Notes From A Bear's Journey

Migration, Animals and Humans    While walking the dogs the other morning, I passed by the hummingbird feeders outside our door, fascinated by the overcrowded platform full of honeybees, desperately loading up on sugar for the coming cold.  The hummingbirds, of course, were long gone having left well over a month ago;  something inside them had told them it was time, time to move southward to warmer weather, this when the leaves had only begun to turn and our temperatures were still into the mimicking of late summer.    So I belatedly picked up my copy of Migrations , a rather large photo book from National Geographic (which was based on their television series), and was surprised and awed at the number of species that migrate, a number far beyond the birds which move at night (some peregrine falcons travel over 15,000 miles annually, and when they dive, they can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour), but a number that would include ants and elephants, crabs and sharks, antelope

Narcissist (not the flower)    One had to wonder what was going on?  The lead article in the November issue of  The Atlantic is "Why Kids Sext;"  Time recently had its own cover story on male, "Aging, insecurity and the $2 billion testosterone industry;"  and last week, Filmspotting highlighted their Top 5 movie narcissists . So what's happening?  Is this resurgence of narcissism happening because of social pressure or is it pure vanity?  Does this reflect a fear of aging or is simply a matter of low self-esteem?  Or is this just people becoming proud of their bodies?  Or, could this be another sign of the disconnect in generations or could this become a generational bridge?    One could be tempted to scratch one's head (especially from the view of an older generation, such as myself) at the surge of teen or young adult (or movie star) sexting, that of sending images of one's body scantily clad or totally unclad, to others.  Why would someone wan

Musical Genius    Music, in whatever form, can affect us in magical ways.  NPR hosts Sound Opinions and their own mix of new music including the newest hits from Latin America.  While in Europe, my wife and I listened to music that will probably never cross the Atlantic.  One country in Africa is using music to help educate it citizens about the ebola virus.  And for Christian Tetzlaff, violinist extraordinaire, music and the violin were boundaries to be pushed, areas ripe for development.   Here's how one writer described it in a piece in The New Yorker :   One day in December, 2010, the German violinist Christian Tetzlaff began rehearsals with an ensemble of young musicians at Carnegie Hall.  The piece was György Ligeti’s iridescent Violin Concerto, a complex score of disorienting beauty, completed in 1993, in which the soloist often plays a cadenza of his own invention.  Tetzlaff frequently performs the work, and has devised a brief fantasy on the concerto’s themes; at

   There is no denying or slowing the fact of growing older, a trait that seems to grow quicker by the year.  One comedian said simply that this was only our perception, a complacency of not finding the new;  he mentions how time went on forever when one was a child, when mornings couldn't come quick enough and the days lasted forever, when everything was a new discovery.  But he said that as we grow older, we begin to simply accept the everyday, the seasons changing, the birthdays arriving, the leaves turning.  We delay the newness, if we see it at all, going further and further into our travels or reading or watching.    This is all the subject of the best-selling French book, The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body From Rusting by Marie de Hennezel.  Here is how she introduces her book:   In my work as a therapist and a counselor, as well as in the hundreds of conversations I've had around the world since publishing this book, I've found, to no one's surprise

Slowing Down    Just as I finished writing about blogs vacating, projects stagnating, novels abandoned, I thought I had it figured out.  And then, the realization that has come to hit me the very next day...the pace.  The demands put on oneself are sometimes too subtle to notice; but gradually they build and build until one day, you take another look and it feels forced.     I thought I had it down for today, the draw of music, the mastery of Beethoven, the demands of violinist Christian Tetzlaff pushing the boundaries of his instrument, the ability of music to snap Glen Campbell out of his deep Alzheimer's state if only for a few hours for the farewell stage, the feedback John Lennon accidentally caused when he moved too close to the amp (a revelation that he turned into the opening of I Feel Fine )...I thought it was there.  The Magic of Music.  And then the clock signaled it was late, then it was early, too early, and there was much to do.  Could I  get it all in?    The

Encourage, Discourage    When someone "disses" you, they're putting you down, the meaning coming from the word, dis-respect.  It is much the same with discouraging someone, especially if that someone is yourself.  When Google "suggested" I view other blogs of interest, those picked out "recently" by the Google team, I noticed that many of the authors of the blogs mentioned had stopping adding to them several years ago.  Perhaps they had simply said what they wanted to say, perhaps they outgrew it, got too busy, moved on to other things.  Or perhaps they simply grew discouraged.  How could they make a difference if nobody was viewing the thing?    Often it is easy to fall into this trap.  Whatever project you have attempted or are doing, self doubt can slowly creep in...wrong job, wrong person, wrong qualifications, wrong, wrong, wrong.  this can be especially true for writers and other artists.  The singer tired of playing dingy, smoky clubs at wei

