Notes From A Bear's Journey

  That's me, not that I faced some sort of a moral dilemma but rather my discovery that despite my added years of age, that there were things that should have seemed obvious but as it happened were...well, I should have known better.  As the Beatles said in their song, "I never realized a lot of things before."  We've all had those things happen, that taking out that one screw before realizing that it held a lot more behind it and now there was no way to get it all back together, or that slip of the tongue that once out you were immediately aware that it was the wrong thing to say.  Perhaps I'm having these thoughts because at the moment I feel like crap,* or more politely, feel a bit under the weather.  I also had the misfortune to watch a batch of history videos titled "Events That Changed the World," which turned out to be all of the major wars, from Chinese emperors to Napolean (his invasion of Russia cost him 475,000 men and eventually his retreat a

   There's a lot of good and bad in our world today, always has been.  The quest for power or money or "more" seems to be a trait of our humanity; but for many the opposite is true as the search for contentment and being comfortable is near or has been reached.  Friends, family, home, quiet...all have arrived around this time of year and the protective bubble hardens.  Part of this comes from discovering certain areas of trust in life: police will keep the order, mechanics will fix our cars, and dentists will repair our teeth.  This doesn't always happen of course, but for the most part this trust of  society and our inner circle adds to our stability and our balance.  So when someone in these professions goes rogue or something goes wrong and we find that we've been taken advantage of, our view of the entire profession can change.  Doctors are people we generally see when we're sick or are wanting preventative care...getting a physical checkup, or antibiotics

   Let's talk about the holidays --the holy days-- now arriving in most parts of the world and in many religions and versions.  Here in the U.S. it can mean a frenzy of both bricks-and-mortar shopping, as well as those peaks of online consumerism heavily marketed during these periods, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (both set new records for spending).  But this time of year also means a lot of travel, be it by air or by car or by foot, all terminating with a welcome sight as the door opens...friendly smiles of family or friends, the warmth of a home greeting you, the delicious aroma of both food and comfort.  At those first moments there will be laughs and smiles as months and years vanish with memories of times past, and with them the regrets of not connecting more often as if realizing that as one grows older the chances to gather diminish and that capturing distant histories can fade as quickly as watching a train disappear into the horizon.  There's another side to all of th

    To hear the word civilian is a bit rhetorical these days, a word now relegated to the likes of "collateral damage" or disaster-recovery teams as in, "the air strike cost six civilians their lives" as if such lives were statistics only and not family members who were mothers and fathers or children.  But perhaps it is simply because we are missing that word's meaning in general in our world, the part that begins its definition with all of us being civil to one another.  Now we're called "tribal" or "divided" as if labeling our differences means that we need to remove our niceties and our smiles, regardless of our beliefs.  To hear the term "open arms" now brings us thoughts not of welcome but of weapons, evidenced by the recent partisan language displayed here in the U.S. during the impeachment hearings (a good and easy to follow flow chart, in case you're wondering how to follow the maze of legalese, came from Bloomberg

   A quick thought to ponder and that is, how did you first think of that title above?  Did you think this might be about a race or poll position of some sort as in "who is in the lead," or did you think that this was about a heavy metal, one that drags you down and led to such phrases as a coach yelling "get the lead out."  That's the puzzling thing about languages and our interpretation of them, our brains struggling to deconstruct or perhaps anticipate what the proper definition is for a word and how it all fits together in a sentence, much as algorithms try to finish our sentences (one tee shirt saying I enjoy says "Auto-correct is my worst enema").  And for people translating books and such, the problem only intensifies (such a criticism recently occurred in The London Review of Books when reviewer Marina Warner wrote:  The prestige of translators has risen since the time when they remained nameless as well as underpaid (that has not really chang

    Heavy water, dark water, cool water.  From the days of non-color television came that beer phrase from the state of Washington, a catchy jingle from Olympia when both breweries and distilleries did such things as create melodies that stuck in your head, even as a child; I would hum tunes to Hamm's and Blatz beers while still trouncing though the hallways of my middle school, all while not really knowing what product I was "advertising."  Most of the beers with such jingles are now gone or have been bought up by a conglomerate and revived in a somewhat tasteless, generic fashion, Schlitz and Rainier being just two examples, the beers still around in some stores but perhaps best epitomized by their original factories once barely standing with their broken windows and faded concrete walls and now turned into something entirely different in the case of the latter.  But just as I was unaware of what the melody stuck in my head represented, I was also unaware of how much w

   Time, time, time.  Who has the time, many of us wonder...and yet I am constantly intrigued by the podcast from AARP, The Perfect Scam .   On that series you'll may find yourself a bit susceptible to the number of scams out there as well as the number of people that fall for them; but then who hasn't suffered through a long presentation for a time share or a vacation property, all for the sake of a few free tickets?  Even on the phone, most of what scammers pitch are quite convincing (especially those prowling the personal ads and dating sites for those "seeking" companionship).  But one of the thoughts to enter my mind was how are these robocallers and scammers able to afford all of this, paying for so many calls and nabbing so many different numbers, often in the hundreds of thousands; and who has the knowledge and sophistication to run such a program?  Well, it turns out that it's simple enough for even the teenager next door to do it, according to a piece in