In this regular weekend feature you will find links to news items from the preceding week related to elders and aging, along with whatever else catches my fancy that I think you might like to know. Suggestions are welcome with, however, no promises of publication.

British novelist, critic and biographer, Dame Margaret Drabble, on the power of old age.

“We want to choose to grow old gracefully,” she writes, “like the Queen or disgracefully, like John Mortimer and Beryl Cook, or not at all, like Helen Mirren. We don't want to be lumped into a category.”

You can read more here. (Hat tip to Maureen who blogs at A View from England)

Last summer, I was privileged to be invited to speak at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle, and I’m sorry I couldn’t attend this year. One presentation explained a new vocal joystick said to be a boon for returning Iraq veterans whose injuries make it hard to operate a computer. I think it’s a great idea for elders too, who may have limited use of their hands due to arthritis and other conditions.

It may have changed since I left New York City two years ago, but there were no ATM fees there. Here in Maine they soak you at both ends of the transaction. Unless I drive out of my way most of the time to get cash from the ATM at my bank, I’m charged $2 at the “foreign” ATM and $1.75 by my bank.

Now, a new “service” is being tested that will deliver dollar-bill size ads with money at ATMs. Although I think there is already enough advertising on every empty space in our lives, I have no doubt this will catch on. Advertisers are paying to place their ads in ATMs, and I think that if we are to be forced into more scraps of paper clogging our wallets, all ATM fees should be eliminated when these ads are dispensed. Read more here.

Eighty-seven-year-old Helen Zarnowski of New Hampshire has strong words for senior ghettos. “Prisons” she calls them as she lobbies for elder housing to be integrated into existing communities holding all generations. And...

“We should plan housing where seniors can access as many services as possible on their own, even when they no longer are able to drive.”

Chuck Nyren of Advertising to Baby Boomers alerted me to the fact that Growing Bolder Media, where both Chuck and I were interviewed on their radio show last year, has won the 2008 Senior Vision Media Award from the Florida Council on Aging. Congratulations.

The Pew Research Center for Politics and the Press reports this week that more Americans – 52 percent overall now, up from 43 percent in 1996 - believe churches should stay out of politics. Elders age 65 and older lead the way with 75 percent saying churches should not endorse candidates. Read more here.

The 2008 Democratic Convention is history now, one that will be remembered, for different reasons, as strongly as 1968 in Chicago.

It went pretty well, don’t you think, for a tightly-scripted, zillion-dollar party with no suspense factor. The increasingly irrelevant TV networks ran only an hour of clips each night which may have been a better idea when compared to the cable news bloviators gabbing (as though they had something useful to say) over the audio of all but the Clinton and Obama families' four speeches. For me, CSPAN was the better choice.

There was another speech cable news allowed to run uninterrupted: Senator Ted Kennedy, the grand old man of Democratic politics over the past half century whose appearance was poignant for both his personal health circumstance and the passing of the baton to a new generation. He is one of us, an elder at 76 years, of whom we can be supremely proud. However his life has been otherwise complicated, throughout his tenure in the Senate, Ted Kennedy has fought harder, longer and more consistently for working people than anyone else in Congress.

His appearance in Denver, a trip made at great physical cost, produced bittersweet cheers and tears. Here again is Senator Kennedy’s Convention speech. [10:01 minutes]