Notes From A Bear's Journey

    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 ...

   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 t...

    Wait, what??  This off-the-cuff post will be one of those magic tricks, a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't sort of thing because in a few short days its localized holiday plea with have passed; but I did it this way so that I could bring up a few local issues, even as the larger issue is something that is happening worldwide, that of the state of homelessness.  In the U.S., the actual homeless "count" is said to have gone down according to a piece in U.S. News & World Report , although that still means over 550,000 people out on the street.  And my state of Utah is no exception, despite our often cold winters and temporary bed space in shelters now dropping.  But all is not lost as reported last year in The Week :  Many experts believe the best solution is to simply put the homeless into low-cost or free apartments, without preconditions.  Utah, which has a "Housing First" strategy, has one of the nation's lowest rates of chronic homelessness...

   My neighbor loves coffee, almost obsessively so, sometimes purchasing "rare" beans for $90 a pound, roasting them (he has his own semi-portable roaster) and savoring the light, delicate flavor and color of what appears in his cup (the end result of which I think is so thin and watery that to quote an old phrase, tastes to me like something "rinsed in dirty socks").  As you can guess, I lean to the more robust side, preferring my coffee dark and "bold" (my neighbor retorts that I like my coffee "burnt").  But it is much the same with my taste in beer, leaning towards the dark stouts that have a bite (vs. the mild, almost milky 4% flavor of the traditional Guiness)...my friends, almost to a person, drink only the lighter lagers and IPAs and consider my pint glass which is filled with that rare almost-bitter stout,* an exercise in drinking "mud."  But Popular Science had a brief piece on the universality of coffee, noting their differe...

   The question sometimes comes up when you call a friend and ask what he's planning on doing that day and the reply is, "nothing, I'm retired."  But the key to such an answer may rest in the addition of the word "successfully" because for many, retirement is a distant dream.  Said The Week : 45 percent of Boomers currently have no retirement savings.  A Gallup poll found that 74% of Americans plan to work past 65, with some Boomers becoming "workcampers" who combine work and retirement by buying an RV and touring a seasonal rotation of places to work....Between 2015 and 2030, the number of people 60 years or older worldwide is expected to grow 56 percent, from around 900 million to nearly 1.8 billion.  In China, alone, those over 65 are projected to spike from 8 percent of the population to 24 percent in just 30 years .*  For many of those "boomers," pensions and anticipated Social Security payments are either nonexistent or are falling...

    Those of you not in the U.S. and perhaps puzzled at trying to figure out what is going on over here with all this impeachment stuff, well, you're not alone.  Impeaching a sitting president has only happened twice before and the upcoming "articles of impeachment" go-ahead vote would mark the third and follows virtually the same rules and methods used in the past two hearings* despite all the vitriol.  Basically it will boil down to this: if the House has its hearings and votes to impeach, then Trump will be impeached; it then moves to the Senate to hold a "trial" to decide whether to actually remove him from office (this has never happened).  Don't worry if you're puzzled as you're in good company as to how all of this proceeds since a President who is officially tried, impeached, and removed from office can NOT pardon himself of the charge but he can run again and be re-elected ...what??  But even more confusing is that if Trump IS removed from ...