Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Those two words are an odd pairing, aren't they?  It's not as if they are words that sound the same but mean something completely different: heard and herd, or stayed and staid.  Such pairings are called homophones, or homonyms, or homographs, explained Grammerly .  Wait, what?  But when you think of most other words, especially when it comes to describing our senses, there are separate words used to describe something in the present tense vs. something in the past tense: hear and heard, or see and saw, or feel and felt, or smell and smelled.  But when you read something, you may find that you had already read it.  Huh?  Dang English language* (a good online "test" of this sort is the daily game from the NY Times, Connections ).       But reading.  I tend to do a lot of it and as many of you readers may know, my preference for reading is heavily slanted towards non-fiction. That said, I do try to pick up a book ...

     Raul Julia.  At the time I knew next to nothing about him, other than he was an award-winning Broadway star.  Then suddenly, I had a chance to see him in a Broadway play  on  Broadway; it would be the only time I would ever see a play on that famed stretch of New York but no matter, the chance was there and he was performing in a play I'd never heard of, the musical Nine (hint: the play ran 700+ performances and would prove to be much better than the film).  If you've never heard of Nine, it deals with the many alter-egos of a man and his view of the women he loves, or would like to love.  This varies from burly hofbreau German women at a spa, to a studious secretary who never breaks from being prim and proper.  21 women in all (the play was based on a film by director Federico Fellini).  I loved the play, and the music (a month after I watched his performance, Julia would have a stroke and be dead at 54).  Jump now to a...

     This year ahead begins with some trepidation on my part; and I thus apologize if this post seems a bit brutal at times, even perhaps unreadable or something off the mark from the usual.  But let me explain just a bit before beginning.  Part of this malaise was of my own doing: reading too much, listening to the news, allowing myself to grow anxious over things I could not really change, at least in the political and the financial world.  And as with the last post on the fires in Los Angeles, there seemed to be so much chaos now seeming to be bubbling up in torrents.  So let me take just one paragraph to blast a few such things out to you.  Who knew that Wyoming would pass a host of laws to encourage continued coal use, including a $1.2 million fund in 2021 for the governor to sue any state that wished to use clean energy instead of Wyoming's lignite coal (wrote Sierra : In 2019, Wyoming's largest utility, PacifiCorp, which delivers e...

    My wife has told me several times that my blog and its writings don't matter, that it is just a series of useless facts and often, opinions.  And she's likely correct, for as with most writers and singers and artists and such, people everywhere are simply trying to make some sort of a difference in a small way, hoping that some small thought or idea will cling onto them as lightly as a floating dandelion seed.  And although my wife never reads my blog, she's accurate in saying that what does matter is helping people, being kind and more caring, having compassion, and expressing true feelings.  And so it was difficult to continue jotting down an almost fluff piece on today's world of dating when people are staring at a pile of ashes, something which was once their home.  Perhaps because it IS Los Angeles, and it IS California, and it IS near the ocean and the homes of mega-zillionaires, many of us either felt that it was immune from major disasters or w...

Photo:  Vance Christie                       Try not to get the wrong impression but sometimes before I throw out my issues of The New York Review and The London Review , I take a quick glance at their classifieds.  Okay, who really has classified ads anymore since so few print newspapers still exist (and yes, my subscriptions to the two publications above are indeed still the print versions).  And apologies to all who are wondering why I would still be reading something "in print," vs. something digitally.  You know, trees cut down and such.  And it's a valid argument and somewhat in my defense, I do read about 10% of my books online via the library's Libby app (and the same with many magazines via their Flipster app ).  But my old school comfort argument is that I just enjoy turning a page and using a bookmark (no dog-eared pages for me, as a courtesy to the next library reader), and the same f...