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Burton Cole

I love food, uh, you. I mean you!

What do we love more than love? Spin a few of our love songs, sugar pie honey bunch, and you’ll soon taste what’s really on the menu: food. We are passionately attracted to calories, carbs and proteins — and the knowledge that just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. We grew up knowing the Muffin Man who lives on Drury Lane, we lost our meatball On Top of Spaghetti, found our thrill on Blueberry Hill and learned that C is for Cookie. One bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch, girl. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. I grew up during the “bubble gum music” era ...

Believe me, man flu is real

“Man flu” is real. Science says so. Sorta. A few years back, Dr. Robert H. Shmerling, a known man, wrote for Harvard Health Publishing that women who refer to man flu as “wimpy man syndrome” very well could be committing a horrible injustice. “Some have suggested that early man ...

Life: A series of obstacles interrupting naps

To enjoy life, the life coach said, one must overcome common obstacles, such as fear, unreasonable expectations, bum goals and those inner voices whispering that success is for others, not for people like you. I’m not on a quest for an exciting, wild life. At my age, all I want is a nap. And there’s one main obstacle that gets in the way — life. Doctors preach the importance of getting enough sleep. If we don’t snooze, we lose focus and tend to screw up our work. So why does the boss yell every single time he finds me curled up under my desk with a pillow and blanket? I’m ...

I need a cure to recover from cures for the common cold

Glance out the window to see what the weather’s doing. Good. Now peek again. Sure, it’s only been a few seconds, but that’s long enough for northeast Ohio to throw us another curve ball. The temperature may have changed by 20 or 30 degrees. If it was sunny, now it’s raining. Or snowing. And, of course, that’s brought on coughs, sniffles and sneezes. Even worse, a swarm of unlicensed doctors now are buzzing about you with their cures for the common cold. From snail slime to lizard soup, there’s nothing like a sure-fire cure to wipe out a minor irritation with a major ...

I didn’t want to know this much

In 1956, filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock released one of his masterpieces, “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” It was a film full of suspense, intrigue and not knowing what was really going on. Seventy years after Hitchcock’s movie, we’re now “The People Who Know Too Much.” Our lives are ...

That just ain’t normal

About 150 miles south and a tad east of Normal, Illinois, sits the village of Oblong. I know this because once upon a time, I wrote for a newspaper in Decatur, Illinois, which was a little closer to Normal than Oblong. One day, the society page of our newspaper carried this headline: ...