What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

Now that I am sixty I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Doesn't matter whether it's a teen girl who's pregnant hasn't told her parents or an elderly couple dealing with one of them being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Those are real people to me. Those are the people I dealt with every single day.

Trouble is kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.

The dissemination of advanced implantable technology will likely be just as ruthlessly democratic as the ailments it is destined to treat. Meaning that someday soon we may have a new class of very smart very fast people - yesterday's disabled and elderly.

One reason outfielders don't have stronger arms might be they don't practice as much as we did. Most teams today don't take outfield practice. Another reason is baseball has to compete with other sports now - basketball football soccer - for the better athletes that might have more skills and stronger arms.

I was a ballplayer but only for a limited time. I grew up playing in Wisconsin. It's a very sports-centric part of the country that I grew up in and I played a lot of sports but baseball first and foremost. I played through high school. I was a middle-infielder.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.

The phrase 'off with the crack of the bat' while romantic is really meaningless since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.