Notes From A Bear's Journey

      The other day I happened upon a soundtrack for the Broadway play, Beautiful , a show which lasted six years and one which I missed (it's still making a few appearances back east).  But then, I don't live in New York and even in my local town, rarely attend stage plays or musicals.  Don't ask me why, don't make me cry, don't make me blue, roared the Beatles.  And I say that because I've actually quite enjoyed them on the occasions I've seen them.  A lot of work goes into the choreography and the music and the lighting and on and on.  And of course, there are the lines and lines of talented and aspiring singers and dancers and actors, although I admit that I miss not being able to use the word actress* anymore (so said  without any political correctness).*  To diverge a little, the BBC noted that although women appeared on stage in 1656 (when the "king" first allowed it), it wasn't until 1700 that they could use the term "actress"

     We live in a time of hurry; Nex-gen (which Forbes describes as those born 1984 onward) nnd Gen Z (generally those born 1997 or later) are just two of these abbreviated labels.   It's as if the era of unsigned holiday cards, memes, and quick Apple "like" replies are becoming out new form of pidgin Engish.  I grew up with speaking pidgin in Hawaii, where a simple question such as "are you hungry" simply became, "you hungry" in pidgin.   So to back up a bit, I claim zero knowledge of Gen Z, or millennials, or you for that matter; in fact I know next to nothing about any "labeled" group which we  lump into convenient categories: religions, races, age groups, diseases, insects, and generally, life itself.  It's easy to think that we feel that we can more easily understand others by doing this, but every bit of life is individual, which may in itself prove difficult to comprehend.  I tend to think of the song from Hawaii, a pidgin version

      It's that time of year when retailers, many of whom glossed over Thanksgiving & Halloween, anticipate that people will feel obligated to wrap and buy and celebrate...and then return.  The "industry" of returned goods is exactly that, an industry; Christmas returns alone are estimated to cost retailers $300 billion, something glaringly brought to light in a piece in The New Yorker .  Imagine that you're Amazon or Costco or Target and the returns begin to arrive...as in a trillion dollars worth overall.  For many retailers, these items will return pennies on the dollar, if anything at all (most are sent to be destroyed, even if new).  Anything bought and returned is no longer new and generally cannot be put back on the shelf, which is okay if you are large retailer such as Walmart and able to absorb such losses (Walmart now accounts for over 25% of all grocery purchases ); but what if you're a small or middle-sized store?  A few dozen, hundred, or thousand

     Before Adam & Eve, or Tom & Jerry, there was LUCA .  Not the Pixar cartoon but the originator of life, the survivor or toxic seas and atmospheres, the creation which would soon lead to entirely new species, ones destined to face hostile worlds of both fire and ice.  LUCA would be the last (or first) ancestor of life, as in life 6,000,000,000 years ahead of our meager 200,000 years of human beginnings.  LUCA was the Last Universal Common Ancestor...or so begins the new series Life on Our Planet , which is the only "life" we know so far.  Way back when, volcanoes erupted for millions of years (yes, millions) and Earth was far from being a blue planet but rather a yellow one, its atmosphere tinged with methane .  As gases and heat and ice became dominant features, life faded away and had to rebuild.  This would happen five times, five mass extinctions where most of life --plant, ocean, animal-- would disappear, unable to cope.  But as the show points out, had any of