Notes From A Bear's Journey

E-I-E-I-O     What the heck?  Most of you will likely recognize the title's meaning simply by saying the letters aloud, at least this being the current variation of the children's nursery song now so popular worldwide .  But despite our visions of this simple, almost idyllic small farm, the vast majority of today's agriculture comes from massive plots of land harvested with massive machines and massive business entities (for the most part) running them.  Farming has become an agribusiness with emphasis on the word "business."  Many of us still picture rolling fields of perfectly spaced rows, a small house in the back, a few sheep peacefully grazing, thinking as we drive by that it must be nice to be a farmer.  But quite quickly, British author James Meeks wakes us up with this bit or reality: To the traveller passing at speed, even to the hiker or dog-walker, farmed fields are anonymous elements that contribute to a pattern.  It’s the lan...

Hit In the Gut     The past few days found me somewhat at the mercy of a stomach bug, one that leaves you with cramps and little energy, much less a desire to eat or drink anything.  It's a 24-hour bug, my wife told me; but at the end of 24-hours, it was still painful to turn over in bed (in which I lay most of the day), my stomach now feeling like the shifting blob of a lava lamp, with accompanying pain as it rumbled into its new position.  Why don't they use this sort of thing on the battlefields, I wondered?  In 48 hours, enemy troops would gladly surrender or offer no resistance, no loss of life, full recovery, no wasted bullets or destroyed homes?  At the time I was sick, even the act of reading or watching something on the tellie was abhorrent, ghastly even.  Sleep, and perhaps a warm stomach massage...wait, cancel the latter.  Too painful.  But at the end of 30 hours, my stomach still hurt but my head was now clear; sleep was co...

Birth Day     We all have them, this annual trip around our sun that marks yet another year passing in our lives.  We call them birthdays, the day on which we were born and the day that says yet another year has passed.  Put more succinctly, I was reading in The Secret Language of Birthdays that: If one considers astrology to be heaven-based, personology is earth-oriented.  That is, the basic structure upon which personology is built is that of the year as it is lived, and as far as we know has largely been lived here on earth.  The rhythms of the year are mostly determined by the changes of the seasons themselves, along with the lengthening and shortening of the days and nights.  Each year these solar changes are roughly the same.  We are fixed to a wheel of life here on earth...The great psychologist C.G. Jung was fond of reminding us of the natural rhythms of nature and of the fact that certain plants, animals., even shapes and ideas co...

No Choice     The New Yorker recently posted this in its opening pages, an editorial of sorts by staff writer Amy Davidson: Of all the words that Donald J. Trump flings into the world, the four most Trumpian are “We have no choice.”  It’s a favorite phrase, and one that he used last week in response to the attack at Pulse, a gay dance club in Orlando, where Omar Mateen shot and killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three more.  Mateen was an American, born in New York to Afghan parents.  Yet Trump said the lesson of Orlando is that “we have no choice” but to institute a temporary ban that would prevent non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States.  He said the same thing when he first called for the ban, last December, after the San Bernardino shooting.  That time, he chanted it in triplicate—“We have no choice! We have no choice! We have no choice!”  Whatever your party affiliation here in the U.S. --whether the unpo...

Updates, Again     It's a fast-moving world out there and as printed media is discovering, one which is proving difficult to keep fresh to readers.  From political campaigns to government (and financial market) upheavals, the news hits and is sometimes over before the ink dries.  So take these updates with a grain of salt, current for today or at least for the past month...life moving onward ever faster (I've highlighted the earlier post on which the update is based).     Brexit : here's what British political scientist, David Runciman (writing to the London Review of Books ) had to say, which nicely summed up the decision by Britain to leave the European Union: So who is to blame?  Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude.  They are not simply suckers and/or closet racists – in fact, relatively few of them are – and they are not plain ignorant.  You can’...

