Notes From A Bear's Journey

  The author F. Scott Fitzgerald once told Esquire in an interview: One should, for example, be able to ... hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed."   One could apply that to the world of today, another phrase often popping up, that of "life in the balance."  Something I had written in the last few posts caused over a thousand readers --98% of them in the U.S.-- to vanish overnight (and as of today, not to return).  What it was I wrote that caused that, I'll likely never know.  Such is life in general, complete with its ups and downs, something that befalls each of us.  One day can be among the brightest ever and the next, well, not so good.  With a bit of time now passing, I glanced back over to the original post I temporarily withdrew after the events at Manchester, UK and am posting it now.  But before you read on, here&

    My original post for today was ready, or at least in the final stages of editing; it was a lighthearted look the different ways we die, all taken from the recent book, And Then You're Dead ...then came the attack (singular as of today) in Manchester.  The first thoughts --beyond the horror and the sadness for the victims-- are those of puzzlement and cowardice.  If the goal is to shock and to disrupt, then that attack was effective, but at what cost?  A life cut short at 8 or 16 or even at 40 is somewhat acceptable in hospitals and roadsides, that random accident or rare disease that seems to make its way through this planet and affect all species.  But to randomly target and aim to kill innocent children and youth...what could cause someone to justify that line of thought?    The history of humanity itself is often a puzzle when the wholesale slaughter of towns and villages and peoples can be captured in ancient times such as the Crusades where streets became the scenes of p

   Apologies to all mothers for not mentioning the recent holiday that celebrated you; it's not that I had forgotten for here in the U.S., that day of celebration has become a marketing bonanza, a frenzy usually not seen again until the arrival of Christmas.  Stores are jammed, shelves are lined with more flowers than at Valentine's Day, and there's everything from boxes of candy to stuffed toy bears pinned with tiny heart-shaped notes decrying one's love for the "best" mom or the "greatest" mom...or wife, or grandmother, or mother-in-law or whoever else the marketers feel that you could think of that might be remotely thought of as an additional mother.   At one particular store, I asked the greeting card rep what exactly happened to all of those hundreds or thousands of cards when the official Mother's Day holiday was over (she had boxes and boxes of cards on the floor and couldn't keep up with keeping the slots full, the people grabbing ca

    Las Vegas, a land of excess and all that is America...or not.  The wild abuse of electricity and water in this desert setting is made all the more apparent when you drive to here as we did.  Other than a few small smatterings of towns --some tiny like Mesquite and some a bit larger like St. George-- this is a land of seemingly endless miles of dust and sand.  If you weren't in your comfortable and dependable car, one that could make the long journey without question along the baking highway that snakes its way down, you would have to wonder if you would survive if you broke down and had to trek mile after mile searching for help.  Minus your car, would you find water, or food, or shade if something happened?  But no matter, you take all that for granted, your car parking as comfortably after the drive (4 hours from Los Angeles, 6 hours from Salt Lake City) as if you've just gone to the grocery store, your flight landing and leaving as easily as the hundreds of others every

   Lately I've been lying low, primarily due to having the crud .  Not the computer sort mind you but rather the urban sort such as my wife telling me not to get too near to her as in, "I don't want to catch the crud."  Of course, the crud wasn't really mine to begin with, she coming home from an overseas visit to her sister and after a lack of sleep and other jet travel maladies, developing bronchitis which the doc said needed a round of antibiotics, all of which blew it out of the water (and unfortunately onto me).  So alternatively defined as the stuff that is baked onto your oven walls and becomes nearly impossible to remove, the crud emerges as that tickle in the throat late at night, the one that makes you cough every now and then, not consistently but just enough to keep you (and most everyone else) awake.  Your energy wains, your head grows fuzzy and soon you begin to feel like the stock market, up then down, up then down.  It was...the crud.  And after

   I've been reading one of the best books on poor grammar which is like all dictionaries should read.  Okay, can you spot the three common grammar mistakes in that sentence (and in the title of the post itself)?  Of all things, one would think that a book about working and writing for one of the largest dictionary publishers* would be about as exciting as watching ice melt; but author Kory Stamper turns her recent book, Word By Word , into such a challenging read that you are pulled into the world of what constitutes proper English grammar (although according to the author, grammar actually has little to do with lexicography or the world of words...what??)  Irregardless** (an entire chapter is devoted to this nagging double-negative of a word that continues to be used and proves to be the bain of many an English major...but now appears in most dictionaries), the world of linguistics is so full of twists and turns that you begin to wonder if we've been educated in the correct m