"So many people need someone to talk to," says Reva Hoewing of Poolesville, Md. "I just listen."

The 76-year-old owner of Crafts-a-Plenty does a lot more than that. The mother of five, the grandmother of 12 and the great-grandmother of eight, she still works five days a week in the crafts shop she opened over 30 years ago.

Back then, Hoewing worked as a teacher in a program for underprivileged children. Her crafts lessons proved so popular that locals in her small town of 5,000 began asking her for classes.

Freelance writer Dennis Hensley calls them Job Hogs: media people who seem to be everywhere while everyone else is out of work. Like Ellen Degeneres. Or Ryan Seacrest.

"Ryan Seacrest wants to be Dick Clark, the original Job Hog," he says. "That I get. But Ellen being the spokesperson for Cover Girl -- that's just greedy. I mean, when you think of cosmetics, who thinks of Ellen Degeneres? She hasn't done her own makeup since high school."

It's official: the chicken came before the egg.

At least that's the finding of British researchers at Sheffield University. But here in Portland, Ore., we've known for years what comes first: the coop.

Portland ordinances allow residents to keep three chickens (or ducks or rabbits or pygmy goats) without a permit. As a result, Portland has the highest urban chicken population per capita in the country. (Not that Chicago wants to be outdone: See Lou Carlozo's piece on that city's first urban chicken consultant.)

In Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would be King, a British soldier named Daniel Dravot schemes to become king of a remote area of Afghanistan. Today, a 63-year-old retired real estate developer calling himself Daniel Dravot also schemes to become king -- of the blackjack table.

In what is surely the most unlikely of "encore careers," Dravot works as a professional gambler.

For 33 years Dravot often gambled in real estate development to keep his 250 employees at work. "There were times I had to remortgage my house on a Thursday to make payroll," he says. But he only set foot in a casino a handful of times.

Irving Fields has got to be one in a million.

Consider the statistics. Of the 5.7 million Americans over the age of 85, only 33% are men, totaling 3.8 million. Of those, roughly 5% of them still work. That's 190,000 guys over 85 still in the labor force.

But how many of them play the piano professionally six nights a week? At 95?

Irving Fields has been entertaining audiences since 1930, when the 15-year-old won the Fred Allen Radio Amateur Hour and received a week's engagement at the Roxy Theater. By the time he was 18 and a student at the Eastman School of Music, he was playing cruises, where he developed a passion for Latin American music. (Check out this vintage video of him playing "The Mexican Hotfoot.")

The other night I was sharing -- okay, whining -- about yet another long and possibly futile day spent writing a spec project that may or may not sell when my partner asked:

"What did you expect?"

I was stunned -- partly because I didn't know the answer, partly because what I wanted him to say was, "Oh, poor sweet babykins, did the Big Bad World hurt your wittle feewings?" But I was exhausted and vulnerable enough to tell the truth:

"I expected it would be easier."

A week doesn't seem to go by without my getting an e-mail like this:

"I've sent out a million resumes for jobs I'm overqualified for, paying money that will barely cover my dog food bills and I don't get a nibble. Clearly I'm meant to be doing something else, but what?"

Perhaps we all need to consider a complete change. That's what 73-year-old Ian Bremner did 11 years ago when he retired from a career as a chemical engineer: "My boss said, 'If you don't sue us for age discrimination, we'll retire you with a pension.'" As a result, the British-born Houston resident found himself with a lot of time on his hands.

The unemployment stats from the recent Pew Research Center report sound dire -- young adults and minorities hit hardest, middle-aged men pushed out of the marketplace, older Americans working into their sunset years -- but there's always an upside. So for inspiration I've been talking to some seniors who are fighting retirement -- and loving it.

When the flooring company 68-year-old Sally Hameister worked for downsized in 2008, she turned a lifelong passion for clothes into a new career. She spent exactly four idle months before son Scott called and said, "I have the most amazing idea ..."

It must suck to be Paul Krugman. I'm sure he'd rather not be the guy who figured out our economy is actually in a depression. Regarding the debate about whether Washington should cut spending or invest in job creation, he had this ray of sunshine:

"...who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again."

Can't you just hear the ominous soap opera music before the cut to a commercial?

"Finders keepers, losers weepers ..."

We all learned it on the playground. Elvis even sang about it. But some of us -- and by some I mean corporate CEOs -- managed to grow up thinking it was true.

Nothing else explains why Maynard L. Jenkins, former chief executive of auto-parts retailer CSK Auto Inc., doesn't want to pay back the $4.1 million in stock-option gains and bonuses he illegally received when his company's accountants cooked the books.