The Daily Noggin

Of all the ways to stay active, walking may be the easiest to begin and the easiest to keep up. It costs nothing, needs no special skill and can be done almost anywhere, from a neighborhood sidewalk to a shopping mall on a rainy day.

Health experts have long agreed that regular physical activity is one of the best things people can do for themselves at any age. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that adults, including older adults, aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate activity each week. That works out to about 30 minutes a day, five days a week, and a brisk walk counts. The minutes don’t have to come all at once; shorter walks spread through the day add up too.

Regular walking is good for the heart and can help with blood pressure, blood sugar and weight. It strengthens muscles and bones, and it can improve balance, which helps prevent falls. Many people find it also lifts their mood and helps them sleep better at night.

Some ideas for getting started:

Start where you are. If you haven’t been active lately, begin with five or ten minutes and add a few minutes each week. If you have health concerns, talk with your doctor first.

Wear good shoes. Choose comfortable walking shoes with good support and non-slip soles.

Find a walking partner. A friend, a neighbor or a dog makes the time pass quickly and helps you keep the habit.

Make it interesting. Vary your route, visit a park, listen for birds or walk to a destination such as the library or a coffee shop.

Walk indoors when it’s cold. Many shopping malls open early for walkers, with level floors, restrooms and benches along the way.

Stay safe. Walk in well-lit areas, carry a phone, and watch for uneven sidewalks and icy patches.

Most of all, enjoy it. A walk is a chance to notice the seasons change, greet the neighbors and give your mind a rest. It is one of life’s simple pleasures that happens to be good for you, too.

Many people notice that their sleep changes over the years. They grow sleepy earlier in the evening, wake earlier in the morning and wake more often during the night. These changes are common, and they are partly the work of the body’s internal clock, which tends to shift earlier with age.

What does not change much is how much sleep we need. Sleep experts suggest that most adults over 65 do best with about seven to eight hours a night. Good sleep helps memory, mood, balance and the body’s ability to fight off illness.

The good news is that small, steady habits make a real difference.

Keep a regular schedule. Going to bed and getting up at about the same time every day, weekends included, helps the internal clock stay steady.

Get morning light. Time outdoors early in the day, or sitting by a bright window, tells the body when the day begins and helps make you sleepy at the right time in the evening.

Watch the coffee and tea. Caffeine can stay in the body for many hours. Many people sleep better if they switch to caffeine-free drinks after lunch.

Nap wisely. A short nap of 20 to 30 minutes in the early afternoon can be refreshing. Long or late naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night.

Make the bedroom restful. A cool, dark and quiet room helps. So does keeping the television and the telephone out of bed.

Be careful with a nightcap. Alcohol may make you drowsy, but it tends to break up sleep later in the night.

If you snore loudly, stop breathing for moments during sleep, or lie awake night after night, talk with your doctor. Sleep problems are common and very treatable. One of the most effective treatments for long-lasting sleeplessness is a short course of guided habit changes known as cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which works without medicine.

Of all the good habits a person can keep, drinking enough water may be the simplest. It costs next to nothing, needs no equipment and can be done in an armchair. Yet it is one of the habits most easily forgotten, especially as the years go by.

The reason is a quiet change in the body. Our sense of thirst tends to grow weaker with age, so the gentle signal that once said "time for a drink" may arrive late, or not at all. At the same time, the kidneys become a little less efficient at holding on to water, and some common medicines, such as certain blood pressure pills, can make the body lose fluid more quickly.

Water does a great deal of work behind the scenes. It helps carry nutrients around the body, keeps joints cushioned, helps regulate temperature and keeps digestion moving. When we run low, the first signs are often easy to mistake for something else: tiredness, a headache, feeling light-headed on standing, dry lips or a little confusion.

How much is enough? It varies from person to person. As a general guide, the U.S. National Academies have suggested a total daily water intake of about 2.7 liters (roughly 11 cups) for women and 3.7 liters (roughly 16 cups) for men, but that figure counts water from every source, including food. Soups, fruit, vegetables, milk, tea and coffee all contribute. Many people find it simplest to aim for a drink with every meal and another between meals.

A few small tricks can help the habit stick. Keep a glass or a favorite cup where you can see it. Take a drink each time you take your pills. Add a slice of lemon, cucumber or a sprig of mint if plain water feels dull. Fruits such as melon, oranges and grapes are mostly water and count toward the day's total. In hot weather, or after gardening or a long walk, have a little extra.

A useful check is the color of your urine: pale straw-colored usually means you are drinking enough, while dark yellow suggests you could do with more.

One word of caution. People with certain heart or kidney conditions are sometimes advised to limit how much they drink. If that applies to you, your doctor's advice comes first.

For most of us, though, the message is a cheerful one. A good, long drink of water is one of the kindest things we can do for ourselves, and it is never too late to make it part of the day.

