 1929’s Coquette, her debut talkie, the first Canadian to be nominated for, and to win, an Oscar just a few years after helping co-found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself. It’s appropriate then that this Tinseltown pioneer should celebrate her quasquicentennial (125th birthday) as Canada marks its 150th – a year when fellow Canuck Ryan Gosling finds himself twostepping through award season on the back of La La Land, Québécois director Denis Villeneuve’s alien tale Arrival beams up praise from film-loving Earthlings and the legacy of Canadians in film gets some…

MORE THAN A decade after their first anti-cancer guide, Cooking with Foods that Fight Cancer, Canadian researchers Richard Béliveau and Denis Gringas are back with Foods That Fight Cancer: Preventing Cancer Through Diet (Firefly Books). Their latest list of beneficial edibles includes, among others, kale (extracts from the green du jour have been shown to dramatically slow – and in some cases stop – the growth of breast and prostate cancer cells) and citrus fruit (more than just vitamin C, consumption has been shown to decrease the risk of mouth, esophagus and stomach cancer by 40 to 50 per cent). And thankfully, as it’s the season for busting the winter blues, chocolate and wine made the cut: both are rich in anti-cancer polyphenols.…

THE LAST time I witnessed anything like the backlash against the Air Miles Rewards Program was in the 1990s. Rogers Cable Systems brought in negative option billing, adding offerings and fees without consent and dropping them only if customers requested the charges be removed. It sparked consumer outrage and prompted Parliament to pass a 1999 law banning the practice. The threat of making unused rewards miles expire after five years provoked much the same response. LoyaltyOne, Air Miles’ parent company, decided that points would start expiring at the end of 2016 five years ago. The information was buried, and most collectors missed it. By the time people realized and starting trying to redeem their rewards, heavy volumes and lack of supply made it frustratingly difficult. That’s not a surprise given…

Kate alexander Daniels’ Toronto home features an enviable gallery of contemporary art by the likes of Irving Penn and Douglas Coupland. But also prominently displayed are three pieces of artwork – one by her 11-year-old son, one by her 13-yearold daughter and another by her husband’s grandmother – which fit right in with the more celebrated works. This says a lot about Daniels’ unpretentious approach. She sports this humour and irreverence with her wardrobe – an eclectic mix of labels like Balmain and YSL, vintage pieces and cheapand- cheerful finds. “Fashion and art are visceral things. How I feel and my response to it is what guides me,” she says of her approach to art and style. “I’m not grounded by someone saying, ‘You must have this.’” She juggles family…

when my son brought his Grade 7 class to our home in New Westminster, B.C., for a “graduation” party a couple of years ago, my wife and I smiled at each other guiltily as a number of the newly minted millennials rushed around breathlessly describing it as an abode of the “rich.” Everything is relative, of course, but the truth is that we live in a modest four-bedroom home in a largely middleclass community where our neighbours are more likely to be nurses than doctors and firefighters than lawyers. It’s true that it has a reasonably noble bearing – the result of good “bones” – sizeable gardens my wife and I have poured much sweat and treasure into and an expansive view of the Fraser River as it wends its…

Middle-aged white people are not usually anyone’s idea of a vulnerable population, even in an era that aims for diversity. Having been history’s conquerors and kings, they remain symbols of the establishment, its presidents and chief executives, comfortable, and still powerful. But in the fall of 2015, two Princeton University economists dropped a bombshell on that assumption. Angus Deaton, who had just won a Nobel Prize in economics, and Anne Case reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the death rates of middle-aged whites in the U.S. had jumped sharply. For the first time in decades, the life expectancy of white men and women between the ages of 45 and 54 had plummeted – a trend not seen in any other rich country. Between 1999 and…

IT STARTED WITH A SIMPLE DESIRE: to get out of my high school chemistry class. This was the domino that set in motion a chain of events that would take me far from my original career path (high-powered, slick-backed corporate lawyer in the John Grisham mould) to whatever it is I do now. A writer or something. I I grew up in northern Alberta, in a far-flung community closer to the Arctic Circle than the American border. Canada felt like a southern country. (I’ve always felt, at some level, that I emigrated to Canada.) In my last semester of Grade 12, I was accepted into law at the University of Alberta but I still had to run out the clock on classes I was no longer interested in, foremost among…

Body Mass Index (BMI), a ratio of weight to height, may be an industry proxy for whether someone is at a healthy weight. Those who are overweight or obese are considered unhealthy. But a recent study by Janet Tomiyama et al published in the International Journal of Obesity found that millions of people are being erroneously labelled unhealthy based on their BMI. The scientists analyzed the link between BMI and several health markers, including blood pressure and glucose, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, using data from the most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The study found that close to half of Americans who are considered “overweight” by virtue of their BMIs (47.4 per cent, or 34.4 million people) are healthy, as are 19.8 million who are considered “obese” and…

For the majority of our members, the single most important priority for CARP in 2017 should be the reduction of wait times for medical procedures. And when you look at the data on procedures like hip and knee replacements, it’s hard to disagree. In B.C., for example, patients experience some of the longest wait times in the country, and the matter is shaping up to be a key election issue come May. The incumbent Liberals will have a hard time defending a system that has seen people wait 12 to 24 months for knee and hip replacements. The obvious hardship for patients is the severe pain they endure while waiting. After all, people aren’t even considered candidates for joint replacement unless they are experiencing significant, unmanageable pain. But this isn’t…

Tim Hortons coffee then $0.10 now $1.57 Average house price Toronto then $24,078 now $782,051 Vancouver then $17,836 now $933,100 A&W Mama Burger then $0.40 now $4.25 Tank of gas then $0.55/gallon now $4.86/gallon…

Defrauding an older parent or loved one is a pernicious form of elder abuse that shows no outward or physical signs. Instead, the senior’s bank account is slowly drained and the money they need for health care or nursing home expenses is no longer there. As part of its role to protect Canadians as they age, CARP is working closely with Alan Goldhar at Ontario’s Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee (OPGT) to raise awareness on different ways seniors are being robbed by the ones who are supposed to be looking after them. Goldhar lists five common ways elder financial abuse takes place. ▪ Abusing Power of Attorney Once appointed as POA, the adult child changes the senior’s bank account to a joint account and then starts dipping into…

Most Canadians would like to age in place, but the high cost of housing across Canada, especially in major cities, is making that dream increasingly problematic, particularly for those struggling to get by on fixed incomes if they’re still making mortgage payments. (According to the provincial Office of the Seniors Advocate in British Columbia, the median income for seniors in B.C. in 2015 was a mere $24,000.) To help address the problem, mayors from across Canada are calling on provincial and federal governments to direct more spending toward affordable housing. At a big-city-mayors summit in Toronto last fall, civic leaders requested that most of the available $20 billion in federal money earmarked for “social” infrastructure be dedicated to public and affordable housing. “Far too many people, from seniors to single…

The reality for older Canadian workers today is a bit at odds with what many people might perceive. Conventional wisdom is that people who lose or leave jobs in their 50s will have a hard time finding new employment that’s stimulating and satisfying or which pays as well as their previous jobs. Not exactly, says Adele Robertson, CEO and founder of The V Generation, a Toronto organization that works with senior volunteers. Despite common misconceptions, whether by choice or necessity, mature workers in Canada are reinventing themselves in droves. “People are living longer and working longer,” Robertson says. “They just don’t throw in the sponge.” Research by Statistics Canada has shown that in recent years the largest number of new businesses has been created by people over 49. Rather than…