The Vastness So Small     There is something about the enormity of the universe that continues to fascinate me.  Why this is I have no idea; perhaps as a child stares at the size of a support pillar while standing underneath a bridge I am amazed that anything could be so large.  And so, I read about our world "out there," not enough to dive into a full-on college astronomy course or to watch hour after hour of films about the birth of our universe, but just enough to keep me wondering.  So you wouldn't expect a theoretical physicist such as Christophe Galfard* to capture my attention, much less write an international bestseller (how often do you see books make the international list, much less one dealing with physics).  And he does this with imagination, telling you from the start that you will have only one equation in the entire book and that it's one you already know...Einstein's E=mc2.  Here's his introduction: The ambition, my ambition, is...

The Great Forgetting     This was the title of an earlier piece in The Atlantic , one that dealt with our complacency and our dependency on technology which was now slowly causing us to lose certain learning functions.  A simple look back at our use of calculators (when was the last time you balanced your checkbook mentally and without a calculator) or spell-checkers built into our word processors, or map-guiding programs (remember unfolding and thumbing through paper maps?).  And while I had written about my mother's slow loss of certain memories in an earlier post , this article in The Atlantic made me think about other losses of memories, a world made easier but for whom?  As he opens his piece in the magazine with a commuter airplane crashing, author Nicholas Carr talks of the digital gauges on the control causing confusion and conflicting with the pilot's training, possibly causing his decision to trust the computer which inadvertently caused the plane t...

Prisons     To be clear, I've never been in prison (luckily) nor do I have any plans to do so, thus I don't have any eyewitness tales or personal insights to reveal.  But I've found it a bit disturbing to read so much recently about life in prisons and the state of our prisons, not only for those people so caught and convicted, but also for those mentally ill and thrown into prison (in the U.S., this is usually a separate prison from the many independent and privatized prisons that house most of the court-convicted).  Backing up a bit, a few of my friends have served decades in both law enforcement and in prison management, and they'll be the first to tell you that there are people out there (and some who are now in prison) who are indeed just bad people.  Now my friends do have some eyewitness tales of prison life, vicious beatings with one prisoner (a known multiple killer serving a life sentence) pummeling but not killing a fellow prisoner because (as ...

(P)neumonia    It works like this, plain and simple.  You drown.  Not always of course, but the difficulty pneumonia can cause in infecting your lungs can make you feel that way.  As Wikipedia writes: ...in developing countries, and among the very old, the very young, and the chronically ill, pneumonia remains a leading cause of death.  Pneumonia often shortens suffering among those already close to death and has thus been called "the old man's friend... Pneumonia affects approximately 450 million people globally (7% of the population) and results in about 4 million deaths per year."  Bacteria, fungus, parasites can all cause pneumonia.  But this isn't about the prevalence of pneumonia among humans...this is about the repercussions in the wild animal world; and for some reason, we're back to that word...culling.     With bighorn sheep (written about in an earlier post ), the problem of pneumonia is affecting some of ...

Last Rights     The right to die, or as others call it, Death with Dignity , is something both ingrained in us and yet something that is terrifying.  Some in the medical profession say that it is a "gift" of sorts, my uncle once telling me that in his observation at least, (his specialty was thoracic surgery) patients without much of a chance but with a strong will to live usually defied the odds and came through...but the opposite held true as well; those who had a high percentage of favorable odds but were convinced that they would not survive the surgery usually died on the operating table.  Some have said that the elderly also have this "gift," this ability to turn off their internal life support, choosing instead to override the machinery and simply move on.  But such decisions are sometimes hidden inside us, and yet we are sometimes able to make them well ahead of time when we are healthy...advanced health directives and POLSTs (Physician's Order of...

The Unknowns     No, nothing mathematical here, no big equations or mysteries of the universe.  Rather, here's a name thrown out at you...Edwin Ruud.  Hmm, never heard of him?  Me neither, until the other day when our air conditioning guy came over for the annual checkup of our monster, a 10-year old noisy rascal that was once the state of perfection back when and now (like me) was slowing down a bit on the hot days.  All's well, he said, got another 5 years or so (the average life expectancy of today's air conditioners); and if it should go kaput, I asked, do I stay with the same brand (in our case, DuCane which was the less-expensive rival to Lennox who has since bought them out); nah, he said, Ruud...good value and dependable.  What, I said, since I'd never heard of that brand of heating and cooling units.  "Ruud," he said, "after Edwin Ruud, the inventor of the water heater."  Of course, I nodded, not really knowing who the heck Ed...