Beat this illness, team!

The Super Bowl is now over! The climaxing end for football this season.

I wish there were an end to the "Alzheimer's Season." Wouldn't it be great if our country rallied behind all of the people with dementia and cheered us on to a winning season? I wish we supported our Alzheimer's teams as much as we supported our basketball and football and baseball teams. If our country did support these teams better, we would have this Alzheimer's disease adversary whipped.

Just think if everyone who watched the Super Bowl sent just $1 to Alzheimer's research. Wow! What an impact that would make on the research funding. If all of the sports fans throughout our country sent just 50 cents each, to assist with stopping Alzheimer's, we would have this thing defeated in no time.

We could achieve this if even half of our population demanded that we make this a national goal, a priority to end the ravages of Alzheimer's disease in our country forever. And make us a working winning team again. A team effort is needed. What will it take to get this country - our home team - to rally round and defeat Alzheimer's disease?

Chuck Jackson, Albany

What about our ears, then?

Doctor Rafalski (Mailbag, Jan. 31) recently dismissed creation science as being "oxymoronic at best." I would like to ask you to consider the human ear with its eardrum, tiny hammer, anvil and stirrup transferring vibrations in the air into electrical signals so sensitive that at 4 kHz it responds to movements of one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Not to mention that the eardrum is living tissue with blood vessels in it but you do not hear the blood rushing through. You have two tiny muscles that instantly dampen the sound slightly if sound is too loud to protect your eardrum.

Your inner ear is bone about the size of a pea with a membrane inside the bone and a liquid inside that. At one end this bony labyrinth, as its called, has bony tubes arranged in three different planes with fluid inside to give you balance. Also in this same area are ontoconia (like tiny stones), which sense gravity so your body knows which way is down.

One end of the inner ear bone has the cochlear duct, which is coiled like a snail shell. It has three chambers running the length of the coil. Sound waves vibrating the fluid over tiny hairs generate the electrical signals of sound. The tiny hairs, as they bend, open ion channels located near the top of the hairs. These tiny ion receptors are held shut by microscopic molecular coiled springs. In order to hear, these gated ion channels must open and close up to 20,000 cycles per second.

The design of the Creator God or a "just so" story of evolution? Give me creation science every time.

Jim Neuschwander, Albany

Don't limit our family fun

All three generations of our family participate in the sport of ATVing. We ride safely, supervised, and with protective gear. As there is more than one way to lose a child, I hope that when my two boys are teenagers, it will still be OK to go riding with Mom and Dad.

I have a problem with this legislation (restricting the use of ATVs by children) on so many levels, yet there is one thing that really stumps me. According to Oregon Senator Devlin's on-line biography he is the Senate representative for the Juvenile Crime Prevention Advisory Committee. Senator Devlin has a B.S. in administration of justice, and his "occupational background is in adult and juvenile corrections and civil and criminal investigations." Surely Senator Devlin has seen first-hand the results of parental neglect and lack of family time, yet here he is sponsoring legislation to ban all children under the age of 12 from spending time riding with their families.

A week ago it was reported on the Portland news that two teenagers were arrested for throwing rocks and bricks at cars off a bridge. The reason they did this: "We were bored." That same Saturday, our family of four, along with my neighbor's family of five were riding our quads on the dunes in Florence. Which would you rather have?

Please oppose Oregon Senate Bill 49.

Matthew Hector, Lebanon

Added charge raises phone bill

I recently received a postcard from my local phone service carrier, Centurytel. They stated that they discovered they were not charging me for extended area service. What this boils down to is that you can choose between paying 6 cents per minute or $6.50 per month to call Albany, etc. I hope that if you received this you read it.

I feel that this is just a sneaky way to increase my rate. This will bring the rate for what I consider local phone service to $36.50 per month plus whatever made-up "Star 69" charges they try to sneak in every month.

I'm not much for government regulation, but when a monopoly for a land line is involved, I don't mind. So I guess this means that I have to switch to broadband phone service with unlimited long distance for $15 to $30 per month.

It sure is a beautiful world out there.

Jason Nash, Lebanon