Notes From A Bear's Journey

Something Fishy    The book, To Sea & Back by Richard Shelton , really shouldn't have been much of a draw for me.  Subtitled, "the Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon," I thought, well, a fish is a fish.  Certainly, having seen tuna feed and race with their incredible speed, and sharks, and swirling schools of herring...all were amazing.  But beyond that, I was simply used to seeing salmon as salmon.  They spawn, they head to sea, they return (or struggle to return) and perish;  or they are simply raised on aqua farms;  but basically, there they are almost year-round, nicely fileted, bright pink or red in the cooler case at the store, and ready for the grill.  If that sounds a bit callous, and it does, it was made to sound all the more so after finishing the book.    Salmon used to be quite plentiful, even filling large rivers such as the Thames and the Danube (pollution drove them away).  And for the most part, they ar...

The Grand Illusion    Scientists searching for intelligent life in space appear to be trying ever more intriguing avenues, the most recent being a high-speed camera (some earth-bound cameras such as those by Photron can records at a rate of over 12,000 images per second ).  If you recall one of the Star Trek, the Next Generation episodes, a being boarded and lived at such a faster pace that even the laser weapon fired at it was too slow, the beam of light (moving at a rate of 186,000 miles per second) moving at such a visibly slow pace that the being was easily able to dodge it and otherwise create havoc for those "stuck" in our slow pace of life.  It's an interesting concept, that perhaps we are missing signs of life simply because it might be moving too quickly for us to recognize.    This first happened in the 1960s, when, according to the excellent radio series, Star Date : Soviet astronomers were studying an object known as CTA 102, which had b...

Memorial Daze    Pulitzer-Prize winner and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Will Durant had this to say about war in his posthumous book (discovered 37 years after his death), Fallen Leaves :   For five hundred centuries, two thousand generations have struggled for that terrain in a calendar of wars whose beginning is as obscure as its end.  Even the sophisticated mind, made blase by habituation to magnitude and marvels, is appalled by the panorama of historic war, from the occasional brawls and raids of normally peaceful "savages," through the sanguinary annals of Egypt, Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, the untiring fratricide of the Greek city-states, the conquests of Alexander and Caesar, the triumphs of Imperial Rome, the wars of exploding Islam, the slaughters of Mongol hordes, Tamerlane's pyramid of skulls, the Hundred Years' War, the War of the Roses, the Thirty Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the Engl...

Ears to Bats    An earlier post talked about the complexity of our ears and how important they are to our balance among other things;  and as mentioned then, the human hearing ability of sound is actually quite limited.  Still, our ears play an important part in letting us know where we are.  Suffer a concussion or have a bit too much to drink, and you'll feel the system start to break down.  The recent issue of Discover talked of one's man's recovery from being rear-ended and who happened to suffer vestibular system damage .  In his words: ...my already-overtaxed and poorly functioning visual system had to take on the extra load of providing for many of my balance needs.  But at the same time, any sort of high-level thinking also required those same visual/spatial systems to create the internal images of thought -- my damaged brain would rapidly grow fatigued...during even short periods of cognitive load, my balance would grow progressively w...

The Great Attractor    Sounds ominous, doesn't it, as if a label straight out of Hollywood or a campaign ad from an aspiring politician.  But no, this is something much larger than a societal or cultural trend; in fact, this is larger than our entire planet, our solar system, and even our entire galaxy.  It's tentatively named, Laniakea, a native Hawaiian term for "immeasurable heaven."  And it is one object just recently discovered in space.    So how big IS this single cosmic discovery?  It's much too large to fathom in today's world, but basically it is large enough to swallow 100,000 galaxies the size of our Milky Way (or put another way, about 100 quadrillion --that's a billion million-- times the mass of our sun).  It all appeared in an article in Discover , an article by Corey Powell about our place in space.  And did I mention, our Milky Way Galaxy is in this huge mass?    The article highlights the work of cato...

Hip Hops    An article caught my eye, and of all things, it was on scotch whiskey (note the spelling, for American and Irish favor the spelling with an extra "e," as in "whisk e y," while other distillers will simply spell it as "whisky").  But here's the thing, these whiskeys were from places as far flung as Taiwan, India and Tasmania.  And here's what some of the comments were in the quick piece from Bloomberg Businessweek :  From France: It’s made by a third-generation cognac producer who borrowed production techniques from brandy: Aging in new Limousin oak and cognac barrels lends it a sweet fruitiness.  From England: The first whisky to be produced in England in a century is distilled by a Norfolk family with 600 years of experience in the grain business.  From Australia: It gets its molasses character from sitting in port casks for 12 to 14 years on the island of Tasmania, where it’s bottled.  From Taiwan: This recent rel...

