Today is June 21, 2021

Published 7:00 am Monday, June 21, 2021

You’re never too old

Like many young men and women Bill Gossett’s schooling was interrupted when World War II broke out, says the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC]. And when the war ended he couldn’t go back to school to get his college degree because he was obliged to go to work. Gossett explained that “There was always a void there but I was busy learning to run a business. Time went by and I finally decided to finish my degree. It was a goal of self-fulfillment.” At last, 80 years later, he finally earned his degree from Lincoln College in Lincoln, IL but fate intruded once again; the COVID pandemic forced the cancellation of graduation and so he was unable to formally graduate in 2020; he had to wait until the 2021 graduation ceremony to accept his degree. The wait was worth it, however; he received not only an Associate of Arts degree, but an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters as well. Not bad for a 97-year-old.

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You’re never too young

There aren’t many two-year-olds like Kashe Quest of Los Angeles, CA. In fact, there aren’t many adults who qualify to join Mensa, the world’s oldest IQ society. You need an IQ of 131 for that and Kashe has become the youngest member of Mensa having checked in with an IQ of 146, according to the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC]. Her parents say she is a normal child who happens to love learning. “She’ll wake up on a Saturday and say, ‘I wanna do elements,’ or, ‘I wanna do states,’ so whenever she’s leaning into it, we’re just there to support her,” according to her dad. But, her mom was quick to add that “At the end of the day, she’s in that toddler stage. So, she very much is still a normal 2-year-old where we have negotiations, we have tantrums, we have everything and it’s different because the way we communicate with her, it has to be different because she’s able to understand just a little bit more.”

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Oops, with a capital ‘O’

It’s one thing to lose a winning lottery ticket; it’s another if you misread the ticket and give it back and ask the seller to trash it. That’s exactly what happened when Lea Rose Fiega of Springfield, MA checked the ticket she had purchased. But ten days later the store owner, Abhi Shah, scanned a stack of supposed losing tickets and found that the one Ms. Fiega thought was a loser was actually a winner, reports the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC]. Shah wasted no time in contacting Ms. Fiega to give her the good news. “As soon as she came in, I hand her [the] $1 million ticket and she freaked out and cried like a baby,” Shah’s father told WWLP-TV.

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Graduating in style
A pair of identical twins in Baton Rouge, LA are graduating at the top of their class this year from the Scotlandville Magnet High School in a very “classy” way — with $24 million worth of scholarships from colleges and universities around the world. The Association of Mature American Citizens reports that Denisha and Destiny Caldwell say they applied to more than 200 schools, using a variety of free application options. But, they noted, they were careful in selecting schools that offered the environment and curriculums they were seeking. In the end they decided to take scholarships offered to them by UCLA where they will focus on math and science courses with the intention of careers in medicine.

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It’s as easy as one, two, three for her
Eleven-year-old Sanaa Hiremath, who was diagnosed with autism when she was two years old, has set a world record for her ability to multiply very large numbers without pen and paper, calculators or any other such aid. In fact, Sanaa won the Guinness award for solving a 12 digit multiplication problem in under ten minutes using just her mind, according to the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC]. Her mother, Priya, home schooled Sanaa and told a Tampa, FL TV station: “One day when I was doing second-grade homework, we introduced the concept of multiplication for her for the very first time and she was able to answer instantly.” She’s come a long way in the meantime as evidence by her award for the “largest mental arithmetic multiplication.” How difficult is that? Try multiplying 617286 times 315969?

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A rare bloom, indeed
It’s not often that one gets the opportunity to see an amorphophallus titanum in bloom and so it attracted a crowd in Alameda, CA when a corpus flower was on show there recently, says the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC]. The extremely rare plant blooms once every ten years or so and is not so easy to find. It’s said that there are only about 1,000 of them that can be found in the wild. This particular corpus flower plant belongs to a local gardener, Solomon Leyva, who put it on display for visitors to see and smell. They don’t call it the corpus plant for nothing.