This sounds like a fairly ominous collection: detailed maps, rolling protests, killer kilocalories and powerful 80-year-olds. Read closely, though, all is benign. Except the calories.

  • Ever find yourself in a new town and wonder about nearby recreational resources? It’s easy enough to find the national parks, and fairly easy to find the state parks. But local parks are less easy to find and anyway you don’t care about who manages the land. You just want to know where you can hike or camp. That’s why the ParkFinder feature on L.L. Bean’s website is a blessing. It generates maps that consolidate information on local, state and federal parks in an area, customizable by zip code. It also lets you filter by activity. ParkFinder is also available as an app for your tablet or smartphone.
  • Hundreds of Toronto citizens rose up…or rolled up…in protest last Wednesday over the city’s decision to remove bike lanes from busy Jarvis Street. This looks like a pretty frenetic flip-flop: the City Council voted to install the lanes in July 2010 and then voted to remove them in July 2011. And the reasoning isn’t clear. Commute times slowed a few minutes (literally, a few: two minutes in the morning and three to four in the evening) but a staff report says the number of cyclists on the street has tripled since the lanes were installed. And collisions are down. So…do what you will Toronto. But we don’t want to hear one word out of you on obesity. Or heart disease. Or clogged streets. You just forfeited your right to complain about these things. Seriously. Shush. No one is listening.
  • We ran a post earlier this week that might have betrayed a hint of frustration over the complexities of figuring out a healthy diet for anyone who is active and older. The easiest part seemed to be calories: you want to be somewhere between 2,000 and 2,800 depending on your age, gender and level of activity. Right? Then we were reminded of a study by the Mayo Clinic that found “an increased risk of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in people 70 or older” who overate. And overeating in this context is not much: “people who consumed more than 2,142, kilocalories a day had nearly twice the risk of MCI as those eating fewer than 1,526 kilocalories a day.” And the more calories, the higher the risk. So just screw it. We’re eating what we want.
  • We don’t follow the Senior Games closely, but every so often we hear about something spectacular. This qualifies:  two world records were set at the Pasadena (California) games  last Sunday. Eighty-one-year-old Joel DiMarco bench-pressed 245 pounds (!) while and Ruth Saenz (80) set the record in the women’s bench press with 70 pounds. Kudos to both.

Image: screen grab of L.L. Bean’s ParkFinder, Yosemite area.