Languages    Sundays are a quiet day, a day typically reserved for traditional events such as attending a church or opening the Sunday paper or making a weekend breakfast or a day with family.  Sunday is also a day of relaxation, something already evident to my cat as he waits patiently for yet another series of strokes.  The gap in writing this all the more apparent at who won out.    It was thus that I found my self immersed in An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy , written a few years ago and filled with tidbits of traditions, from where "keep the change" originated to how bowing before a woman and tipping one's hat became a common piece of etiquette.  But what was even more interesting to me was the table of language usage borrowed from SIL International (SIL deals exclusively in studying language usage and language history, the typical SIL employee spending 10 to 20 years in the field studying a specific language).    Dominating the numbers (the figures are

On Passing    The other day, we attended a celebration of our friend's passing, something she wanted due to her ancestry geared in wakes and celebrating life and not death.  After a long battle with pancreatic cancer (30 chemo treatments!), she fell into a coma and moved on a day later.  She was 64.    Of course, none of us really know when we will breathe our last breath.  Each night, we go to sleep and think little (if anything) of not waking up.  Tomorrow's another day, we say, and expect it to be so.  It is the same with being told that you have something wrong inside your body, something seriously wrong.  Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and author of over 50 books, might have summed in up in his book, Open Heart .  On being told by his cardiologist (over the phone, who saw his scan results) to get immediately to the hospital and go through the emergency entrance where he would meet him, Wiesel writes:  On occasion, I can be incredibly stubborn.  And so I nevertheless s

I, Robot    "It going to get you."  That's one of the chorus lines from Alan Parson's award-winning album from the mid-70s, I, Robot .  And although we might picture robots as primarily assembly workers, doomed to do repetitive precision tasks over and over, today's robots are moving far beyond what we expected.  Newer robots have "no motors, bearings, shafts, or other rigid parts," in one report from Bloomberg Businessweek .   Robots today can pick up a credit card from a table, place an elderly person into a bed, and even have the potential to become a new prosthetic...and they're entering a world of teaching themselves (a process known as "transfer learning").    This subject became the cover story in the November issue of Popular Science .  But the subject matter had changed to how robots can move from delivering medical supplies in hospitals or stocking and retrieving products in massive warehouses (both already in existence) to p

Business Travel    The world of business has changed, and so has the world of business travel.  London's Heathrow is still #1 in international arrivals and departures; but guess which airport city is now #2?  Paris (no, #3), Atlanta (no, not even in the top 20), Hong Kong (no, #4), JFK (no, #17)...the answer?  Dubai.    More than half of today's business travelers list having wi-fi in their hotel rooms as the #1 priority...not a comfortable bed (#2) or customer service (#5).  And nearly half report usually "enjoying" traveling for business.  And in one area, airlines are responding.  Gogo (a major supplier of inflight wi-fi) will boost bandwidth to 70+ megabits per second (in comparison, the average Mbbs speed on the ground is 30+ in the U.S. --although around 15+ in my city-- and around 80+ in Hong Kong...the U.S. ranks as one of the slowest providers of bandwidth speed in the world, not because it is incapable of increasing the speed, but because bandwidth provi

The Fault In Our Stars    Simply put, The Fault In Our Stars is worth seeing.  Well written, well acted and likely doomed to disappear (even though it's available now on DVD), this small film with unknown leads deals with two teenagers fighting a losing battle with cancer, how they deal with it, how others deal with it, and how love, in the midst of it all, can appear out of nowhere.    At one point in the film, one of the characters feels pretty low at what's happening and at how life is turning out, to which the other replies, "I know you want to be remembered by everyone.  But you've got me, you've got family, you've got the world, and if that's not enough then I'm sorry."    Perhaps some of us find that solution early in life, that of what really matters.  Perhaps some of us find that answer only when life is nearing an end.  Perhaps some of us leave this world having never found it.  As with finding the meaning of life, the meaning of

