Notes From A Bear's Journey

   To just look at the word hygge, one might be puzzled even if this has become a recent trend that has appeared in books and headlines throughout the world (if you're interested, it's pronounced HOO-guh).  Ah those Danes, makers of some terrific films and books, as if challenging rivals Sweden and Norway to up the ante (and all to our benefit).  As a few examples, glimpse of snow and deep powder (living in it, not skiing in it) by peeking at the quirky Norweigan movie, In Order of Disappearance (which Liam Neeson will remake and star in), or the even quirkier Swedish/Danish collaboration, The Bridge (which portrayed a bit of this alledged rivalry between Denmark and Sweden and was remade by Sky in the UK as the series, The Tunnel ).  Hygge!  Despite what one may hear, the term hygge basically comes down to defining the feeling of happiness that comes from being snuggled and cozy with friends, something the Danes been practicing for ages (think Zen with f...

   Think of the news and of how quickly we can both get it and how quickly it can change once we do so.  Breaking news has become a term so overused that we often pay no more attention to it than to a car alarm that is blazing in the street, which is a shame because sometimes there really is something important, something that rises momentarily to the top of the bubbling pot before quickly sinking back into the morass of entertainment, sports and whatever miscellaneous items are needed to fill those broadcast minutes or those pages, all of which are fighting for your eyes and your minds in anyway possible...look at me, pay attention to me, listen to me they all cry, as loudly and as emphatically as your spouse or partner or child or pet.  Bright colors, sexy images, movement, what on earth will work to catch your eyes even if just for a moment?  Think of a grocery display or a store's advertisement, a homeless person holding a virtually unreadable cardboard sig...

   Occasionally a series of photographs come in that makes one think about adventure and luck and the "wow" factor; but often there is less thought about the skill and preparation that goes into creating such a shot, not only on the part of the photographer but also on the part of the athlete.  What drives such people?  Hidden behind the terrific and professional shot is generally a lot of work, a lot of coordination and sometimes a lot of just plain luck in timing. For many of us these stunning photos also bring the realization that the photos we've managed to capture on our phones and have perhaps posted somewhere are simply  destined to be filed away in our memories and likely never to be viewed as "professional," despite how good we think they appear.  But then again you never know and we should be en couraged and not dis couraged by such professionalism because the more we know the better our chances and our understanding.  By presenting these f...

   Bits and bobs, odds and ends, bits and pieces, you get the idea.  We all have those miscellaneous tidbits hanging around, that stray coin from 1898 or the rare magazine cover or that button collection our grandmother kept.  What to do with it all?  For me, the bits and bobs come in the form of information, pieces of readings or products that seem quite interesting and that I thought would perhaps prove valuable at some point until somewhere along the way I realized that they were really little more than those odds and sods, broken pieces that somehow didn't seem to fit anywhere.  Just one example might be graphene, a material which author John Colapinto said "...may be the most remarkable substance ever discovered.  But what's it for?"  More specifically, Wikipedia started the description of graphene by saying that it: ... is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a two-dimensional, atomic-scale, hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each v...

   No thanks.  Don't get me wrong for my youth was terrific and who wouldn't want to be back to flexible joints and carefree times where life just seemed to have no end (until work arrived and then life truly did seem to be a world without end).  But as I grow older it is time for me to step aside and make way for the large crowd which is behind me for I've had my chance, and life holds another segment for me to consider.  Time to let go, it's telling me.  But the good news is that I am quite excited about the young coming up in the world...as it was when I had years and decades ahead of me, theirs is an exciting world of promise and you can almost feel that hope and enthusiasm as they become the next force of change.  Okay, a few things have shifted since my early days as it would appear that marijuana is so passe since ayahuaca is here, and that computer programs are now composing music and creating art (the new Google program even analyzed 20,000 b...

    Okay, a terrible pun and a variant of the original phrase "masel tov" which from Biblical Hebrew meant what is thought to be "constellation" or "destiny," says Wikipedia .  But for the residents of the city of Mosul and other cities that are downriver on the Tigris masel tov might come to mean more of a disaster instead of the more traditional meaning associated with it, that of congratulations and good luck.  Picture this, a wave of water nearly 100 feet high and with enough force and volume to wipe out cities and drown hundreds of thousands of people.  It's a scenario typically imagined with tidal waves or as disasters depicted onscreen in movies such as The Impossible and 2012 .  For the residents of Mosul and cities such as Tikrit, Samarrah, and Baghdad, such a scene might become a reality as soon as the spring of this year...the Mosul Dam 60 km above them is struggling to stay intact.  The Iraqi government has already issued a warning f...

    Missed it by a about a week.  January 3rd.  Festival of Sleep Day.  What??  Never heard of it?  (neither had I)  But we all crave this thing we call sleep, consciously or not, so much so that sleep-deprivation is often used as a tool of torture (and can seem like such on those nights when we can't fall asleep).  Stuck awake we become envious of the person next to us sleeping soundly.  What's up with that?  Some people can fall asleep almost immediately while others seem to take forever to dose off no matter how tired, as if sleep were a giant freighter carefully and ploddingly docking for the night.  Hurry up!  I covered a bit of this a few years ago in a post but much seems to have changed in the world of sleep since then...some sites such as that of Prevention even emphasizing natural ways to help us drift off (one surprise was its suggestion to stop smoking, saying: Nicotine is a stimulant, so it prevents you from...

    Add sixteen seconds to that figure of eight minutes and you have the time it takes for the heat of the sun to reach you here on earth.  Not a big deal you think, except that when looking at our sun's core --all those hydrogen atoms struggling to avoid turning into helium and later becoming the gamma & x-rays that emerge as light and heat on the surface-- that process can take anywhere from 15,000 years to a million years.  And where did all that come from, that massive (well, the sun is just a medium-sized star by astronomers' standards) well of bursting energy we call our sun?  Theories are that other gases and particles slammed together at some point to create a star which then went through its own cycle of fusing atoms and generating heat and light and eventually exhausting itself only to collapse inward billions of years later and release even more energy in its exploding that it helped create another new star...our sun is the third such star t...

   Have you been to the stores recently, those stores that were/are stocked with dozens and dozens of calendars and are now frantically discounting them in the fear that what inventory remains will remain unsold, unusable and have to be discarded?  I know all about that, having once produced my own set of calendars, mine being a series of questions to ponder, thoughts I still go through such as would I voluntarily leave this place if I knew that I would never come back (my original question was that of leaving earth).  In my case, the publication of such a thing involved many trips to both my graphic artist and my printer, choosing the right size and color and the weight of the paper stock and the right fonts and "look and feel" of it and on and on (all that after going through constant re-writes and editing).  And once completed, there came the time and cost of mailing them out to stores and vendors and different media contacts in the hope that someone would lo...

   This morning the temperature was a brisk 4 degrees Fahrenheit, at least in our area.  In more northern and mountainous parts near us, the temps dropped to the -20 degree mark.  Now this is not such a big deal if you live in Nebraska or parts of Canada or even in the northern parts of Alaska, places where such negative temps are just a fact of life during winter.  But here in this portion of the Salt Lake valley, anything below 10 degrees is reason enough to feel cold.  So it was ironic that instead of reading author Bill Streever's best-selling book simply titled " Cold ," I was immersed in his follow-up book called " Heat " (on a side note, his recent book on wind is in my book pile waiting to be read).  His section of the book on thirst was alone an insightful glimpse of the endurance and resiliance of our bodies, particularly when other animals perish within seconds or minutes of their bodies heating up beyond their core temperature (yes, even li...