SHREWSBURY, Mass. — The imminent chopping down of a crab-apple tree, to make way for a large trash bin, was the last straw.

Lee Perrone and Pat Henry, residents of a subsidized housing complex for the elderly here, tied chairs to the tree and sat down to protect it. Their protest kept the chain saws at bay, drawing curious onlookers and local reporters. A meals-on-wheels program sent them food. Their landlord, the Shrewsbury Housing Authority, sent them eviction notices.

Lee Perrone

“My daughter thinks I lost it,” says Ms. Perrone, 74 years old. Her friend Ms. Henry is 65.

The eviction notices brought to a head more than a year of friction between the housing agency and tenants of Shrewsbury’s Francis Gardens apartments, in a battle over cluttered patios, fire codes, an allegedly dangerous garbage bin, and who decides what’s best for old people.

It was the garbage-bin hazard that meant the crab-apple tree had to go, the housing agency said. Another tenant injured her arm after falling on uneven pavement near the trash bin. The place chosen to relocate it was where the tree stood.

Francis Gardens is the kind of “independent living” community that more people who want to avoid nursing homes are winding up in. Residents of such places often cope with limited mobility and advancing infirmity, as they try to preserve their quality of life. In Shrewsbury, a central Massachusetts town of some 33,000, tenants bristled at what they saw as excessive safety precautions.

Francis Gardens, an array of brick-and-yellow-clapboard houses, has 100 one-bedroom apartments that tenants rent for a third of their monthly income. Many residents, especially elderly women living alone, have taken special pride in their decks and patios and decorated them with flower pots and rugs. In the warm months, social life revolves around the outside areas.

The trouble began in June 2007, when a state public-housing inspector noticed that a door on one apartment’s deck was blocked by furniture, which it called a “fire-egress obstruction.” In a letter the next month to residents, Dennis Osborn, executive director of the Shrewsbury Housing Authority, cited violations of building and fire codes.

Later that summer, the authority issued a new obstruction policy. “No chairs, tables, flowerpots, wind chimes, flags, mobiles, birdhouses or similar items shall be placed on decks or patios, or hang from, gutters, hand railings, trees, or the buildings,” it said. “Common entry hallways must remain clear of floor mats, throw rugs [and] welcome mats.”

Tenants acknowledge some decks were overflowing with clutter. Ms. Perrone recalls one deck in particular looked like “the city dump.” But in a letter to the housing authority, 65 tenants asked why everyone should be punished. “Now you want us to take ALL things off our porches/patios,” a move that would give Francis Gardens “a blank sterile atmosphere,” the letter said. “That would only serve to hinder people [who] can’t walk very well from getting out at all.”

The authorities didn’t back down. “You can’t look at that as your patio or your deck,” says Gerald LaFlamme, who was the town’s fire chief at the time the obstruction policy was issued. “You have to look at it as a legal entity called ‘the fire exit.’ ” Mr. LaFlamme says blocked exits have hampered his firemen in the past.

Helen Jarzobski, 93, had set up a plastic table and four chairs on a grassy patch next to her small patio. “I had a little sign that said ‘friends welcome,’ ” recalls Ms. Jarzobski. “People would walk by, and they would sit and talk to me.” The housing authority removed the table and chairs, she says.

The new restrictions were particularly hard for Ms. Jarzobski. After a car accident a year ago convinced her to give up driving after 53 years, her world shrank to the size of her small apartment and her patio.

Helen Jarzobski

Ms. Perrone threw away the flowerpots hanging over the handrail of her deck, and removed the sun umbrella under which she used to read. Housing officials took away a rug and curtains she placed in a common hallway, she says.

Mr. Osborn of the housing authority declined repeated interview requests. Richard Ricker, one of the authority’s five commissioners, says the obstruction policy was based on “the lawful commands of the fire chief, and of the state and local inspectors.”

