Notes From A Bear's Journey

   What???  Another mish mash of stuff?  Let's jump right into the water, a subject running dry as resources begin to dissipate.  My state alone uses 82% of its fresh water for agriculture, and it is far from alone, even worldwide.  We need water to grow crops.  But as pollution and other uses such as bottling water or injecting water into fracking and mining sites continues, the search for more of this finite resource grows a bit more difficult.  One or two dry years and people begin to worry; one or two decades of drought and people begin to move (one theory of ancient cultures such as the Anasazi).  Fertile forest such as the Sahara turn into deserts which sometimes causes entire populations go to war.  The belief that WWIII would be over the control of water begin appearing four years ago in all sorts of media , and hasn't stopped.  But this brief history of the earlier centuries-old fighting over water (which appeared in Popul...

     As with the last slurry of tidbits , I'll give you the option to skip over this or save it to sort out for exploring later, a method by Hakai which simply adds a section they title, "What We're Reading Now" at the end of their newsletters.  Of course, they're utilizing an entire office of readers and editors (and marine scientists) so their variety is rather extensive; but every now and then I'll find myself clicking on one of their links and be pulled outward on yet another tangential journey.  All of which is very similar to an essay from way back by author and professor Ellen Ullman on her story of coding, artificial intelligence, and cooking...sounds very piecemeal but her piece showed the difficulty AI has in trying to conceive of every possible avenue of thought and yet (so far) miserably failing, all of her insights coming with her many thanks to Julia Child (whaaat?).    Anyway I first begin with a visually beautiful piece on mini...

    Not sure if you remember that slurry of a post awhile back, that mish-mash of thoughts and information that somehow had gathered around my desk and brain like some sort of dust eddy.   Well here it comes again, although much of it this time likely has to do with having to put down the cat.  It was my wife's mum's cat and at 19, perhaps was the last representative in our house capable of being as stubborn as all get out and wanting to hang onto life no matter what (although I think that my wife and I will prove much the same, despite all of our coherent rantings now of saying "if I'm ever like that just shoot me," perhaps a telling tale of just how long we've been in "the states" and how lightly we assume that someone would have access to a gun and from there have the wherewithal to carry out the gory deed, especially to shooting someone who would provide as much resistance as a wet noodle).  Anyway, I digress...    There is ...

   The giraffe smells bad, or so say those who have actually seen one in the wild.  The animal which was once the symbol of the now-defunct magazine, Qwest, may soon follow that periodical's path and become little more than a symbol.  Hunters and poachers want them...well, not the entire ton+ of the animal's body but just the tail (and occasionally a head or two).  The rest can be left to rot because after all, the helicopter they've chartered can't haul those three rare animals out anyway.   And they are indeed getting quite rare, in some places just a few hundred or so remain...to a trophy hunter, this makes them all the more of a prize, the effort to get the last one, about as tough as shooting a grazing cow.*  My neighboring state's Fish & Game Commissioner recently resigned after proudly displaying his set of kills, not only of a giraffe but of an entire family of baboons, including the infants, along with other animals.   And that $250...

   For some reason I picked up a book featuring a collection of essays, part of the "Best American" series, annual publications from publishing house Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that whip together a compilation of what the editors consider to be among the best pieces of each year in fields that range from mysteries and short stories, to travel and sports writing.  Generally, the process is this: the editors (there's usually a regular one and a guest one) put out a notice for magazines to submit what they would consider their better published pieces from that year, with the magazines ranging from local small presses or recognized college publication, to the  large and established periodicals.  What results is generally anywhere from several hundred to over a thousand submissions, which the editors then pare down to somewhere between 25-30 for each book.  To date, I've dabbled in fields that I've thoroughly enjoyed because I'm interested in them, generally the ...

   I'm going to start this out a bit frivolously, as if to cover my unsettled reaction to what recently appeared in the recent NY Review of Books after they published their almost frivolous reflection (since corrected in the online edition) on the firing of Jian Gohmeshi who once hosted the Canadian broadcast of Q (which is still on the air but with a new host, Tom Power).  And I use the word frivolous so as not to chase anyone (mostly men) away for this is a very serious topic.  So let's start with the Democrats in the U.S. (whaaat??).  Here's how the London Review of Books summed up the "problem" in an earlier piece by writer Jackson Lears:  We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking.  For a start, they aren’t talking about interference of other sorts in the election, such as the Republican Party’s many means of disenfranchising minority voter...

   Last night I had a nightmare, one in which my wife had to shake me awake.  It wasn't horribly bad, nothing gory or violent; but I had a difficult time returning to sleep, staying awake for another few hours as if trying to digest all the chatter in my head.  The thing is, I rarely get nightmares, perhaps one per year or so, a blessing when compared to those suffering from PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  Briefly, this nightmare of mine found me at what appeared to be my mother's former house although the rooms had been juggled around; I was talking to someone sitting on the toilet but both of us were fully dressed, and I was just beginning to read him a science article when the front door knob jiggled quite violently along with loud banging on the door, but no voices.  I yelled back, "It's too late, leave," and repeated that again, apparently loud enough to awaken my wife who in turn nudged me awake.  The time (in the dream) was 10:30 at nig...