Notes From A Bear's Journey

Don't Fence Me In     You might be too young but the above title was a hit song once.  It was a country song written by Cole Porter (from a poem he bought), lyrical and talking about a quest to remain free: Oh give me the land, lots of land under starry skies above, don't fence me in; Let me ride through the wide open country that I love, don't fence me in; Let me be by myself in the evening breeze, listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees, send me off forever but I ask you please, don't fence me in.  Those words could have been the theme in Berlin, the famous downing the "wall" now marking its 25th anniversary.     Twenty five years.  Seems a long time ago, doesn't.  I  remember hearing the opening to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's..."It was twenty years ago today."  Even then, the time seemed incomprehensible.  Such numbers were reserved for class reunions after one had gotten well into adulthood.  To sa...

Imagination     It's a funny gift of sorts, that of imagination.  Sometimes mixed in with creativity, imagination occupies the world of Willy Wonka and Harry Potter, Jules Verne and Guardians of the Galaxy.  There are screenwriters and authors who transport us to another world, a world of fantasy and science fiction, a world of crime and a world where all is well.  And for the most part, we are able to follow along in this "world," simply because of our own imagination.  Their world becomes our world, although it is also a world that is unique.  For even with their descriptive wording, a new version will soon emerge on the theater's screen, as well as in our head.  Sometimes a song will do this; but more often than not, it is the written word that brings us fresh characters and sceneries and lives...and it is all happening somewhere above our eyes, internally, and once again, something mysterious that works only with our imagination (for how els...

Being Real       I'm going to go back a bit and rehash a few things, each of which deals with writing. Much of this came from an article in The Atlantic about a group of Norwegian songwriters, five to be specific, who write most of today's hit songs and have done so for nearly a decade (one of the Norweigians is Karl Martin Sandberg: The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44 [and] is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles ). Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Kelly Clarkson, Brittany Spears...these five songwriters write most all of those singers songs, and those are the older singers of today's world.  Says author Nathaniel Rich: As I write this, at the height of summer, the No. 1 position on the Billboard pop chart is occupied by a Max Martin creation, “Bad Blood” (performed by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar).  No. 3, “Hey Mama” (...

Photo by Jonathan Fuhrmann -- Flodigarry, Scotland, United Kingdom Up and Away    Once again, there will be a slight pause in these posts as I bolt off to help celebrate the 90th birthday of my mother.  First, how lucky all of us are, those of us who still have a parent (or parents), two human beings who brought you to life...no matter your relationship to them, the truth is that you wouldn't be here --be alive, even-- if at some point they hadn't gotten together.    On the other side, imagine reaching that stage of your life...90 years!  It's quite a milestone and even for her, even at 90 years, it seems to have gone by so quickly.  So, we will be eating some cake and letting diets and livers and whatever throw caution to the wind for a bit.  It is time to celebrate, and to thank, and to acknowledge.    In the meantime, I leave you with a few things to ponder.  For one, there is a world (quite descriptive of the size, ac...

Being Them    Part of reading the recent book by Carl Safina, mentioned in the last post (his book is Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel ) is that of his own changed outlook.  As he spends time with Cynthia Moss in Africa, now in her 70s and a lifelong observer of elephant behavior, she tells him: Comparing elephants to people -- I don't find it helpful.  I find it much more interesting trying to understand an animal as itself.  His realization?  ...I am stunned.  As a lifelong student of animal behavior, I'd long ago concluded that many social animals --certainly birds and animals-- are fundamentally like us.  I've come to see how elephants are "like us."  I am writing this book about how other animals are "like us"...My task now --a much harder task, a much deeper task-- would be to endeavor to see who animals simply are ...like us or not.  We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally.  But by looking from the ins...

Cold DNA    Our DNA (dioxyribonucleic acid) is a fascinating building block, and is something that we share with so many other organisms.  But despite all of that, each of our DNA spectrums is unique, something that emerged in a recent article in The Atlantic titled A Death at Torrey Pines by James Vlahos .  The cold case (basically, a police investigation that has remained unsolved and has been filed away for possible later re-investigation) involved a rather brutal set of murders on the beach near San Diego, murders several years apart and yet showing similar characteristics.  The first suspect, a transient, claimed to have seen one of the teenage victims and was getting messages from her since her death...he later committed suicide.  The second suspect, a convicted rapist, had his DNA found on one body but not on the other (he was in prison at the time), confounding the detectives who felt that the two murders were done by the same killer.  He (...

