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Savvy Senior: How to Protect Seniors from Scam Calls
Dear Savvy Senior,
What tools can you recommend to help protect trusting seniors from scam calls? My 74-year-old mother gets tons of unwanted telemarketing and robocalls on her cell and home phone and has been duped out of hundreds of dollars.
Frustrated Daughter
Dear Frustrated,
It’s a great question! Scammers are always looking for new ways to dupe people out of money, and in the U.S., phone calls remain the primary way swindlers hook older victims.
The Federal Trade Commission recently found that 24 percent of adults over age 60 who reported losing money to a scam in 2021 said it started with a phone call – the largest percentage of any method, including email, text and mail.
To help protect your mom from the onslaught of robocall scams, telemarketing and spam calls, here are some tips and tools you can help her employ.
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Hotel Review: Boston’s Verb Hotel Gets 4.5 Fresh Towels
Prefer to listen? Just click for the audio version.
Hotel reviews are based on a Fresh Towel rating. Five means a top destination, one means check in at your peril.
Welcome to the first hotel review. It’s being added to my restaurant reviews (1-5 Yums), and my general travel reviews and blog posts.
Like a lot of people, we’ve been traveling a lot since the removal of pandemic restrictions. We’ve been to Delaware, Atlantic City, and we’ll be heading to California and Las Vegas soon, as well as taking a cruise to Canada in October that arrives back in Bayonne, NJ, on my birthday!
I was especially prompted to kick these off because we’ve come to Boston to visit one of Frank’s oldest friends (who takes the ferry to Provincetown every year in August when we head their for our annual time share). Frank booked us into The Verb Hotel, and I was wowed!
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Hotel Review: Boston’s Verb Hotel Gets 4.5 Fresh Towels
Prefer to listen? Just click and enjoy.
Hotel reviews are based on a Fresh Towel rating. Five means a top destination, one means check in at your peril.
Welcome to the first hotel review. It’s being added to my restaurant reviews (1-5 Yums), and my general travel reviews and blog posts.
Like a lot of people, we’ve been traveling a lot since the removal of pandemic restrictions. We’ve been to Delaware, Atlantic City, and we’ll be heading to California and Las Vegas soon, as well as taking a cruise to Canada in October that arrives back in Bayonne, NJ, on my birthday!
I was especially prompted to kick these off because we’ve come to Boston to visit one of Frank’s oldest friends (who takes the ferry to Provincetown every year in August when we head their for our annual time share). Frank booked us into The Verb Hotel, and I was wowed!
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Mark McNease Mysteries Podcast #48: Final Audition – A Marshall James Thriller, Narrated by AI (3 Chapter Sample)
Just … wow. I had no intention of using AI to narrate my writing, but I tried it with ElevenLabs, and I love it. I’ll be able to use this for my blog posts, my fiction and non-fiction writing, you name it. Will it replace working narrators? I hope not. But I would otherwise have narrated this myself. It saves an enormous amount of time, and the technology is stunning. The glitches are very few, and only with tone and emphasis, not on the words themselves. So … enjoy this three-chapter sample of Final Audition: A Marshall James Thriller, narrated by the robot Josh.
About Final Audition: A Marshall James Thriller
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Mark McNease Mysteries Podcast #48: Final Audition – A Marshall James Thriller, Narrated by AI (3 Chapter Sample)
Just … wow. I had no intention of using AI to narrate my writing, but I tried it with ElevenLabs, and I love it. I’ll be able to use this for my blog posts, my fiction and non-fiction writing, you name it. Will it replace working narrators? I hope not. But I would otherwise have narrated this myself. It saves an enormous amount of time, and the technology is stunning. The glitches are very few, and only with tone and emphasis, not on the words themselves. So … enjoy this three-chapter sample of Final Audition: A Marshall James Thriller, narrated by the robot Josh.
About Final Audition: A Marshall James Thriller
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Dreamshaping Podcast #19: My Robot’s Name is Josh (Adventures in AI Narration)
This is my first adventure in AI, using a service called ElevenLabs voice synthesis. It’s frankly amazing, and it opens up a lot of new opportunities for me as a creator. Podcasts, blog posts, short stories, anything I wanted to have narrated can now be offered as audio. It’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to new frontiers as a writer and podcaster.
This first one is called ‘When You’re Older, Son,’ and the Slippage of Time.’ As with all things Dreamshaping, it’s a look at the human experience and how we create and experience the ultimate dream of our lives.
‘When You’re Older, Son’ and the Slippage of Time
Are human beings the only animals aware of time passing? Do cats know they’re getting old? Do fish ever wish they’d swum in this direction instead of that one? Is a tree concerned at all with the number of years it has stood rooted in one spot?