Before Halloween last year, Ms. Perrone borrowed a striped prison-style tracksuit and a cap and wore it to a small protest in the middle of Francis Gardens. She carried a sign that read “State-funded prison for senior citizens.” The protest brought local media attention and put the battle on the map.

After her patio furniture was confiscated, Ms. Jarzobski removed a birdbath from her deck. But Ms. Jarzobski, who is of Italian descent, refused to take down wind chimes and an Italian flag nailed to a tree in memory of her brother, who died in World War II. Her family bought her a new, elevated chair that was easier on her ailing legs — and chained it to a post on the deck to prevent housing officials from taking it.

In September, Ms. Jarzobski received a letter from Mr. Osborn, who ordered her to remove the chair and wind chimes or face possible eviction. Ms. Jarzobski ignored it, and on Sept. 23 received a 30-day eviction notice citing a “violation of the obstruction policy.” She’d lived in Francis Gardens for 32 years.

Ms. Perrone and Ms. Henry, who had been sitting guard at the crab-apple tree, received their eviction notices the same day. The two women, already angered by the obstruction policy, worried that the moved garbage bin would be too close to their windows. And Ms. Perrone says that just because the tree is old and scraggly doesn’t mean it needs to die. “My skin is flaky and I’m old, too,” she says.

Facing eviction, the tree defenders and Ms. Jarzobski filed complaints with the local housing court. Their lawyer chartered a bus to ferry the plaintiffs and other residents to the court hearing scheduled for late September.

After a state legislator decided to mediate, the housing authority chose to avoid a courtroom battle. On Sept. 29, the eviction notices were rescinded. Shrewsbury’s new fire chief, Robert Gaucher, says that as long as the tenants keep the fire-escape paths clear, they can have some personal items on their decks. “We are a little more flexible,” he says.

The crab-apple tree was saved, and the garbage bin is staying put. Housing officials say they plan to patch up the cracked concrete in its current location. To celebrate victory, Ms. Perrone dressed up as a crab-apple tree for Halloween this year. A new tenants committee has been meeting with the housing director twice a month to discuss concerns. “We are not looking for trouble at our age,” Ms. Perrone says.

Write to Philip Shishkin at philip.shishkin@wsj.com

Cell phones distract car drivers more than talkative passengers, and hands-free devices don?t make for safer driving, according to a recent Reuters report on a new study published by the Journal of Experimential Psychology: Applied. Even worse, drivers who use mobile phones are as impaired as those who are legally drunk.

University of Utah researchers used a series of driving-simulation tests to determine that hands-free gadgets such as a Bluetooth headset are just as distracting as holding a phone to your ear. Talking on a cell phone slowed the reaction times of adult drivers aged 18 to 49 to those of senior citizens, according to the study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Passengers, even chatty ones, are far less distracting because they can point out hazards or remind drivers of upcoming exits, and are more likely to change a conversation (by shutting up or talking less) when driving conditions change — and because they’re in the car, they’re more likely to notice that the driver needs to focus.

Meaning

To be effective and efficient; deserving of one’s pay.

Origin

Sodium chloride, a.k.a. salt, is essential for human life and, until the invention of canning and refrigeration, was the primary method of preservation of food. Not surprisingly, it has long been considered valuable.

To be ‘worth one’s salt’ is to be worth one’s pay. Our word salary derives from the Latin salarium, (sal is the Latin word for salt). There is some debate over the origin of the word salarium, but most scholars accept that it was the money allowed to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt. Roman soldiers weren’t actually paid in salt, as some suggest. They were obliged to buy their own food, weapons etc. and had the cost of these deducted from their wages in advance.

Salt continues to be important enough to feature in the language for many centuries. Other phrases that would have been known to the mediaeval mind were take with a grain of salt, the salt of the earth and below the salt. The ancient roots of ‘worth one’s salt’, and its similarity to the 13th century ‘worth one’s weight in gold’ and the 14th century ‘worth one’s while’ (i.e. worth one’s time), give the phrase a historical air. Nevertheless, ‘worth one’s salt’ didn’t exist in Roman Latin or even in mediaeval English and dates from as recently as the 19th century.

