Wrap It Up

     Back in the days of old Hollywood, when film arrived on bulky reels and directors used cheerleading-type megaphones, you'd hear that call at the end: that's a wrap!  Or so I thought.  Such a phrase didn't enter the film industry until 1970 (what was I thinking?).  Here's how one etymology site listed the origins of the word "wrap" (for the noun, anyway): late 15c., "fine cloth used as a cover or wrapping for bread." ...a type of women's garment, recorded from 1827..."plastic film or cellophane used as a wrap" is from 1930..."end of a filming session" is attested from 1970..."sandwich material folded up in flour tortilla" is by 1998.  But jump to the verb's beginnings and wrap --as in "let's wrap it up" (meaning, said the site, to "put an end to"-- can be dated back to 1926).  Cecil B., where are you?

     But since this was the holiday season, the story of wrapping paper (not literally wrapping a ream of paper but wrapping...oh, you know what I mean), dates as far back as the 2nd century.  And it has evolved into quite the ginormous industry (an expected $25 billion in the US in a few years, predicted Grand View Research).  And what to do with all that gift wrap?  Unfortunately, the one thing NOT to do is to put it into your recycling bin since so little of it is recyclable...anything with tape, glitter, a shiny layer, a sticker, a crinkly sound when crumpled, a bow or ribbon, and a host of other things (such as tissue paper) mean the recycling company has to pull it out lest it jam up its system with blotchy inks or barely seen plastic (hey, the invention of plastic wrap is an entirely different subject).  But the deed is likely already done, the jumble of festive papers already hauled away, and you've moved on to college sports and glittery balls dropping from tall buildings since the new year is just waiting in the wings.  But before I move on as well, you may find this one last glance at how that decorative sort of wrapping paper got its beginnings here in the US.  From The Atlantic and a story about two brothers who were running their stationary shop in 1917 and enjoying a very good year of sales: ...so good, in fact, that they ran out of their standard inventory of tissue paper.  Not wanting to be hampered by their success, but needing a replacement for the sold-out paper, they found among their supplies a stack of “fancy French paper”—paper meant not for display, but for lining envelopes.  Figuring, “hey, why not,” they put that paper in a showcase, setting its price at $0.10 a sheet.  And the paper sold out—“instantly,” Mental Floss notes.  So, during the holiday season of 1918, the brothers tried the same trick, offering lining paper as gift wrap.  And, again, the sheets were a sell-out hit.  By 1919, having confirmed that the lining sheets' sales weren't a fluke, the pair began producing and selling their own printed paper—decorative, and designed for the sole purpose of wrapping gifts.  And an industry was born.  The brothers?  Joyce and Rollie Hall.  Their store?  Hallmark.

     In with the old, er, out with the old and in with the new (a Freudian slip as I get older and make valiant attempts to push back the slowing down of my life's carnival ride).  Perhaps that's why the other night, my wife and I dug through our DVD collection* and watched Love, Actually, a film now nearly 20 years old but with that rare chance to see a Hollywood star lineup when everyone was in their prime: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Chiwetel Ojiofor, Keira Knightley, Billy Bob Thornton, Lúcia Moniz, and even a dapper Rowan Atkinson.  Besides seeing all of those "stars" looking vibrant and fresh in their 30s and 40s, we enjoyed the opening narrative that started the movie: Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.  General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that.  It seems to me that love is everywhere.  Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.  When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love.  If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around. 

     We all have our loves, those moments when the first snowfall arrives or the first bulbs pop out come spring.  This early start to winter for us has been a doozy, a single storm bringing nearly 4 feet of snow to one of our ski resorts, and me using my snow blower so much that I had to make a run for gas after only a few short uses (although I do tend to clear off the sidewalks and driveways of many elderly in the neighborhood, as well as a few young parents with kids readying themselves for school).  But yikes, it's a lot of snow for this early in the year as you can see by the photo taken of our back deck.  No grumbling here, as I am again comfortably returning to a warm indoors, ready for a cup of tea and always aware that so many others both here and abroad do not have that option; for them the freezing cold and the tall mounds of snow must make time crawl to a stop as the sun hides itself and the frost jumps on its chance for center stage.  Without a warm coat or a place to simply "take the chill off" life itself can be bitterly cold, the physical giving way to the mental as if there is no end in sight (an interesting article on such mental fatigue appeared in The Atlantic with the piece noting, "there are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which").  If I could speak to winter right at this moment I would simply ask, can we start to wrap it up about now?

