Notes From A Bear's Journey

     You have to love those hooks, those words that either pull you in or baffle you.  Take the piece in The London Review which featured words such as corbels and gibbets, precentor and prising (what??).  I had to look them up; cool words but really, who uses them in everyday life?  Advertising is sometimes like that with catchy phrases or jingles (We Are Farmers...), or more often a play on words.  That Rolex watch ad from the last post came from the same book that these award-winning 1989 ads did, a book which i remember from way back when the idea of spending $40 or $50 for a book was far out of my league.  This was 1989 after all and that amount of money, in today's dollars, was over $125.  Who'd be crazy enough to spend that amount on a book?  And an advertising book, no less.  But I went ahead and got it...go figure.  As it turned out, it would be the first time such a book had been put together for such "awards" (the annual versions of The One Show continue

     There's a lot of great writing out there: descriptive, captivating, ingenious, even imaginative and transformative, at least in the nonfiction books I read.  Take this one example from Kevin Fedarko's  A Walk in the Park  about his (mis)adventures hiking the Grand Canyon ... it unfolded during a time of day that I had come to despise more than any other, which was the hottest part of the afternoon when the fleeting freshness of early morning was nothing but a distant memory, and evening's reprieve lay far too off in the future to even start dreaming about.  A period of such incandescent misery that it felt as if a cackling, fork-tailed demon had flung open the door to the furnace of hell itself.  The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if

     Our cruise, and thus these "travel" posts, were coming to an end.  We had seen a lot, from France to England/Ireland/Scotland and now, the remaining southern coastlines of Norway.  The variety was immense, not just in watching the peoples and hearing the languages, but even among the storefronts of food and fashion that changed before our hungry touristy eyes.  Gone were the magnets and (gasp) postcards, as if declared relics from a distant time capsule, one that held sweep-second wrist watches and ballpoint pens.  And just a few tee shirts and hoodies were visible, but not many, perhaps because of their $60 price tags.  But overall, shops were open for business as normal because our ship would generally dock quite close to actual towns.  Cruises came in now and then but apparently not so often that sidewalks and roadways were overwhelmed.  For many of us in our ship, waiting tour buses quickly swallowed us up and whisked us away for the day, sparing the towns from the g

     While I mentioned that I would spare you readers the travelogue, a few articles caught my eye as if tugging at me not to forego this part of history.  Nothing specific, mind you, but...well, you'll see.  Now I have to mention that while many of my friends are fascinated by history and  tend to put its timelines together in an interesting way, this was never my strength.  Take the entire history of this area we were in --from Great Britain to much of western Europe and Scandinavia-- and I can remember one part of its history: the Norman Conquest in 1066.  That said, I couldn't tell you much more about it.  Who was involved and what was it about?  Were they before or after the Vikings and the blue bloods?  Heading east and south, how did the Persians and the Dutch, much less the Russians, fit into the timeline?  And did Nordic relate to Norman (yes, at least linguistically).  So, see what I mean?  Dare I say that I wasn't about to start piecing together the histories of