Notes From A Bear's Journey

      My dog and I see things differently, which seems like a no-brainer, but let me give you a for instance.  It comes in threes is an old "wives" tale with little to no basis, sort of like the "myth" of needing to walk 10,000 steps daily, wrote Psychology Today (it was originally a marketing scheme to sell fitness trackers developed in Japan).  But once such idioms are planted in your mind, they becomes Manchurian in a sense, embedded and difficult to shed, particularly when it comes to bad luck or to bad things happening.  Why is that?  The flat tire or the small ding in the fender is followed by a sprained ankle or a bonk on the head.  Nothing too serious, and often with a bit of time and a bit of cash, you survive and chalk it up to a bit of bad luck (yes, we woke up to that flat tire ).  But when a good friend got a rare form of cancer, one almost always with a bad outcome despite aggressive treatment, it was suddenly in our fa...

       There is much going on in the world today, and more and more of us (it seems) are beginning to voice our opinions, whether it's at dinner tables, town halls, or national protests.  Often the conversation remains civil, unless you're one of those GOP Congress folk now taking their meetings virtual simply to avoid confrontations with their constituents (wait, isn't that their job?).  And the question remains, what makes you upset?  Is it the plummeting markets and that fading hope of retirement; or the debacle that was Signal Gate, or Netanyahu's IDF bombing and burying aide and ambulance workers  and  their vehicles to hide evidence (wrote  The Guardian ; videos of the incident and more at The Rocket Medic ), or the tariffs increasing the prices of goods, or that despite nearly a million people taking part in the Hands Off protests around the world a few days ago, Trump was in Florida playing golf?  And nobody in Congress...

     Wait a minute, didn't you just read about bird flu (and the flu in general) in the last post?  Well yes, but as Scientific American wrote, there may have been a bit more to our severe flu season because of what researchers began calling the quad-demic.  Norovirus? (hand sanitizers won't work with the norovirus, wrote Discover )  RSV? (which hits children more than adults, although one of our adult friends got it)  And now a new Covid strain found in bats?  And what about all those "resistant" bugs going around, the ones seemingly able to avoid our antibiotics and our normal remedies of rest and lots of liquids?  Add to all of this the likely return of polio, measles, and tuberculosis?  What the heck?  Where's the  good  news?      With spring around the corner and many of us feeling that we've finally turned the corner, hearing about diseases is likely low on the list of things we want to hear about....

      Have you seen the price of eggs?  Hmm, a silly question for most of us, despite friends telling me that eggs are still inexpensive in countries such as Mexico.  But unless you're looking at that frozen turkey in the fridge, you'll notice that the prices of "fowl" have also jumped substantially, in some cases doubling or tripling in price.  The issue is the culling of entire flocks of chickens due to the spread of bird flu, which for many commercial producers, can amount to millions of birds per farm.  But first, a few basics of the flu in general.  Here's a quick summary from UCLA Health on the difference between a cold and the flu:  The common cold is caused by a virus, usually rhinovirus and sometimes coronavirus.  An identifying characteristic of a plain old cold is that the symptoms it causes occur from the neck up.  These include a sore throat, clogged sinuses, a runny nose, sneezing, the production of thick (and seeming...