Odds and Sods

   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 vertex.  Yikes.  The original piece in The New Yorker was much more interesting (actually, both are well worth reading if you're needing a few more bits and bobs for your brain).  If you're still wondering about whether to look into reading about graphene, here's one last bit from Explain That Stuff which said: If the 20th century was the age of plastics, the 21st century seems set to become the age of graphene—a recently discovered material made from honeycomb sheets of carbon just one atom thick.  Science journals have been running out of superlatives for this wondrous stuff: it's just about the lightest, strongest, thinnest, best heat --and electricity-- conducting material ever discovered.  And if we're to believe the hype, it promises to revolutionize everything from computing to car tires and solar cells to smoke detectors.  Okay, where do I file or fit that article (into the trash it goes).

    Here was another one, this one from Popular Science back in 2012 on filling the fuel tanks of a jet.  At that time the industry used 320 million gallons of jet fuel each day...ever think about that much fuel or how you get that fuel into a jumbo liner?  Here's the photo, filed away into my bits and pieces drawer:

Photo by Benedict Redgrove (video link to his filming of the laborious process of making tennis balls)

   So where to put all this stuff?  When I did my post of the making of tires, I failed to find a hidden piece from WorldWatch adding that: ...45 million scrap tires are used to make about 25 million retreads every year in the United States.  Or that archaeologists recently discovered one of the largest tombs ever unearthed in Greece, complete with sphinxes.  Or that the now-famous duct tape was created by a Navy mom who said that the melted-wax paper tapes used to seal cans of ammuntion were too difficult to open.  Or that there's a website for finding out if anyone has died or been murdered in your house (and asking, would it affect your decision to rent or purchase said house).  Or someone asking why, if we name the moons of other planets, we haven't named our own?  Or asking knowledged authors and historians "what accident most changed the course of history?"  Or that "...gas-powered leaf blowers with cheap two-stroke engines can spew as much pollution in half an hour as a Ford F-150 pickup does driving across the U.S. one and a half times."  Or that consciously lying and mixing in the truth and the ability to "cover up gaps in memory by fabricating bogus replies and asserting them with confidence" is a symptom called confabulation.  Or that our blood flows at a speed of 3-4 miles per hour (about the pace a person walks) and that our heart will beat about 2.5 billion times before giving up the ghost.

    Odds and ends, all of it.  Why did I hang onto all of it (and there's more, unfortunately).  Push and pull and yin and yang, it all comes and goes.  Here's one personal example.  Way back when on the day of the assassination of John Lennon (1980), I rushed out to nab some half dozen issues of Playboy magazine which I thought had published the last interview that Lennon would give (actually Rolling Stone would do an interview just days before).  Securely stored in boxes with other "collectibles," I had moved the box several times across several states and now some 20 years later, I decided to open the box and look up to see the fortune I had made by having such foresight.  The result?...new copies of the magazine were everywhere and they now cost less than what I had originally paid for them.  What a sod.  Odds and sods...a new meaning.

    It's a new year, a time of changing leaders and changing governments, of changing dreams and changing hopes, of changing odds and bobs.  In about a week it will be the start of the Chinese lunar new year that welcomes in the Fire Rooster -- the year will be 4716 (the new year is celebrated in Japan, N. Korea and Vietnam as well), a time to mark ...the official beginning of Spring, a time to honor heaven and earth, God and ancestors.  It is marked by the yin of fire, ...extremely powerful and can't exist itself -- it must be created and supported, said author Valerie Litchfield in The Catalyst.  She goes on: The flickering flame of a candle, a small fire, represents emotion.  It must be kept in check at all times.  Like the Chinese saying —“a spark of fire can burn down the field”— emotions can get out of control...(Fire Rooster years) are characterized as a time to look onward and upward, with righteousness, perseverance and transparency...like the Vietnamese metaphor for the Rooster, “have the strength in your beak and claws to find a worm in the desert” this year.  

    I now stare at that box of old and almost worthless magazines, much as I would likely stare at my grandmother's button collection if she had one.  As we march through life we become filled with these tiny details that soon become just bits and pieces.  Somehow throughout all those years, even if they're now almost worthless, they helped to fill in our cracks and divets and make us whole.  Those odds and bobs meant something, and perhaps still do mean something...but maybe now in a different way.  And rather than utilize the Vietnamese metaphor above, I am more drawn to the words of a U.S. President from long ago, Teddy Roosevelt (who set aside 150 million acres as "national forests" and is still considered the conservation President): We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources.  But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.  But he added words much more simple: Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.  That goes for all of us, even those of us filled with odds and sods.