Notes From A Bear's Journey

     What a word, that.  It's everywhere, if you think about it: love, honor, and obey; his honor; medal of honor.  And yet, today's world seems to be taking more and more luster away from that word's meaning.  Think of how many times you've heard that introduction in Washington: ... the honorable blah-blah.  Really?  Be it a president or a Congressional rep or a justice, how much weight do you put into that "honor" part these days, especially when little qualification is needed for each position.  Basically one has to ask, what makes a politician "honorable?"  Or an ambassador.  Or a cabinet posting?  One only has to read through today's donor/loyal appointees and wonder, what makes them qualified.  And while earlier posts have brought up the topic of coroners and morticians (which is how Dr. Vincent di Maio made his living, so to speak), ghostwriter Ron Franscell noted that little to no training is required to be a ...

     Most of you are too young to remember a television show (in black and white) called Hopalong Cassidy .  Heck, I don't even remember much of it, but it must have somehow impressed me as a young child because my mom spent a bit or her savings to have a studio picture taken of me (back in those days, stores such as Sears and Penney's all had small "portrait" studios where for some relatively inexpensive sum you could have your picture taken in a proper setting...on film, no less!)  T his was all in the days before higher-end stores arrived such as Nordstrom or Macys, stores which would later send those everyday stores out of business (Sears would always send out a phone-book sized catalog each year, a godsend for us 10-year old boys just starting to feel hormonal urges and ogling at the models posing in grandmotherly bras and Bridget Jones panties; in rural parts of the country, those catalogs landed in the outhouse and became several months worth of toilet p...

     Many of my friends, even those my age or older, call me old school because I write checks, those old fashioned slips of paper that as a form of monetary tranfers, are on the verge of fading into the sunset, perhaps taking me along with them into that great recycler.  And yes, I've heard all the cautionary tales or how those paper checks contain all of your banking info (routing and account numbers), and how ball point ink can be washed off and the amount rewritten by unscrupulous and nefarious individuals (gel ink dodges this problem, but really, who even uses a pen these days?), and how checks can get lost in the mail.  Heck, even the IRS no longer issues paper checks (which I discovered this year, sending even more of my info to DOGE and who knows who else).  Even my trash company --the county one that picks up your trash bins for waste and recycling each week-- said no more checks: electronic bank transfers only (we paid in advance to avoid this for...