The earliest citation of the phrase that I have found in print is in The African Memoranda, a report of an expedition to Guinea Bissau, by Philip Beaver, 1805:

“Hayles has been my most useful man, but of late not worth his salt.”

It’s worth pointing out that, although English is replete with phrases of a nautical origin, none of the above salty phrases has anything to do with the sea.

Add a phrase a week to your own web site or blog. (www.phrases.org.uk/a-phrase-a-week/add.html)

LONDON (Reuters) - Mice fed junk food for nine months showed signs of developing the abnormal brain tangles strongly associated with Alzheimer’s disease, a Swedish researcher said on Friday.

The findings, which come from a series of published papers by a researcher at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, show how a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol could increase the risk of the most common type of dementia.

“On examining the brains of these mice, we found a chemical change not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain,” Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, who led the study, said in a statement.

“We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors … can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer’s.”

Alzheimer’s disease is incurable and is the most common form of dementia among older people. It affects the regions of the brain involving thought, memory and language.

While the most advanced drugs have focused on removing clumps of beta amyloid protein that forms plaques in the brain, researchers are also now looking at therapies to address the toxic tangles caused by an abnormal build-up of the protein tau.

In her research, Akterin focused on a gene variant called apoE4, found in 15 to 20 percent of people and which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s. The gene is involved in the transport of cholesterol.

She studied mice genetically engineered to mimic the effect of the variant gene in humans, and which were fed a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol for nine months — meals representing the nutritional content of fast food.

These mice showed chemical changes in their brains, indicating an abnormal build-up of the protein tau as well as signs that cholesterol in food reduced levels of another protein called Arc involved in memory storage, Akterin said.

“All in all, the results give some indication of how Alzheimer’s can be prevented, but more research in this field needs to be done before proper advice can be passed on to the general public,” she said.

(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Catherine Bosley)

Rick Broida

Nov 24, 2008 1:57 pm

I just wanted give you all a heads up about something I have done in the past.

Each year for about two weeks Amazon has this cool program where customers vote
in a special end-of-year promotion where you can vote for the deal you’d like to buy at an amazing discount. There will be six rounds of voting with three products in each round. Beginning Thursday, November 27, 2008 each day a new winning product will be announced, and randomly selected customers who voted in that round will receive an invitation to participate in the race to buy the winning product.

The savings are really amazing if you win, and all you have to do it go there and vote on products they offer up. If you win you an invitation to buy the product at a huge discount.

You can decline and just keep “playing”, but you may want to give your win to a friend.

I am an Amazon affiliate, so if you use this link whenever you login to Amazon, I get credit!

If you login right now using this link and bookmark it, it will stay forever for future shopping!

Amazon link to use for all shopping!!

My daughter Linda and I split an Amazon Prime membership, and you can share one with a friend or family and we love it. You get free shipping on anything that comes directly from Amazon.

See details here.

Also this year I will be most of my shopping on Friday online.
You all know what a bargain hunter I am, and every year Amazon has had

great deals and amazing CS and delivered to me really fast.

So please help me out and shop using my link this year!

Black Friday 2008 Has Arrived at Amazon.com!

It’s that time of year again! Thanksgiving is only a few days away, which means the biggest shopping day of the year is also fast approaching. Be sure to read below and see what Amazon has to offer you and your readers this year!

Great Black Friday Deals. No Black Friday Blues.

Black Friday deals start today! Don’t spend Black Friday 2008 jostling for bargains and parking spots. Amazon will have amazing deals to help you and your site visitors get holiday shopping done for less. Our Black Friday page is the central point to find all our Black Friday deals, including the Gold Box hourly deals featured from midnight to 11pm PST and thousands of products that are on sale for a limited time only.