     So, my "present" to you dear reader is a random selection of thoughts and pieces gathering, or rather piling up, in my head, sort of that year-end set of notes that seems to be cluttering up both my mind and my laptop.  No specific order here, just a random list which starts with a glimpse at final wishes.  Ever reflect on those?  That a doctor might give you a not-so-good prognosis, or your memory might soon start to really go, or that the police may yell "get down" a bit too late, or you'll have a bad nightmare that makes you wonder what happens on that "other side."  Yes, morbid and yet I can't help but notice that my local cemetery is always busy.  I reflected back to Greg Melville's book and his chapter on cremation: The human body is 60 percent water, and about 1,000 pounds of wood is needed to produce enough heat: about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to turn a person into ashes.  Cremation was difficult, if not impossible, in regions without heavy tree cover -- and where there was enough timber, cutting and hauling the wood required was no small task.  Even today, in India, where about 84 percent of people are cremated in a traditional Hindu funeral pyre, about 50-60 million trees need to be cut down annually for the job...(Today) Crematoria are often powered by natural gas, and one cremation is estimated to create somewhere around 55 pounds of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of driving a car seven hundred miles.  Cremations also account for 5.5 percent of America's mercury emissions, due to the burning of dental fillings.  Good heavens, even leaving this earthly body is fraught with problems (you may want to check out alkaline hydrolysis instead and how Smithsonian summed it up).

      Speaking of bodies, mine just underwent an MRI, one of those noisy machines that somehow scans you in every direction without you or the magnet inside moving (here's how the Mayo Clinic described it: ...the magnetic field temporarily realigns water molecules in your body.  Radio waves cause these aligned atoms to produce faint signals, which are used to create cross-sectional MRI images).  I came back and peeked at all of the images (yes, along with our DVD player my laptop still has an optical drive so I could put in the disc to view the results) but of course it was an uninterpretable mess to me (but fascinating).  Not so easy a process for other patients who may be undergoing treatments where contrast dye is injected for a computed tomgraphy (CT or CAT) scan...there's a shortage of the dye!  Well, the Shanghai facility for GE (which provides 50% of the iodized dye that US hospitals use) is now back up and running but as with all supply chains, the half-year lockdown still affects some worried neurology departments.  It reminded me of that saline bag shortage when hurricanes devastated parts of Puerto Rico, reminding us that we're all dependent on the global supply chain.  Which brings into question our medical manufacturing process...ever wonder just what's in your pills, asked Bloomberg Business.  Here's part of what they reported: A little more than four years ago, scientists at Swiss drugmaker Novartis noticed an anomaly while testing the quality of an active ingredient, 45 tons of which had been ordered from a Chinese supplier.  The scientists observed a spike on a readout that looks a bit like results of  a lie detector test, indicating an impurity.  It was, upon further examination, NDMA, a chemical the World Health Organization classifies as a likely carcinogen — one that had once been used in rocket fuel and is found in cigarette smoke...The latest to join the ranks of nitrosamine-tainted drugs is Merck’s widely used diabetes treatments Januvia and Janumet.  Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration said it was allowing them to stay on the market with higher-than-allowed nitrosamine levels to avoid shortages.  A couple days later, Wall Street panicked over upcoming lawsuits claiming the heartburn medicine Zantac and its generics called ranitidine gave people cancer, sending shares of Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline plunging.  The drug was pulled from the market in 2020 because of NDMA contamination.