Being Sick    Woody Guthrie once said, "Life's pretty tough...you're lucky if you live through it."  This came to mind when several weeks ago, my wife caught some sort of bug, a stomach flu that come to find out, had infected virtually every employee at our local grocery store.  Where it came from was anyone's guess...a grocery cart handle, grabbing change, a sneeze, a package of meat.  But it was there, debilitating and immbobilizng to my wife's usually strong immune system.  Feeling both sorry for her and yet a bit smug that I was still free of the bug, I continued my normal routine, even overdoing it a bit by splitting wood, mowing the lawn, cleaning the deck, and before long, I found myself caught in its snare, not entirely mind you, but enough to make me realize that I could no longer override a few things.     Often these bugs or viruses or diseases, arrive through no fault of our own.  Our healthy diet or lifestyle is simply c...

What's Inside     There's been a bit of a lull in these posts since once again, I've been off traveling, this time off to join my brother in a visit to see my mother.  She's approaching 90 in a few months and as with so many of us, realizing that we are starting to see the end of that conveyor belt of life in the distance, something all of us knew was always there, but somehow felt that because we couldn't see its end, that perhaps it didn't exist after all.  But here we are, and lucky we are (to still be here).  The moments are precious.    Part of the reason my brother and I arrived was to simply help a bit with chores, to try and tackle some of the bigger things that she can no longer do (make no mistake, my mother is still quite independent, having passed her written and physical driving and vision test --again-- just last year); but her once beautiful yard is now filled with weeds, lush and green while the rest of the lawn sits dry and almo...

   Since returning from our trip to the Cornish coast of England, both my wife and I have had a longer-than-usual (for us, at least) time recovering from jet lag.  The throwing off of our circadian rhythms keeps waking us up at 4 or 5 in the morning, despite our best efforts to resist naps and go to sleep at our normal hours.  Hunger also follows the pattern, arriving way ahead of schedule and virtually gone by dinner time.  It is something both frustrating and fascinating, once again displaying the complexities of the brain (here's how the National Institutes of Health puts it: The biological clocks that control circadian rhythms are groupings of interacting molecules in cells throughout the body.  A "master clock" in the brain coordinates all the body clocks so that they are in synch.  The "master clock" that controls circadian rhythms consists of a group of nerve cells in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN.  The SCN con...

Leaving Cornwall    The end of our trip (for these last four posts have been somewhat of a travelogue of my stay in the southwest coast of England, particularly around the towns of Newquay and Porth) brings a certain sadness as getaways such as this usually do, a mixture of being ready to get home and yet not wanting to leave.  But this trip seemed to have a slightly larger pull on us for we had attended many festivals while there, from sausage and pie festivals (these being more the meat pies since the sweet fruit pies those of us in the U.S. have come to associate with the word are more often called tarts or cobblers) to ales and ciders (much of Cornwall is known for its ciders and many ciders appears side by side with the taps that dispense lagers and ales in the pubs).  And ales are everywhere, one festival alone featuring over 80 craft ales, each served in pints, half-pints or third-pints (the drunk driving laws being very strict and enforced, not something I ...

(Con) Temporary      Here in the Cornish coast (located on the southwest side of England), the beauty of the crashing waves against the brownish-blackened rocks is reminiscent of rural parts of Hawaii, particularly the Big Island of Hawaii where the fresh lava flows meet the ocean (thus creating the Hawaiian islands, the newest island of Loihi slowly ready to emerge; and molten lava pools can be huge as seen by the Pacific ocean's "ring of fire" that outlines much of the western hemisphere...the recent discovery of the connecting pools of magma underneath the Yellowstone area is estimated to be about the size of eleven Grand Canyons, thus the recent label as one of several "super" volcanoes overdue to erupt).  The landscape is always changing, even here as cliffs collapse into the ocean, much of the more visited areas and paths now guarded by sturdy fence rails some five feet back of the edge.  But it wasn't that changing coastline that caught my eye, for...

Trust    Another interesting (and pleasant) discovery out here in the English countryside (if you've missed the earlier posts, my wife and I are vacationing along the western coast of Cornwall where she grew up), is that so many of the places we've visited have such trusting people. Now is this limited to the pubs and restaurants or the smaller towns and villages (say, vs. London), well perhaps. But it has nonetheless been a happy discovery.  And let's start with one little town we visited, St. Agnes.    Did I mention that we had just finished our five-mile walk, were quite ready for a pint when we faced the prospect of taking the shortcut across the sea rocks (which we had done before since we'd done this hike many times), or tackling the footpath, another half-mile long and mostly straight up before it finally creeps downward into the town the final five-hundred yards or so.  But since we had  done the hike before, we somewhat recognized that ...

The Harbour    Here are the cast of characters: Colin and Lizzie, Erik and Ashley, Joyce and Ray, Andreas, Dave, Columb, and two bulldogs, along with a mishmash pile of extras, from wild haircuts to tattooed heads.  But all have played starring roles in our journey back to the coast of England.    Let's start with our hosts, two transplants from Manchester who, after a divorce on one end and a renewed love on the other, decided to search together for something new.  "Would you ever fancy running a holiday accommodation?," she asked.  He nodded, she looked, and here they were, two years into the next chapter of their lives, running a B&B on the outskirts of Newquay in a little town called Porth (which happens to be the town where my wife spent a good portion of her childhood, going to school here and making close friends at the age of ten).  Their purchase of the Kalacliff Hotel with eight rooms is far from what I would think of as a leisur...