Step off the ferry at Mackinac Island and the first thing you notice is the sound: the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. Cars have been banned on the island since 1898, when automobiles were new and noisy and frightened the carriage horses. The ban has stayed ever since, and the island has kept its unhurried pace.

The island sits in Lake Huron, in the Straits of Mackinac between Michigan’s two peninsulas. Its name is pronounced MACK-in-aw, the same as the nearby town of Mackinaw City. Ferries cross from Mackinaw City and from St. Ignace in about 15 to 20 minutes.

Most of the island is a state park. In fact, Mackinac was briefly the second national park in the United States, after Yellowstone, before it was handed over to Michigan in 1895 and became the state’s first state park.

Visitors get around by horse-drawn taxi, rented bicycle or on foot. A road of about eight miles circles the island’s shore. It is a state highway with no cars at all, and it makes a lovely bicycle ride, with views of the water nearly the whole way.

High on the bluff above the harbor stands Fort Mackinac, built by the British during the American Revolution. Its whitewashed walls and stone buildings are now a museum, where guides in period uniforms show what soldier life was like. Nearby is Arch Rock, a natural limestone arch that stands about 146 feet above the water.

The island’s grandest building is the Grand Hotel, which opened in 1887. Its long front porch, lined with rocking chairs and flags, is often called the longest porch in the world, at about 660 feet.

And then there is the fudge. Shops along Main Street have made fudge on marble slabs in their front windows for generations, and the sweet smell drifts down the street. Islanders even have a friendly nickname for summer visitors: fudgies.

The main season runs from May through October. In winter most shops close and only a few hundred people live on the island. When the lake freezes hard, islanders have traditionally marked a safe path across the ice to St. Ignace with old Christmas trees.

In the autumn of 1621, the English colonists at Plymouth, in what is now Massachusetts, gathered their first harvest. They had come through a terrible first winter in which about half of those who sailed on the Mayflower died. A good harvest was reason to give thanks.

About 90 Wampanoag men, led by their leader Massasoit, joined the colonists for a celebration that lasted three days. One of the few written accounts tells us the Wampanoag brought five deer, and the colonists went out hunting wildfowl. There is no mention of pumpkin pie. The colonists had no ovens for baking one and little or no sugar.

For more than two centuries afterward, days of thanksgiving came and went. Governors and presidents declared them from time to time, often on different dates in different states. New England families kept the custom most faithfully, with roast turkey, pies and long tables of relatives.

The person who changed that was Sarah Josepha Hale. She edited Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the most popular magazines in the country, and she is also remembered as the author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” For about 17 years she wrote editorials and sent letters to governors and presidents, asking for one national Thanksgiving Day shared by the whole country.

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln agreed. His proclamation set aside the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving, and presidents repeated the proclamation every year after that. In 1941, Congress made the holiday permanent and fixed it on the fourth Thursday in November, where it remains.

Many of the traditions we know came later. Macy’s held its first Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City in 1924, with animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. The giant balloons arrived three years later. The Detroit Lions have played football on Thanksgiving almost every year since 1934.

Turkey suited the holiday well. It was native to North America, it was large enough to feed a crowd, and most farm families could raise their own. By the late 1800s, roast turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce had become the dinner most Americans pictured when they thought of Thanksgiving.

Whatever is on your table this year, the heart of the day is the same as it was in 1621: a good harvest, good company and a moment to be grateful.

Australia has one of the world’s oldest aquaculture sites, a controlled aquatic farming environment, where eels were farmed by Indigenous people for thousands of years. Scientists estimate one of the five systems is around 6,600 years old, based on carbon-dating findings.

The Budj Bim eel farms’ cultural landscape in western Victoria was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2019. Budj Bim is a dormant volcano with ancient basalt lava flows. It was the first site inscribed on the UNESCO list for its cultural significance alone.

This video was produced by the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation at the time of its nomination:

The Gunditjmara are the traditional Indigenous owners of the land. They resisted white colonization and dispossession in the hard-fought frontier Eumerella Wars from the 1830s to the 1860s. Many lived on a Church of England mission near Lake Condah from the 1890s till the 1950s.

This hand-drawn map of the Lake Condah area and fish trap systems was produced by Alexander Ingram in 1893:

TikTok user, westvicbrolga, recently posted a video of a Budj Bim tour led by Gunditjmara man, Joey Saunders:

Local Winda-Mara Aboriginal Corporation conducts guided tours of the eel traps and stone houses. The Tae Rak Aquaculture center at Lake Condah has many stone holding tanks for eels, and visitors can have an eel tasting in their bush tucker cafe.

The discovery of the traps has helped to correct misconceptions about pre-colonial Indigenous peoples as being only nomadic hunter-gatherers. Ian J. McNiven, Professor of Indigenous Archaeology at Monash University explained the new findings in an article in The Conversation:

Rather than living passively off whatever nature provided, the Gunditjmara actively and deliberately manipulated local water flows and ecologies to engineer a landscape focused on increasing the availability and reliability of eels.

