Notes From A Bear's Journey

    A quick warning: the following text contains some descriptions of poisons, their resulting effects, and experiments done on both humans and animals; should you feel that you might find reading about such subjects offensive, it might prove advantageous for you to skip this post.     The rats were back, and this time they appeared as a far cry from when I wrote about them almost gingerly in an earlier post .  This time one might almost classify their appearance as a swarm, a scene from one of those horror-movie films where rats arrived one after the other and in such numbers that you tended to gasp.  Okay, not quite that bad but shocking enough that my wife and I decided that our playful admiration side of them was proving a bit naïve.  The BBC mentioned some time ago that a breeding pair can soon become 200 rats in one year (yes, they breed year round), and we viewed at least 8-10 rats on our porch, scampering around like large flies, far too quick and too smart to fall for thos

     Back in my younger days there were times when we boys would meet in a huddle during an impromptu American football game, generally just three to a side: someone to hike the ball, someone to throw the ball, and someone to catch the ball (the person hiking would also become a possible catcher).  Generally, these games progressed at a snail's pace with neither side really gaining much ground, the thrill of the tags or flags often vanishing as quickly as the daylight (as we grew older the roughness of tackling faded away, not so much because we didn't want to toss and tumble but rather because we now cared a bit about our clothes since, at least in my case, my parents couldn't afford a lot of extra clothes so we kids would try to keep even our "play" clothes as dirt free and as grass-stained free as possible since they might just prove to be the clothes we would be wearing to school the next day and well, girls were beginning to enter the picture and what girl wa

    Life, it is said, is something most of us take for granted.  Witnessing a loved one or a pet fade out from this world of ours is inevitable even as we send away the thought that this will also happen to us.  But such is the circle of life, with death being as important to the cycle as life itself; as I grow older I seem to appreciate more the native American view of life being circular vs. the view of most secular religions which tend to view life as linear (as a caveat, I actually know very little about any religion other than just the highlights ).  But now comes a new thought about life and one which comes from of all places, scientists delving into space research.  This came about as I once again fell prey to one of my odd pleasures, that of reading the opening comments of an editor.  Be it a book or a magazine, I am always captured by these "forwards" and "introductions," tomes often presented at the beginning of non-fictional material (rarely, if ever, in

   Some decades ago one would hear this take on an old saying and think only of a popular, if a bit corny, television Western .  But after the (again) recent mass shootings here in the U.S. (and again, carried out with assault rifles by the shooters and in one case, body armor), outside observers have to wonder what is going on, not only in the "west" but throughout the United States.  Our President and our Congress (well, our Senate at least) continues to blame mental illness as the cause, as noted in a day-old editorial by of all places, the business oriented Bloomberg :  Maybe this time will be different. That’s the thought on the minds of many Americans now.  Two mass shootings in 24 hours have left at least 31 people murdered and many dozens more wounded.  This, just a few days after a shooter at a festival in California killed three and wounded a dozen — with shooting sprees in Brooklyn, Chicago and Mississippi that also left people dead, dozens wounded and communities