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Dreamshaping Podcast #19: My Robot’s Name is Josh (Adventures in AI Narration)
This is my first adventure in AI, using a service called ElevenLabs voice synthesis. It’s frankly amazing, and it opens up a lot of new opportunities for me as a creator. Podcasts, blog posts, short stories, anything I wanted to have narrated can now be offered as audio. It’s very exciting, and I’m looking forward to new frontiers as a writer and podcaster.
This first one is called ‘When You’re Older, Son,’ and the Slippage of Time.’ As with all things Dreamshaping, it’s a look at the human experience and how we create and experience the ultimate dream of our lives.
‘When You’re Older, Son’ and the Slippage of Time
Are human beings the only animals aware of time passing? Do cats know they’re getting old? Do fish ever wish they’d swum in this direction instead of that one? Is a tree concerned at all with the number of years it has stood rooted in one spot?
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The Twist Podcast #216: Headlines and Horse Feathers, Brad Shreve Joins the Chat Room, and a New Guest Listicle!
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we scan the headlines, introduce our new Chat Room feature with our first chatterbox, author and podcaster Brad Shreve, and treat listeners to a listicle from Allison DeMarcus on the best things about sharing your life with a country musician.
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The Twist Podcast #216: Headlines and Horse Feathers, Brad Shreve Joins the Chat Room, and a New Guest Listicle!
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we scan the headlines, introduce our new Chat Room feature with our first chatterbox, author and podcaster Brad Shreve, and treat listeners to a listicle from Allison DeMarcus on the best things about sharing your life with a country musician.
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Q Audiobooks: Enemy of My Enemy (Executive Office, Book 2) by Tal Bauer, Narrated by John Solo
Enemy of My Enemy
Executive Office, Book 2
By: Tal Bauer
Narrated by: John Solo
Length: 18 hrs and 12 mins
4.8 out of 5 stars (153 ratings)President Jack Spiers and former Secret Service agent Ethan Reichenbach throw caution to the wind, committing themselves publicly as the first out male lovers and partners to occupy the White House. Jack moves Ethan into the Residence, but as Ethan settles into his new role as first gentleman of the United States, not everyone is thrilled with their choices. When it seems like the world turns against them, Jack and Ethan must turn to each other, finding the strength together to press on.
In the chaos, Jack’s relationship with Russian President Sergey Puchkov grows closer, and the two nations find themselves working almost as allies. But President Puchkov has secrets of his own, secrets that could rip everything apart. And Ethan steps back into the action with Lieutenant Adam Cooper, taking charge of a covert kill team tasked with hunting down General Madigan once and for all.
But Madigan is elusive, and his dangerous reach is long. He strikes at Jack and Ethan from the shadowy corners of the globe, unraveling their entire world. As the mad general draws new allies together, he is single-minded in his quest to destroy the only two men who ever beat him.
Contains mature themes.
©2017, 2020 Tal Bauer (P)2020 Tantor -
Mark on Topic: Subscriber Tree House – ‘Joyful Warriors’ and Cheerful Terrorists
The following is from my Wednesday ‘Subscriber Tree House’ edition of Mark on Topic (Substack). Subscribe here!
Happy Wednesday, Tree House friends! A couple things to relate today from the tin-cans-and-a-string news outlet.
One, I may take a short sabbatical from fiction writing. As much as I love making up worlds and the people who inhabit them, it’s also frequently frustrating. I sometimes suffer from a form of creative constipation, and that’s where I find myself this morning. But it does not mean I’ll be this way tomorrow. It’s likely that I’m just feeling over-extended, and one of those burners has to be put on low.
The subtitle today, ‘Joyful Warriors,’ comes from the name of an upcoming convention in Philadelphia being hosted by the Moms for Liberty kitchen-table terrorists with their massive dark money backing. You know Besty DeVoss is lurking in there somewhere, salivating at all the public education dollars she’ll be able to funnel into her Good Christian friends’ pockets as our educational system is destroyed. Knowledge and freedom are the wood, Moms for Liberty are the termites.
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An App for That: HealthyWage Lets You Lose Weight and Gain Money!
It sounds like a scam but it’s not. I just joined HealthyWage as a way to make some money while I lose the extra pounds. The plan is very simple: you wager an amount (payable monthly or in one lump sum) against the pounds you want to lose, and when you succeed within a certain amount of time, you get the winning payout. For me, it’s $60 a month for six months ($360), with a calculated winning of $745.
The formula is easy to understand: If you don’t lose the weight, they keep the money, and use the income to pay those of us who do make our goal – which I will! I’m wagering that I’ll lose 30 pounds by August. Success is the only option.So if you’re looking to lose weight and you’re confident of success, check out HealthyWage and see if it’s a nice little side gig for you. I will report back in August when I hear that ca-ching!
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