Notes From A Bear's Journey

Bang, Bang     Guns.  It's time we talked about them without walking around as if we're stepping on glass.  Rather than being a taboo subject, the reality is that guns are everywhere; and here in the U.S., everywhere means virtually every single home (as of the latest count, estimated gun ownership was enough for roughly one gun in every home).  As of a few years ago, the number of people being killed every day due to guns (8 of them children) was averaging 360...and obtaining a gun in the U.S. is as easy as attending a gun show (a regular event in the U.S.) or answering an ad;  in many cases, there's no need for a name or an address, just hand over the cash and get your gun...or rifle...or assault weapon.  Registering your weapon?  In the U.S., there are indeed some background checks due to such laws as the Brady Law but they are very limited*, and once again, efforts to expand their influence have been defeated by Congress (no new gun laws since 2008), despite all of th

Shrimp     Who doesn't like shrimp?  Okay, so as with some other foods, shrimp is one food I stopped eating decades ago.  Yes, it tastes good (Americans devoured over a billion pounds of shrimp last year --again-- or about 4 pounds per person, making the U.S. the largest importer of shrimp worldwide), but I simply couldn't get past the methods used for farm-raising them...and, like much of our chicken production, shrimp regulations are virtually nil (did I mention that they're bottom feeders so that whatever settles at the bottom --from agricultural chemicals to uneaten antibiotics-- are gobbled up by the shrimp, and later by you).  All right, I'm being a bit harsh here, for that decision is mine alone and many, many of my friends absolutely love to eat shrimp...and then there's also the people (brave people, I might add) out there harvesting the wild shimp.     Turns out that when the ocean water is at its roughest (high waves and stormy seas), the shrimp are p

Seeds of Change     There was some disturbing news the other night and it had to do with the war in Syria.  Despite the difficulty of trying to sort out the politics, one thing is certain and that is that we are losing priceless artifacts that are centuries old.  Destroying temples are one thing, but now the crisis is reaching a point where the future of the world could be even more affected...the seed bank.      Some of this I had covered in an earlier post on seed and crop domination.  But some decades ago, a few countries and scientists had the foresight to not only seek to preserve our ancient food heritage, but to build a facility far out of reach of most...away from wars, rising seas, and errant travelers.  And now, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault deep in the Arctic Circle holds 860,000 varieties of seeds.  But for the first time, seeds are leaving the vault instead of going in...the war in Syria has reached its hand deep into the Arctic.     PBS Newshour and others repo

    The first name you may not recognize, at least in the common world.  What about this name: Auguste Deter?  Don't worry if neither of them sound familiar, the latter name being the first recognized patient, and the first being that of her doctor.  As a patient, Auguste Deter was delusional, forgetful, her short term memory basically diminished to minutes.  But it was her doctor, Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who later looked at his patient's brain after she had died, and found the plaques so common in today's diagnoses of the condition.     The statistics are shocking.  Within 35 years, an estimated 150 million people will have the condition...40 million have it now.  This was presented in a TED talk by scientist Samuel Cohen : If you're hoping to live to be 85 or older, your chance of getting Alzheimer's will be almost one in two.  In other words, odds are you'll spend your golden years either suffering from Alzheimer's or helping to look after a friend

Finding, You...Part II     Listen to this opening: There is no beginning, and there is no end.  The sun rises, and falls, each day, and the seasons come and go.  The days, months, and years alternate through sunshine, rain, hail, wind, snow, and frost.  The leaves fall each autumn and burst forth again each spring.  The earth spins through the vastness of space.  The grass comes and gores with the warmth of the sun.  The farms and the flocks endure, bigger than the life of a single person.  We are born, live our working lives, and die, passing like the oak leaves that blow across our land in the winter.  We are each tiny parts of something enduring, something that feels solid, real, and true.  Our farming way of life has roots deeper than five thousand years into the soil of this landscape.     The words are from James Rebanks, author of his new book, The Shepherd's Life (and the book's reception is surprising to him, at least from what he writes in the credits in a quick

Finding Oneself     My earlier post on cremation drove more than a few readers away, which is understandable for each of us have things that we simply don't want to see, hear or read about...the killing of animals, torture, pain, someone seriously ill and likely to die.  At those moments, our compassion runs strong and we wish we could help; and at other times, we simply don't want to know partially because it might just change our lives or our choice in what we decide to eat or not eat.  And sometimes, it is because we feel that some subjects are simply taboo, as author Caitlin Doughty discovered in writing her book; death is just one subject that many people just do not want to hear about.     But the reality is that we will all perish.  A little over a century ago, the average lifespan for a person was living until the ripe old age of 60; in days before that, making it until age 45 in the wild, wild west was considered quite an accomplishment.  Jump back to the heyday o

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust     There was an interesting interview on NPR the other day, talk being of the discovery of Neanderthal graves highlighted on a blog on archaeology at Vassar University:  To an archaeologist, human remains can be considered a treasure chest of information.  Human remains do not just simply tell archaeologists about the death of the individual, they can also reveal much of the life story, such as age, sex, height, genetic ancestry, if they had any illness/disease, types of food they ate, past injuries and how they were treated, any deliberate body modifications, and so much more.  An individual’s remains can explain a little bit about their life, but a burial ground(or lack thereof) can explain much about the surrounding culture of the people as a whole...The findings from the site showed that Neanderthals were not the ignorant, barbarian-like characters that modern humans perceive them to be.  Archaeologists found that the Neanderthals were mor

Last Gasp or First Breath?     The passing of Dr. Oliver Sacks was the subject of a reflection in The New Yorker by fellow doctor, Atul Gawande.  Just weeks before, Oliver Sacks had written to the doctor (in longhand), excitedly telling him about an article he was working on covering the subject of eyes: “I’m writing a piece on EYES —all sorts, from those of jellyfish and scallops and jumping spiders and octopi to our (vertebrate) eyes,” he reported.  “I am also trying to write something about the (deadly) effects of ‘social-media’ when they absorb people, to the exclusion of everything else, throughout their waking hours.”  He told of his delight in coming upon a century-old E. M. Forster short story called “The Machine Stops.”  “Do you know it?” he asked.  Forster, he said, had foreseen such possibilities. “But I don’t know if I can complete the pieces,” he went on.  “I fear I am losing ground fast.”  He was having trouble breathing and was growing weaker.     One of

   My wife and I just returned from visiting a friend's cabin down in the desert-like setting of southern Utah in the western part of the U.S.  It's a cabin that he had built from scratch, a project still not completed after over 10 years, but certainly much more than I could have accomplished, complete with loft, insulated wood stove, kitchen cabinets to hold the pots and dishes for the propane stove, a huge electric generator and more.  Big oil has come a-looking over the past few years and those shale pumps, the land scraped bare over the drilling "pads," are now everywhere, some of the pumps even pumped out and ready to be removed (the oil companies seem to really take their time with that, he said, that and restoring the land to the way it was which was all according to their agreement to drill).  Some folks down there got $15,000 per month from leasing their land when oil was in its heyday, not bad for a temporary tenant of sorts (the average payment was clo