     Well why bother with all that when life boils down to the unknown anyway.  Heck, we could get hit by an asteroid (over 616,000 are currently being tracked, with nearly 30,000 of them considered close enough to be listed as Near Earth Objects).  But even those "tightly" clustered in what we name The Asteroid Belt (by Jupiter) are pretty far apart from one another, as in about a million miles.  "Space is emptier than you might think," wrote astrophysicist Chris Lintott in the London Review.  He went on: Somewhere out there, moving steadily on its orbit, is the next large impactor that will hit the Earth, and a lot depends on its size.  An asteroid a hundred metres across landing in the wrong place would destroy a city; one a kilometre in diameter would be big enough to have an effect on the global climate similar to a nuclear strike, plunging the world into long-lasting winter.  If something the size of the Chicxulub impactor, perhaps 15 km across, were to arrive, we probably wouldn’t fare any better than our reptilian predecessors.  Yikes, get hit by one of those larger ones and we'll all become the next batch of petroleum, although such fossil fuels didn't entirely come from dinosaurs wrote National Geographic.  

     But speaking of fossil fuels, if you peek back at all the mining and digging and drilling that we do in order to run our cars or heat our homes or make those rolls of plastic wrap, you'd sort of think that once done --especially with a year of record profits-- the oil and gas and mining companies would close the well or mine, say thank you very much for the resource, and return the land to a version of what it was.  But alas the truth is quite the opposite, even with the new infrastructure bill wrote High Country News; similar story for coal mines sending toxic wastes into rivers and eventually into the land and ocean, said the magazine in another issue, and echoed by NPR.  But forget the land for a moment and ponder the escaping methane; wrote The Guardian: Methane is the main component of natural gas, used for fuel, and also one of the most powerful greenhouse gases, responsible for as much as 30% of the rise in global temperatures to date.  About 40% of methane emissions from human activity come from the energy sector, mostly from leaky oil and gas wells and pipelines, or fracking operations, but in many countries few attempts are made to control emissions.  Last year, leaks from fossil fuel operations amounted to as much gas as Europe burns for power in a year (noted Smithsonian in a similar piece, methane emissions increased in the atmosphere by a record amount last year).  But hey John Q. Public, no worries; this press release emerged from the Department of the Interior: The Department of the Interior awarded $560 million to plug orphaned oil and gas wells across 24 states, the largest single investment in oil field cleanup in history.  This funding is part of the $4.7 billion orphaned well program that was included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.  Over 10,000 high-priority wells will be cleaned up with this funding...As of 2021, there were over 129,000 known orphaned wells on state and private land...This funding is part of $250 million allocated for cleaning up oil and gas sites in national parks, national wildlife refuges, national forests, and other public lands.  In total, there are an estimated 130,000 orphan wells across the country which could require around $8 billion to clean up.  Wait, high prices and record profits for the fossil fuel companies but you, the taxpayer, foot the bill for the cleanup (did I mention the subsidies you also provide to such companies for even finding such fuels...as in nearly $6 TRILLION of your tax dollars in 2020, wrote YaleEnvironment360?).  Just something to think about as you gas up that SUV...