The Colorado, Part II    In the last post, the discussion fell on the ongoing water crisis facing cities, not only from rising demand from increased populations, but also from groundwater depletions due to low runoffs and drier climates in general.  In a piece in Nature , it was mentioned just how pervasive this making up of the water shortage is among cites around the world: When we turn taps on, we take for granted that clean water will flow out.  But accomplishing this feat takes a lot of infrastructure: Cities move about 130 billion gallons of water per day a distance of nearly 17,000 miles.  About 41 percent of Earth’s land area acts as a funnel for urban regions, gathering rainfall and directing it toward the 3.9 billion people who live in cities.  These lifelines will be under intense pressure...(Los Angeles) draws more water from outside its natural watershed than any other in the world.  To safeguard its water, Los Angeles owns about 3...

The Colorado    Perhaps I should have titled this, The "Poor" Colorado to evoke some sympathy.  After all, there are only a handful of rivers that just hearing their names brings to mind their grandeur. The Amazon.  The Nile. The Danube. The Rhine. The Mississippi. And yes, the Colorado.  But despite the many great stories of dam releases and a resurgence of wetland growth and her bountiful waters once-again trickling into the Pacific Ocean, the Colorado River is not in great shape.  Thinking back, this once mighty river falls into one of the categories of being shaped and carved and manipulated by human kind, a river dammed and its waters controlled and used until its power at the end, its replenishing power, is sapped into submission.  And now the news that even its hidden underground supply is diminishing.    As it turns out, a new study by NASA and the University of California at Irvine, is revealing that as much as 75% of the water b...

Changing Colors    Walking home earlier this morning, my wife and I glanced up at the foothills and were surprised to see so many fall colors decorating the hillsides, surprised because it seemed that just two days ago, the colors weren't there.  Were we simply not paying attention or had the bushes and trees accelerated their seasonal change into hibernation?  I had somewhat written about the autumn process in an earlier post about getting out but as a quick recap, the reds, oranges and yellows one sees in the leaves of autumn are always there, simply overshadowed and camouflaged of sorts with the green of the chlorophyll.  And there's always those thoughts, as the trees and plants gauge the waning light of the days, that perhaps nature does more more than we do regarding when it's time to start storing and getting ready for the winter (although it would appear that nature is having a bit of a difficult time dealing with all the atmospheric changes this hum...

Parts Is Parts    You've heard the saying, often in a humorous form, but still, I couldn't help but think of those words when my two other root canals (side by side so done at the same time) were being filled with files and measuring tools as shown in the photo.  And that saying came up again when several of us went hiking the next day and the discussion came up about our aching knees, hips and whatever other joints we had banged and abused on the way up to the lakes.  Almost all of us either knew or had heard about someone with new knees or a hip replacement, or a stent or a pin in the shoulder.  Before long, we thought, there'd be parts on demand...medically.    Our discussion began because of a recent article in Smithsonian by Matthew Shaer on lab-created body parts and the industry growing around it. “Think about it like the Dell model,” said Anthony Atala, a pediatric urologist and the institute’s director, referring to the computer compan...

Soda...Gallons of It    A disclosure right off the bat...I don't drink soda;  actually, other than the nostalgic gulp of a root beer, I haven't had a soda in quite a number of years, like decades.  This could have been because of my teeth and the stories I kept hearing about all the sugar (an average 12-oz. can of soda has about 10 packets of sugar ...while a medium soda at a theater or convenience store has about 17 packets of sugar) giving me cavities (and boy, have I had a lot of cavities, and crowns, and now --which is why there was another pause in these postings-- another two root canals, bringing my total in two weeks to three root canals...what happened?).  True or not, I guess that I could have jumped off the ship and blamed it on the other sugary things, even the juices or the candy or the not brushing my teeth (does any kid enjoy brushing his/her teeth?).  Whatever the reason, after my teens, soda seemed to be out of my life (for the most part...