Notes From A Bear's Journey

     An odd couple to be sure, that original clash of stereotypes in Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau that made me wonder, what happened to the word "stereo?"  But old pairings and phrases aside, something else quite old and stereotyped just happened a few weeks ago (and by now likely forgotten)...the Oscars.  It had been well over a decade since my wife and I viewed any such sort of  "awards" show, especially those where a media industry pats itself on the back and makes a production of praising its own people...the Emmys, the Grammys, the Oscars (and those are just in the US for the practice has now spread across the world).  A quick peek at the BAFTA winners showed results almost opposite those of the Oscars.  How could that be?  And who exactly gets to vote anyway?    Quartz had this to say about the mysterious process of who the voting members are who decide who will or won't get an award from the "academy:" ... a 2012 investigation by the Los An

      As disgusting as this title may sound, I was intrigued when I remembered astronaut Mae Jemison say this on NPR  some years ago:  Pus is one of the neatest things ever, right?  When I was a little girl, I got a splinter stuck in my thumb and it got infected, pus came out of it.  My mother told me to go look it up and then I found out it has all these really cool things in it.  It's just the most fascinating thing that your body could do.  Pus (and boils) are words I remember from childhood but rarely hear these days, despite pus being described in  Medical News Toda y in this manner:  Liquor puris  is a "protein-rich fluid" (what??).  It went on to explain: L eukocytes, or white blood cells, are produced in the marrow of bones.  They attack the organisms that cause infection.   Neutrophils, a type of leukocyte, have the specific task of attacking harmful fungi or bacteria.   For this reason, pus also contains dead bacteria.   Macrophages, another type of leukocyte,