Notes From A Bear's Journey

Healing     There are all sorts of healing, one being my own cautiousness in returning to the recreation center where my locker was broken in to (okay, it was a set of public lockers but I did have a lock on it) and I was suddenly minus all of my credit cards, identification, phone and later, car.  But by now over a week had passed and I was ready to not let my life be overtaken by such cautiousness, this after having thoroughly thought out how to take only the minimum amount of items with me to the center, a set of spare car keys (no fob), my driver's license and my rec center admission card.  Everyone was quite helpful (and sympathetic) there, even holding onto those few things I had brought while I took off for the pool; after all, I felt that I was getting a bit "soft" as my maintenance exercise shrank away to nil, all while I continued to feed calories into me as if I were still the exercise champ (which I never was but it sounds good).  So a jump in...

Wrong (Again??)     I was wrong.  Don't you love to hear those words...from anyone?  Weather folk who badly miss their forecast, or stock predictors or even politicians?  Or bloggers like me?  Yes, I was wrong in quoting the severance figures for the departing CEO of Wells Fargo.  As it turns out, CEO John Stumpf has not yet left but if and when he does he would receive an estimated figure less than what I had mentioned, a measly $123.6 million severance package instead of the $150 million I had originally written; he would still receive a personal driver and assistant for two+ years, as well as possibly continue to be paid a "working" salary of nearly $3 million, said Fortune .  So apologies there...my confusion came because earlier (and due to the scandal of creating false accounts and thus driving the stock of Wells Fargo artificially high) another executive of Wells Fargo departed as Fortune reported two weeks ago: ...that Carrie Tols...

Money, It's A Crime Graph from The Atlantic Monthly     Okay, apparently that saying is not proving accurate despite what Pink Floyd might have said.  Bankers, Wall Street traders, corporate raiders, politicians...few if any are prosecuted or chastised (indeed many prove the opposite and are rewarded such as the recent Wells Fargo CEO who received a $150 million exit package despite having surreptitiously moved customers' monies around without their knowledge, all in a speculative effort to profit the bank's shareholders).  And surprisingly little of this issue has emerged in the political spectrum (the first of the U.S. presidential debates, now limited to just two of the four parties running, are scheduled for tonight so it will be interesting to see if such a subject is brought up).  But then came this in The Atlantic Monthly on the pay and returns of political consultants: The consultants may be getting rich, but recent events suggest they don’t ...

Speculation     The word itself has a variety of meanings but among those most used are "contemplation" and  "consideration;" but other common definitions include (from Dictionary.com ): "... conjecture or surmise: a report based on speculation rather than fact," and " engagement in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains..."  To view the upcoming elections here in the U.S. might be to add to those definitions, the "race" virtually eliminating any outside parties from entering debates (the newly-made rule is that the two main outside parties still don't have at least 15% of the polling voters and thus cannot appear in the debates, this despite what The Atlantic reports: As it stands, neither third-party candidate qualifies under that criterion—Johnson averages 10 percent support, with Stein around 4 percent. But both can now claim significant support from vot...

Link, Sync and Backup     It's been a rather long week since the robbery, the opening of new accounts and the closing of old ones only adding to the massive password changes and trips to the Social Security office.  All of these thoughts usually come in the middle of the night as your head goes over and over what you might have missed, a swirling feeling that you may have finally covered your bases and then reading about the hack at Yahoo (an apparently admitted hack of 200 million users data, but other reports claim it might run as high as 500 million).  What's a person to do?  So after this 6-day pause of trying to staying ahead of the crooks, I finally went and purchased a new phone for about $130, not the latest and greatest but one that still had much more than my older phone both in memory and LTE capability (in other words, ready for the upcoming 5G network).  But here's where all that education comes into play for as with the Yahoo hack, it...