Reviewing Killing    Last night I watched a disturbing documentary titled The Act of Killing , a POV film on PBS which airs online for another week.  Sadly, it is worth watching.  In the film, Indonesian soldiers and paramilitary recall how they killed millions of people, stabbing, strangling, shooting, beating, raping, all while young paramilitary or hired "gangsters" and all having done it proudly to save their country...today, they are still in power and the killing continues (the youth group many of them were in now has over 3 million uniformed members).    What is so chilling about the film is that the men interviewed, now in their 60s and older, appear to have little remorse (although one described having nightmares and another, when reenacting a scene of how he killed only this time he was the one portraying the victim, seemed to suddenly be overcome with emotion).  These men were making a film of their achievements, a propaganda-like film of how justified and imp

Nano, Nano...    In yet another set of surprises for me, I happened to glance at one of the special editions of National Geographic 100 Scientific Discoveries That Changed the World (on newsstands for another week or so) thinking that I'd be able to pick out at least a dozen or so (I had tried this earlier with similar "greatest inventions lists" in Smithsonian, Popular Science and The Atlantic and failed miserably).  Alas, it was not to be (spoiler alert...before reading further take a quick guess at the top 10 answers you would pick; cellphone (no), computer (no), bucky balls (yes)).     The arrival of funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to a distant researcher at Northwestern University took the top spot.  To first provide some background, the researcher was Chad Mirkin who has gone on to author over 480 scientific manuscripts, found four companies and hold over 440 patents and/or patent applications.  Fifteen years ago (1997 he began resear

Frequent(cy) Hearing    The visiting by my mother brought another unexpected surprise, a view of the changing world of hearing.  Her own hearing had worsened, but it was only now that she agreed to the possibility of needing hearing aids...and the testing for hearing has changed (at least to my viewpoint) dramatically.    Beyond the frequency tests one usually hears (and if you think you're immune and can hear perfectly fine, it might be worth taking the quick test on Brain Games , the series available online or at your library;  in a room filled with people from ages 8 to 70, ever higher frequencies began to be emitted...by the third range of frequency, I could hear nothing, which it turns out is typical for my age group; at the end, only the 8 year-olds could hear the higher test frequencies, although even they will lose that frequency range by the time they reach their teens), hearing tests now conduct speech frequencies, the computer constantly adjusting the hearing aids

Moms    A quick note of apology if there is a gap in these posts appearing.  The moms visiting is making time short, or at least, time for writing the blog short.  But when you find time spent with your mother coming only at intervals (or perhaps when your mother is always around), you enter a period of slow glances as you age...a tick of the face here, the upturn on the lip, the mannerism you never noticed.  Is that something you learned (likely) and yet, there's also that genetic thing...the bent toe, the crooked tooth, the arthritis and beyond.  It is now, at a later age, that you worry about health problems, mental problems, and even her attitude...sounds silly in some ways but you realize your mom is now a  preview of what you might be facing some years from now.  Was she gray at 40 (gulp!), good life, tough life (we seem to rarely pay attention to our moms when we're younger), abused, afraid of dogs (chased as a child, you find out)...random discoveries one had best fi

Eclipse and Patience    The other night, my wife and I woke up at 2 in the morning to view the lunar eclipse (when the newsfolk said the eclipse would happen), then 3 (when the eclipse actually started), then 4 to witness the eclipse more than halfway through.  Carl Sagan worked and worked to get our thinking away from a "rising"  or "setting" sun and have us think more of witnessing earth's rotation (the sun stayed where it was; it was our earth rotating that made the sun appear to move around our planet).  It was much the same with the eclipse, witnessing our earth and moon slowly aligning in their respective rotations, the earth blocking the sun's light to cast its shadow on the moon  (the brightness of a full moon is about 10% of the sun's light at day, the dark surface of the moon absorbing much of the visible light).    What was even more dazzling (perhaps I should say equally dazzling) was that once the shadow began, the stars emerged with a

Digital Adventures    The magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council, OnEarth , was the most recent magazine to announce its change from print to digital-only production.  "Reinvention has long been a part of this magazine's DNA," said editor Douglas S. Barasch.  "I've enjoyed working in the print medium, but I am genuinely thrilled and inspired by this next step in OnEarth's evolution.  Every month, we promise to take you on a truly unique, captivating, and immersive journey, offering a perspective, as always, that you simply won't find anywhere else."  Hmm, sounds awfully similar to the words used to launch a new magazine.    But for those of you still subscribing to magazines or reading hardcover books (that's me), the writing does seem to be on the wall as digital sales continue to climb.  Publishing costs are simply getting too expensive.  A typical magazine with a million+ subscribers will destroy hundreds of thousands of mispri