Notes From A Bear's Journey

   Things have been a bit busy here, what with my brother arriving to celebrate my mother's 92nd birthday.  At such times, whether from vacations or friends & relatives popping in, things get disrupted...exercise routines go out the window, eating habits change, sleep patterns shift (I've been getting about 5 hours a night), but we all seem to survive when it happens.  We adapt surprisingly quickly and before long, once everyone has left and the compacted good times seem to fade, we find that we are back into our routines.  But for how much longer?  My brother mentioned his own upcoming birthday (he will turn 70) and almost wistfully added the hoped for years ahead.  "Say 10," he said, "I'm 80.  Say 20..even 30.  There's no guarantee."  At 92 my mother still seems quite happy, as do many of the other residents in her facility, but who knows how they really feel?  Her world had gone from having little to having a marriage and chi...

  Take the population of the entire United States, then double it and even add an extra 100 million people to the equation.  Got that?  Every man, woman and child in the U.S. times two and then some.  That's the most recent figure (815 million) from a United Nations study as to the number of people in the world who are hungry or starving each day... each day!  It's a phrase one hears almost casually, that we're starving; and generally we utter those words when feeling a bit hungry (or peckish, as my wife would say) but far from actually starving; for indeed few of us have ever experienced --or thankfully will likely ever experience-- true starvation even if we acknowledge that it is happening in the world.  Certainly after a disaster, the monsoons or the hurricanes that hit the Caribbean and the Florida Keys which reeked havoc with water and food.  But even there, boats and some supplies are coming are coming in and the threat of facing death by starv...

   There was something odd about my feelings as I watched the final countdown of Cassini, the joint-venture spacecraft so carefully monitored by both the European Space Agency and NASA.  Just three weeks shy of 20 years since its launch, the Cassini craft was faithfully obeying its final order to enter the atmosphere of Saturn, an entry that would heat it into oblivion and end its mission.  Almost as if mirroring the wait for an execution, NASA's live coverage had a clock on the side as the craft sped past 75,000 mph breaking into the new territory 1,000 miles above the surface.  "We are less than two minutes away from loss of transmission," said the announcer, herself watching the clock.  "Radio transmissions still look good, both S and X bands strong but now in high mode."  The thrusters were starting to fight the pull of Saturn's gravity, the craft struggling to keep the antenna pointing to earth; fuel was down to 1 or 2% as the craft dutifully col...

   The other night found me quite restless, the clock silently moving past midnight (the digital figures at such times are just as irritating as the ticking of the old electric and battery clocks).  We've all been there, our mind's chatter just whirring away for whatever reason, perhaps things to do the next day or some worrisome news that had come earlier and now just won't leave.  At those moments, the chatter can seem constant, your body's position or trying to think of something else proving as difficult as getting rid of that throbbing in a joint that suddenly appeared out of nowhere; it can seem as if your body has let some rascal side of it escape and tonight is its day to play.  Come on, you say, I need to get to sleep; I've got a lot to do tomorrow.  Alas, sleep aids target much of this chatter, those Ambien-type drugs meant not to knock you out but primarily to let your already-tired body fall asleep on its own by not having any background chatter...

   The beginning of the word --com-- has a variety of possibilities, from today's world of dot-com to opening such words as "community" and "communication."  In the past few months for some reason, I've become intrigued by a genre author Mark Kurlansky made famous, that of commodities.  Ages ago, my parents used to dabble in commodities, investing in such things as pork bellies and wheat; my childhood ears didn't understand what any of that was, even as they tried to explain that they were "buying" railcars full of the stuff but not really (what the heck were pork bellies anyway).  But commodities can be anything that we trade in bulk as in thousands or millions of tons bulk, from corn and wheat to silver and platinum...and yes, even salt.  Ironically, author Kurlansky noted that he's written 30 other books but it's pretty much been only his books on commodities such as salt and paper (not pepper but paper, and his upcoming book on milk...

   Those of you outside of the U.S. might be wondering what the heck is going on in our country; just peek at these headlines: "Conflicts over U.S. Military Interventionism, the Environment, and Immigration Dominate Public Debate;" "Massive Banks and Corporations Wield Disturbing Power;" and "The Huge Income Gap Between the 1% and the Other 99% Grows Visibly Wider."  One thing I should point out is that those headlines are from U.S. newspapers printed over a century ago.  The  phrase "bully for you" has been attributed to that of former president Teddy Roosevelt whose meaning of the term initially meant "good for you, full speed ahead."  His bully pulpit, a term he coined, seems to have now gone full circle or perhaps half-circle, and left much of the world (and our meek Congress) wondering if we may now have the more modern definition of a "bully" running the White House.  But talk to his supporters and you'll find stern ...