     But wait, you say...what sort of a cheery end-of-year post is this?  Well it's cheery for me in that those mosquito-like subjects that have hovered around me for months can now be wiped off of my slate (apologies for dumping it onto you).  Out with the old (perhaps you as the reader may now be thinking that that should have included me as well) and onward to the new...herewith, a bevy of quick links and subjects to keep you busy for at least a few minutes.  1) check out the older (2015) book by Mary Norris, a copywriter who lets us know that Webster (yes, that Webster before George & Charles Merriam bought out his copyright) was responsible for converting many British spellings to those more familiar to us: musick/music, defence/defense, masque/mask, colour/color. theatre/theater.  And author Norris also noted that Webster studied 26 languages.  Put that in your bonnet (the book is actually quite a fun read); 2) The Conversation had a quick blip about microbes and how little we actually know about them: If we squeezed Earth’s 4.5 billion years old history into a single year, life would exist on a microscopic scale until the end of October.  Humans would appear on the last 30 minutes of the year, and we would be aware of the existence of the microbes just less than three seconds before the new year; 3) Got milk?  If you're asking that, you may also be asking  about all the different types of "milk," from cashew to rice; here's how National Geographic broke it down; 4) And if milk alternatives weren't enough, what about digital currency, asked Smithsonian; a bit of good news emerged from these digital "mines" as a few smaller crypto-mining rigs are re-using some of those old abandoned oil/gas well pads as well as burning the excess methane for power, wrote High Country News (the article also notes that crypto mining still uses enough electricity to power about 6.7 million homes); 5) if you've ever wondered how or why a dam is removed (how do they divert all that water?), Smithsonian had this one explanation; 6) and Machu Picchu is far from the only Inca area discovered; there are actually even larger ones still in use (and which you can hike, wrote SA Expeditions); 7) turns out that plastic production has doubled in the last 2 decades and yet we still only recycle 9% or less of it, which is totally fine with the plastic/petroleum industry, wrote Bloomberg; 8) another growing industry (one replacing even cattle and fish farms in Columbia) is cocaine, wrote the same magazine: Satellite photos show that the amount of Colombian land planted with coca rose to a record of more than 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) last year, more than five times what it was when the infamous Pablo Escobar was gunned down in 1993...Seizures in Europe have tripled in just five years; In Africa, cocaine seizures increased 10-fold from 2015 to 2019;The amount captured in Asia increased almost 15-fold over 2015-19.  But let me at least end on an encouraging note: if you're wondering how teeny-tiny you can make a difference in climate change, a good place to begin may be in your own backyard wrote The Washington Post.  

     Phew, all of that information can be too much at this time of year, and may give you nightmares (which can possibly be changed, wrote a study in Current Biology).  But this time of year is also a time to dream, to think of what may be ahead and to do so with hope and with optimism.  Out with the old,  said again.  Old thoughts.  Old ideas.  Old beliefs.  Perhaps Santa is real.  Perhaps God is real.  Perhaps life and death are real.  Perhaps even the afterlife is real, a world where hatred and war don't exist and instead is filled with kindness and compassion, a world where you are happy --truly happy-- to see those people and animals you love, a world where you (perhaps suddenly, or for the first time) see who you really are.  And perhaps that world already exists...

      One of my most enjoyed quotes from the late Andy Rooney was this: It's paradoxical that the idea of a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.  May we all welcome the new...ideas, year, and you..

This photo was sent from a close friend as a joke...at least I think it was a joke.

*As to those DVDs, we still have quite a collection of what we consider about 50-60 movies and concerts worth keeping.  Why, you may ask, especially when streaming is now so easy and so popular, so much so that our library continues to cull its own collection of well over 7,000 DVDs.  One reason we hang onto those DVDs is partly because we enjoy watching the "extras," the deleted scenes and the director or writer explaining what exactly they were trying to achieve or show in the film (same with the concerts which often offer interviews with the musicians on writing or performing or setting up the stage exactly how they wanted it, something both Don Henley and Michael Jackson were fanatic about in the concerts we saw).  In the case of Love, Actually we were fascinated with the soundtrack, the songs both surprising us (as was the case in Cruella) and how each song fit so well into the sequence; but it turned out that screenwriter Richard Curtis had very different songs in his head when he was writing the script only to find that many of them didn't fit when it came time to edit the film.  His choice of song at the end (the Beach Boys' God Only Knows) was somewhat of a fluke, Curtis starting to go through his alphabetically-arranged music collection and arriving at the studio with just 2 albums instead of the 50 he had planned, and as he mentions in the "extra" section, the song just fit. The other reason is that many films such as Love, Actually --and these are not rare or foreign films and concerts but rather popular mainstream ones-- are not on the major streaming channels unless you "rent" them, a problem we're seeing more and more as the streaming channels fracture into smaller and smaller segments, each wanting your paid subscription...nah, we just go grab one of our DVDs when we want to escape for a feel-good few hours.  That said, a nice sequel of sorts to Love, Actually may be the Norweigan film, A Storm for Christmas which also interweaves random characters together in unexpected ways...