Happy To Be Here. Or There.

The financial advice outlet WalletHub has issued its annual list of the top 25 happiest cities in the U.S., based on 29 "key indicators of happiness," such as income growth rate, life expectancy, job satisfaction, weather, sports participation and divorce rate.

The top 10 were Fremont, California; Overland Park, Kansas; San Jose, California; Madison, Wisconsin; Irvine, California; Honolulu, Hawaii; San Francisco, California; Pearl City, Hawaii; Columbia, Maryland; and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Nine of the 25 happiest cities were in California, including Huntington Beach, Garden Grove, San Diego, Glendale and Anaheim.

Fremont (population 227,514) is located between No. 7 San Francisco Bay and No. 3 San Jose on the eastern side of the bay. It claimed the top spot, in part, for low rates of depression, long lifespans and roughly 80% of households with an income above $75,000 -- a number sometimes seen as a threshold for a higher quality of life.

Body of Knowledge

An aspirin is reportedly 40% more effective if taken with a cup of hot chocolate rather than a glass of water. Anecdotally, some patients effectively relieve a migraine by soaking their feet in hot water. It is not known if this works using hot chocolate.

Stories for the Waiting Room

Napping is great. These great people were/are famous nappers. Coincidence?

No. 1: Thomas Edison. The inventor of the lightbulb (insert asterisk) had the bright idea that sleep was counterproductive, and so he preferred to take periodic naps throughout the day and night.

No. 2: Winston Churchill called naps "blessed oblivion."

No. 3: Salvador Dali believed naps should be self-limiting and advised taking them while seated in a chair, lightly holding a heavy key in one dangling hand. Eventually, you drop the key and wake up.

No. 4: Jimmy Buffett named his final album in 2023 after his grandfather's description of a nap: Equal Strain on All Parts.

No. 5: Mikaela Shiffrin, Olympic gold medal skier, says she wakes up in the morning eagerly looking forward to her daily afternoon nap.

Doc Talk

Nocturia -- waking up more than once during the night to urinate

Phobia of the Week

Ancraophobia -- fear of wind or drafts

Food for Thought

Slim Jims are a ubiquitous packaged meat product found wherever, uh, people stand in line at cashier counters. They are comprised of 17 ingredients, which are listed on every plastic tube but are hard to read.

As a public service, the ingredients are beef, pork, mechanically separated chicken, water, textured soy flour, corn syrup, salt and less than 2% of the following: natural flavors, dextrose, paprika and extractives of paprika, hydrolyzed soy protein, maltodextrin, lactic acid starter culture, barley malt extract, citric acid, soy lecithin and sodium nitrite.

Beef and pork are self-explanatory, but "mechanically separated chicken" sounds ominous -- and it is, especially for the chicken (even dead). Mechanical separation is a process in which the chicken's soft tissues are separated from hard, inedible bones by passing it through a sieve under high pressure. The result is a batter-like paste that can still sometimes contain undesirable bits such as nerves, skin and organs. Besides gas station meat sticks, notes the website Mental Floss, the process is also used to make hot dogs and bologna.

Best Medicine

Q: What do you call a doctor who graduated at the bottom of his class?

A: Doctor.

Observation

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome." -- American writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

Medical History

This week in 1981, the journal Nature published the longest scientific name in history. With 16,569 nucleotides, the systematic name for human mitochondrial DNA is 207,000 letters long.

Self-Exam

Q: Why is that particular piece of gym equipment called a "dumbbell"?

A: The word was coined by Joseph Addison, an 18th century poet and politician who once scribed the line: "But chains or conquest, liberty or death." That prose likely inspired Patrick Henry's later famous quote: "Give me liberty or give me death."

Back in Addison's day, gym weights did not exist. Instead, Addison used a rope-and-pulley system to lift and lower attached lead weights. It was similar to the mechanism used to ring church bells, but without producing any sound. Thus, they became known as "dumb bells."

Curtain Calls

In March 2017, palm oil farmer Akbar Salubiro, 25, became the first confirmed case of a snake swallowing an adult human when he was killed and consumed by a 23-foot-long reticulated python in West Sulawesi, Indonesia. The killing was confirmed when other farmers opened the snake, revealing Salubiro's body.

Coincidentally, a second case happened in the same region the following year when another 23-foot-long reticulated python killed and swallowed a 54-year-old woman working in her vegetable garden.

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To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.