Manipulation of the landscape involved stone structures (such as traps and channels) dating back at least 6,600 years. Eel aquaculture facilities (ponds and dam walls) pre-date contact with Europeans by many hundreds (and possibly thousands) of years.

The remains of approximately 300 stone-walled structures, which may have been houses, have also been found near the eel traps. They could provide evidence of permanent occupation before European contact.

One of the world’s oldest creation stories also stems from Budj Bim, explaining the origins of the iconic volcano:

Most kitchens have a box of baking soda somewhere, often pushed to the back of a shelf. It deserves better. Baking soda, known to chemists as sodium bicarbonate, is a gentle, inexpensive helper for dozens of household jobs.

Americans have been buying it in boxes since 1846, when two brothers-in-law in New York, John Dwight and Austin Church, began selling it for baking. In baking, it reacts with acidic ingredients such as buttermilk or lemon juice to make bubbles that help biscuits and quick breads rise. Baking powder is a close cousin: it is baking soda with a dry acid already mixed in.

Outside of baking, its usefulness comes from two qualities. It is mildly alkaline, which helps it neutralize acidic odors and loosen grease, and it is very finely grained, which makes it a gentle scrub.

Here are a few ways to put it to work.

Freshen the refrigerator. Leave an open box on a shelf to absorb odors. Replace it about every three months.

Scrub without scratching. Sprinkle baking soda on a damp sponge to clean sinks, stovetops, tubs and coffee mugs stained with tea or coffee.

Make a cleaning paste. Mix three parts baking soda with one part water and spread it on baked-on spills in a pan or oven. Let it sit, then wipe it away.

Freshen carpets and shoes. Sprinkle a little on a carpet, wait fifteen minutes and vacuum. A spoonful in each shoe overnight helps too.

A few cautions. Do not use it on aluminum pans, which it can darken, or on delicate surfaces such as marble. And while mixing baking soda with vinegar makes an impressive fizz, the two mostly cancel each other out, so they work better used one after the other than mixed together.

Keep a separate box for cleaning and another for baking, and the humble box will earn its spot at the front of the shelf.

If you have bought a smartphone or a computer in the last few years, you have probably been asked whether you want to “back up to the cloud.” It sounds mysterious, but the idea is simple.

“The cloud” is just a nickname for computers that belong to someone else, kept in large buildings called data centers. When you save something “in the cloud,” you are storing it on those computers, reached through the internet, instead of only on your own device.

You may already be using the cloud without knowing it. If you read your email on a website, your messages live in the cloud. If photos taken on your phone appear on your tablet as well, they traveled by way of the cloud.

Why is this useful? Mainly, it keeps your things safe and easy to reach. If your phone is lost, dropped in a lake or simply wears out, the photos and contacts you backed up to the cloud are still there, waiting for your next phone. You can also look at the same pictures and documents from a phone, a tablet or a computer, wherever you are.

A few things are worth knowing. Most cloud services give you a certain amount of storage free and charge a monthly fee for more. You need an internet connection to reach your files. And because your things are stored online, protecting your account matters.

Use a strong password that you do not use anywhere else. Turn on two-step verification if it is offered, which means the service sends a code to your phone when someone signs in on a new device. And remember that genuine companies will never call or email to ask for your password.

Used sensibly, the cloud is a little like a safe-deposit box for your photos, letters and memories, one you can open from your own armchair.

Many of us grew up with the picture of Johnny Appleseed: a cheerful wanderer with a cooking pot for a hat, walking barefoot across the frontier and scattering apple seeds as he went. Like most legends, it holds a seed of truth.

Johnny Appleseed was a real man named John Chapman, born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774. As a young man he headed west, into what was then the frontier of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and later Indiana.

Chapman did not scatter seeds at random. He was a practical nurseryman. He gathered apple seeds, often from the leftover pulp at cider presses, and planted them in fenced nurseries on land just ahead of the settlers. When families arrived, he sold them young trees. Some of his nurseries were hundreds of miles apart, and he walked between them, tending each in turn.

There was a good reason settlers wanted his trees. In many areas, a settler claiming land was expected to plant an orchard to show the land was being improved. And apples grown from seed rarely taste like their parents. Most of Chapman’s apples were small and sour, better for cider, vinegar and applesauce than for eating out of hand. Cider was a common everyday drink on the frontier.

The stories about his gentle nature appear to be largely true. People who knew him described a kind, odd and generous man who dressed in castoff clothes, often went barefoot, and would not harm animals. He was a welcome visitor in frontier cabins, where he shared news and told stories.

Chapman died in 1845 near Fort Wayne, Indiana. He left behind a great deal of land, and orchards across the Midwest that grew from his trees.

His legend grew after his death, in books, poems and a much-loved 1948 Disney cartoon. But perhaps the best tribute is the simplest: every autumn, when the apples ripen, his story comes around again.