Notes From A Bear's Journey

   Think of all the things that you pay cash for, from small pastries and coffees to perhaps your groceries and stamps.  But a car or a house?  Not likely.  We have quietly and rather quickly become a cash-less society.  Reserving rooms, paying utilities, receiving pensions, buying online.  All of it is either done electronically or with a piece of paper that has our signature hastily scribbled on it...the check (also vanishing).  Jerry Seinfeld used to make fun of this check writing, playing a timid man who glances down at this piece of paper and tries to explain to a merchant that he gave all of his money to someone in a building called a bank who in turn gave him these paper checks and told him that they were now as good as those similiar-sized pieces of paper called money which was now housed in said bank; just placing his signature on the check was supposed to be good enough for the merchant to go to the bank and get that money.  Trust m...

      We all seem to love surprises, well, as long as they're not the coming home early from work, type; or the FBI breaking down your front door type.  But that pleasant, unexpected gift or announcement (or promotion) is always --or at least if you're not too old and your ticker is still quite strong-- a welcoming bright spot to your day.  It's the same when you read something or are told something that you never knew, or didn't expect: Mabel did what??  My car will cost how much to fix??  You're pregnant??  But none of that here, although it is time for me to unload a bunch of miscellaneous tidbits from my readings or watchings.  And what better place to start than with a brothel...    Photo: Brotheler       Back in the day, the Mustang Ranch was the premier, or at least most known, legal brothel in Nevada.  We high school teenagers fantasized of telling our buddies that of course we'd been there and had had t...

   We appear to be entering a new world, a world difficult to imagine even just a few weeks ago, one in which the world is wondering just what the heck happened, a world in which we are seeing our compassionate and caring side, but also our fear, greed and feelings of what we think we need (toilet paper???).  But what of the countless people now locked out of work or locked down in their apartments?  The servers and staffs, the fast food cooks and the counter folk, the hotel and vacation people who realize that nobody is coming and that soon their paychecks will also not arrive, and the elderly in rest homes now stuck in their minds and their rooms.  To pay the rent or to feed the child?; to keep the power on or to scramble for that roll of toilet paper?; to eek out that last bit of savings or to worry about what to do tomorrow?  As libraries and gyms, restaurants and corner shops, everyday stores and schools close down. children are now staying home so how...

Cows and Climate     Beef.  It's there almost everywhere, dominating landscapes and lining the shelves of meat counters, even altering governments as they move water channels and knock down forests to make way for ranchers.  So what does all of this have to do with climate?  As it turns out,  quite a lot.  Author Richard Manning looked into our ranching practices and discovered that for the most part, we in the U.S. and elsewhere might be doing it all wrong...     So you likely already know about the life of a cow (word of warning: the following is toned down but still quite descriptive regarding the raising and slaughtering of cattle so some of you might want to skip this part and jump right to the next paragraph), born and raised in captivity, separated from their mother after two months for branding and castration and given a variety of vaccines (this summary from the Cattle Network : Booster viral respiratory vaccine-MLV str...

    There was an article in the London Review of Books simply titled, "All Hail the Microbe," a subject that went hand in hand with the book I was finishing, a book by author Ruth Kassinger titled Slime .  Yuck, who would think that was interesting?  But then, as with so many stereotypes we've grown up with, I became fascinated with the study of microscopic life and how difficult life is to just survive at that level, much less to evolve (but life is easy to end as this Covid-19 virus is now teaching us).  Okay, backing up a bit, here was how I basically viewed our early evolutionary beginnings: our cosmic start was fiery with a harsh atmosphere and little water but slowly bacteria emerged and evolved into multi-celled organisms that self-reproduced, then RNA and DNA and, well, throw in a few billions of years and out popped us...humans.  Author Mark O'Connell tried to explain it simply but with a bit more detail and wrote this about what he terms, the Gr...

                    Photo of F1 steering wheel:  The Sports Rush      What exactly is that word "formula"?  Put "baby" in front of it and you sort of know what it is, although does anyone really  know what goes into baby formula?  Or throw a few chemicals or math equations together and you may come up with a new "formula."  So the question I had to ask was, where did auto racing pick up the word ?  Of course, this sort of question came up because of watching an aging Brad Pitt playing an aging character named Sonny Hayes in the Apple film, F1 , a film weak on plot but full of action (IF you're into Formula One racing), something which could almost be said about the aging Tom Cruise ending his own aging MI series.  But while the effects and all were well done in the F1 movie, what caught my eye more was the money involved in the sport (in  Formula One, NASCAR, Indy and others , there...