Home sweet home

Don’t worry drivers; the medical industry has got you covered.The FMCSA Medical Review Board recently recommended that all commercial truck drivers with body mass indexes of 30 or greater undergo a one- or two-night study for sleep apnea.The proposal may go nowhere, or it may be adopted in full.Whatever the case, the sleep study industry is prepared for the latter. A press release recently

Don’t swim in it

So far, floods and severe weather along the Mississippi River have killed 24 people and injured 148; forced more than 38,000 from their homes; and ruined at least 3.4 million acres in three states. While the state economies are taking a hit and transportation and other businesses are facing operational challenges and the U.S. Mail is delayed, the real casualties are those people whose lives are

Dying on the job: it’s a mean surprise

I talk to truckers all the time about cases where drivers have heart attacks or strokes or some medical event that ends their lives while on the job. Recently, one driver told me he figured as much time as he spends alone in his truck, he thinks about it a lot and this is where he thinks he will draw his last breath. In his opinion – and I agree – getting killed on the job would be one very

On my honor …

Reporters and editors are famously calloused. Covering car wrecks, suicides and awful crimes can occasionally cause a person to be flippant or cynical, if for no other reason than to deal with the shock to one’s system.News this week that four Boy Scouts in Iowa were killed this past week when a tornado hit their campground was particularly striking for me and my family.Our hearts went out to the

Changing your heathen ways

Maybe it’s the fact that Boomers are getting older, but it seems like the marketing world believes incontinence is a more pressing problem than, say, $5 diesel. (There’s a joke about going/not going in there someplace, which I leave to your creative minds to find.)Not long ago, I wrote about a fairly expensive alternative to the trusty, if leaky, old-fashioned milk jug. Now comes word of a