Letter to a Thief      To begin with, it's a terrible stigma to be called a thief (even if you are one).  And frankly, I'd be very surprised if you're even reading this for I wouldn't picture this sort of blog and its encompassing and underlying message to be something that would interest you; but you never know, since cards with this blog's address were among the many things that you took.  And I won't even pretend to know what's going on in your head or why you felt the need to cut all the locks in the locker room and strip the lockers of their contents.  Nice idea however, that of pretending to be heading to work out when really all you had in your gym bag was a bolt cutter.  In and out in under seven minutes, said the police, so I assume that this is something that you've practiced or actually done over and over.  One would think so, since the police showed me your picture at Home Depot where you got issued your first warrant to be arre...

Predator     When you hear the word one usually thinks of a shark or a lion, something fearsome and basically not to be messed with, something wild and out searching for something to eat, something that might kill you without warning...prey (or if you're being hunted, pray).  And while definitions generally list such descriptions (says one dictionary: one that preys, destroys, or devours; an animal that lives by predation ), there are also these synonyms listed in The Free Dictionary : marauder, piranha, vulture, aggressor, assailant, assaulter... A person or group that robs, victimizes, or exploits others for gain.  Rarely seen, a predator in the wild relies on surprise, an attack that has to be as close as possible or one which simply exhausts and overcomes the victim; so it is a bit surprising when the top predator now uses high powered rifles and scopes and helicopters, attacking from places far out of sight and safely hidden, giving t...

Millennials     It is said that one should only write about what one knows but if that were the case it would stifle imagination and we'd have no Harry Potter or Star Trek; so I have to assume that the premise was meant to apply only to matters of nonfiction or perhaps life in general.  No matter, those of you reading this should know that I am likely the farthest thing from being mistaken for a millennial and for those of you who are millennials (likely a name you hate as much as people my age hated the name "boomers"), my advance apologies...but here's what the big data folk who crunch all the numbers and research have to say about all of this fuss.  Millennials --those generally defined as those 18 to 35-- are now the largest portion of the US. population and workforce, even holding 20% of management jobs (although they tend to stay in the same job for an average of just 3 years); they also hold more college degrees than previous generations, live with the...

   "There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear."   Back then those lyrics were about Chicago, but the overall picture was about something so large that we couldn't see it, something so devastating that it was killing us, something that we all knew about but didn't want to believe it existed (the Vietnam war).  And after writing about Alzheimer's and dementia the other day, I came across something as disturbing as those above words from Stephen Stills; something is indeed in the air and it's filling our lungs and accumulating in our brains...and it may just be leading to Alzheimer's.     In a study released a week ago from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported by The Guardian , it was announced that magnetite nano-particles were found in the brains of a small group study of people from various parts of the world and of varying ages.  “You are talking about millions of magnetite particles pe...

    The past few days have been somewhat of a blur as the calls came in.  It was Sunday morning (or was it Saturday morning?), the middle of a holiday weekend.  The phone rang and a voice on the other end said that upon leaving her rehab facility, my mother should be moved to memory care, a polite term for what used to be the Alzheimer's wing of the building.  It was strictly a recommendation from the facility where she currently resided but if I chose not to do so, her care level and cost to keep her in the room where she now was would jump substantially.  The move to the new memory care wing, by the way, would now incur a monthly fee of $7,009 which translates to over $84,000 annually.  How do people afford such prices (and their wing in this particular facility was nearly full).  My mother did not have Alzheimer's (for more on that disease, you can check out my earlier post ) but was showing progressively stronger signs of dementia....

Cluster       Cluster is another of those words with several different interpretations, usually having a meaning of people or things gathering together but often associated as a slang term that's used when a group of things go wrong or meant in a derogatory sense sexually.  And this might be the extent of our defining of the word in the developed world; but in many other parts of the world, the word "cluster" takes on all of those definitions, including the subtext of shame and anger and degradation that can last for years if not a lifetime, for at this point we're talking about the other common association of the word, that of cluster bombs.  If you've ever viewed those stunning displays of aerial fireworks during holidays, each arching high in the sky as a streak of light which then explodes into hundreds of rivulets plummeting to earth, you'll have a good idea of a cluster mine; the main munition opens in the air and releases hundreds of mini soda-can...