Notes From A Bear's Journey

   Have you ever had one of those days where you just want to do nothing?  It's one of those free days, a day different than a vacation day or a day where you are sick.  Rather, it's an unexpected day, a day full of free time, time to do whatever --clean that room, finish that book, watch that video-- and all you really want to do is...nothing.  As George Gershwin wrote in Porgy and Bess : I got plenty o' nuttin,' an nuttin's plenty for me.  A day like that recently popped up for me and it found me puttering about, checking in on this, peeking at that, but overall really accomplishing nothing.  No bills paid, no shows watched, no books read, just a lot of time wasted...only, it wasn't.  That is, it felt as if I just needed that day of nothing.  For by the end, there was nothing there, no relief, no guilt, just a day that had somehow passed and had seemingly encased me in Jell-o for a day and was now gone.  There it was, and there it went...

   The other day I almost got creamed (an old phrase left over from childhood), a new red pickup running a red light at full speed with me being the first driver crossing and destined for what's called a T-bone (a car slams into you from the side).  It's a big intersection, and on a hill, and has been the scene of other accidents.  One which I witnessed was another red-light runner only she swerved, clipped the crossing car's bumper and just like in a Hollywood movie, her car flipped onto its roof and spun like a top...into oncoming traffic.  The width of the intersection is deceiving and I think that drivers tend to see the light turn yellow and hit the accelerator, only to realize too late (once they are in the intersection) that they won't make it, at least not before crossing traffic is already well into the middle of the road.  In my case, I was close enough to see the face of the young male driver, his expression of shock and realization coming way to...

    Yup, still splitting wood and playing zookeeper so yes, on that end I'm still pooped...but ah the gut, home to those instinctual feelings and quick to let us know when it's upset (gotta go, gotta go, gotta go right now).  Turns out that our gut flora (for those of us in the majority of cities, anyway) are doing a terrific job of damaging this second brain of ours, our obsession with germ-free environments and ointments and medicines reducing our gut microbial diversity by close to 40% when compared (as scientists have done) with indigenous tribes in remote jungles.  Sounds ridiculous, such comparisons, but it gives us an idea of what our modern homes and diets might be doing because this inner sanctum of ours, the one just below our heart and intimately connected to our brain, a diverse entity which proving far more important that we give it credit for (and so far, studies are seeming to show that probiotics actually do little other than proving themselves ...

    Lately I've been pooped, a term* used in this sense to mean dog-tired or exhausted; much of this is likely because my wife is away for a few weeks visiting family which means that I take over her side of things, primarily the hour-plus it takes to feed her menagerie of wild ducks and geese and feral cats.  It's that old adage of never knowing how much the other half does until it's dumped into your lap (my mother said that all the time when my stepfather passed away).  Throw in the growing older bit and well, another adage comes up of just not being able to do what I used to...in other words, it boils down to being pooped.  But it got me to thinking about that word in general...     It's something that's universal to all animals, even insects...that is, poop.  And no matter our views on it --disgusting, necessary, smelly, whatever-- it might be time to look again at it, all of it, at least on the human side.  There's an interesting...

   To begin, I'll state right up front that I'm not really sure what I believe in once physical life ends; I certainly hope that something continues (don't we all, in a sense).  But a giant human-like figure...no.  For me it would seem that it would be more of a spiritual thing, energy or something; but even that comes into question for me for all of that is imagined in my puny mind which is unable to fathom anything more that a physical and three-dimensional world (even with the elaborate graphics of Dr. Strange who is taught to "see" what possibilities await outside our existence).  Planets and atoms and molecules...what if life afterwards is unlike anything we could visualize (after all, eyesight only came to life in the very, very late stages of our known existence of all life on this planet).  Don't believe me?  What about this, from Ed Yong's book on microbes, I Contain Multitudes .  He has you imagine our world's entire existence as a one-...

    Remember a few posts ago there was a small note about the Senate removing the law that blocked access to your Web history?  In just a few days, it sailed through the House as well and in a change of pattern, without lights or cameras or reporters, President Trump signed it into law.  So let's recap on what that means...for one, the Congress that people have elected (albeit on partisan voting) have pretty much made this change permanent; that is, the FCC which used to protect access to your information can no longer add any additional laws which are similar to restrict advertisers and marketers from getting your information.  Well, who cares what you order on Amazon or whatever, you say.  But let's say that you've got a newly diagnosed medical condition --say the onset of diabetes-- and you've been researching away on your phone or tablet.  Could an insurer buy that history of your browsing information and possibly use it against you later when you ...

   So I get it, this fast pace of the computer world; but come on, in just three months time the Windows 10 on my new laptop needed 8 updates all of which took nearly 2 hours to download?  Then there were the competing anti-virus programs that battled each other and told me to take one of them off; same with the malware programs.  Good grief, since when did the simple open-and-start computer disappear?  So now some 5 days have gone by and --after leaving the finicky new computer untouched-- I bravely opened the laptop and...it was stuck (not the lid itself but the browser); well, let's just say that it was slow enough to appear stuck.  Enable this on your toolbar, it said, remove that, updates being installed (and like the Firefox malware I was locked out of overriding the install to get to the settings bar to disable the preset "auto load updates" which was checked on virtually everything, the icon continually telling me that "updates are being installed" ...