Bad-boy British novelist Martin Amis  is in the news for proposing euthanasia "booths" on street corners where the old old could off themselves with "a martini and a medal.” Amis maintained that his comments were meant to be "satirical" rather than "glib", but there’s something to offend just about everyone in his prediction that “a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, [will be] stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops.”

These videos of Olga Georgia came to me via her daughter Olivia, who thought that Olga might not fit my demographic unless I counted her vivid imagination. Surely all viewers will agree, however, that this woman is hard at work. She’s 85, and lives next door to Olivia, who shot the video.

Thanks to Sue Swartz for her kind words about this blog as Curator-of-the-Week for She Writes, a forum for women writers.  Quoting my observation that “Age is a frontier and these are our scouts,” Swartz writes, “Now that I’ve reached AARP membership age myself (if you don’t know what that is, you’re probably under 45), I find myself more interested in what happens to our lives at the point that we’re “supposed to” retire.

My new year’s resolution is to start integrating more personal reflections into the blog. No better place to begin than a BBC News story that came my way last week about a link between youthful looks and longer lives. Studies show younger-looking twins in both Denmark and the UK outliving their siblings. As ever, it’s a dance between genetics and environment. Worn faces probably reflect harder lives, and those subjects also had shorter telomeres (pieces of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes from deteriorating).