Thoughts (some personal)

(Can someone explain to me how I can have such good-looking and smart great grandchildren.  I'm sorry but I must brag. Two of them visited with me today and I enjoyed them immensely, especially their handsome faces and ability to do puzzles.  

Yesterday I received copies of the marvelous class pictures for two other gifted grand-children.

Maybe they are all ready for the movies or Mensa membership!)

Yesterday was also the birthdate for my first-born daughter, Elizabeth.  When she passed, a great candle was extinguished in my life.

Yesterday was also the anniversary of the wedding of Elaine's daughter, Emily, and Matt Schulman. Their wedding, during a hurricane, was an experience to be savored.

Pesky Ailment

Binge-watching "Breaking Bad" has got me thinking about Cancer and how far we've come in our fight against it over the years.

I just came across an issue of Bottom Line Health dated July 2008 and read about how they thought then about avoiding carcinogens.

01.  Don't consume food or beverages that contain the sugar substitute aspartame, also sold as NutraSweet and Equal. (It does have FDA approval.)

02.  Don't use mothballs and room deodorizers.  Many contain naphthalene, a carcinogen in animals.

03.  Don't microwave food or liquids in plastic containers.

04.  Don't hold a cell-phone against your head.

(Both my daughter and a friend died of brain tumors, and they had almost constant exposure to cell-phone emissions.)

05.  Be careful about X-Rays. (Notice how X-Ray technicians always avoid contact with them.)

06.  Get rid of asbestos!

  

Nutrition

The same issue of Bottom Line Health showed some tips on how to improve your digestive health.

01.  Avoid foods that cause indigestion. Instead, choose foods that easily digest such as fish, brown rice or steamed veggies.

02.  Shortly after awakening in the morning, drink an eight-ounce glass of room-temperature water.

Repeat 5 to 10 minutes before each meal.  Avoid iced beverages with meals and before and after.

(Damn! I know I can't conform to this tip.  Sorry, but I'm sure it would help me lose weight.)

03.  Squeeze fresh lemon or sprinkle vinegar on your food.  This improves the digestion of fats.

04.  Take a 15 minute walk after meals.

05.  Finish your bath or shower with cold water. (No way!  I was ordered to do that in Boot Camp and I hated it, even though I had done so after weight-lifting sessions when I was a teen-ager.  Besides, it could cause a stroke in old dudes like me.)

06.  Drink chamomile or peppermint tea after dinner, in eight-ounces of water.

07.  Use foot massage to relieve intestinal pain.  (Interesting.)

08.  Never eat when you are stressed.

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Today is World Octopus Day!

Facts

An octopus is an eight-limbed mollusc of the order Octopoda.  Each limb contains its own mini-brain.

There are 300 species of octopuses (octopi), within the class Cephalopoda along with squid and cuttlefish.

Octopi can live from 2 to 15 years.

Octopuses love to eat crabs and sometimes steal them from fishermen's nets.

They have blue blood (its oxygen contains copper rather than our iron), three hearts and a doughnut- shaped brain that exerts central control over its eight mini-brains. 

Octopi can recognize human faces and have been known to squirt water at those it doesn't like.

Octopuses are able to change both their color and skin texture for camouflage purposes.

A male octopus donates a bunch of sperm to a female and then slowly dies.

The female deposits around 80 eggs in a safe location, cares for them, and when the eggs hatch, their mother dies.

You can view a startling 3D image on Google.  It's amazing!

The Kraken

A legendary sea monster of enormous size, supposed to haunt the coasts of Norway.  Depicted as a giant octopus.  

This scary mythical creature intrigued Victor Hugo and led to depiction by Jules Verne.

"The legend of the Kraken may have originated from sightings of giant squid which may grow to 13-15 meters (40-50 feet) in length."

A recent usage by an election denier quotes the phrase "Release the Kraken" in "The Clash of the Titans" 1981.

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 (A doctor told me that Elaine's news is good.  I hope she can come home soon.  I miss her a lot.)

Humor (kind of)

01.  Valuable Items

Jeanne Cabioting reported in Readers Digest (RD):

"My husband placed a perfectly good set of used tires outside his garage with a sign that read 'Free.'

After a few weeks with no takers, he changed the sign to '$20.' 

The next day they were stolen.

02.  Money Manager

Two bank robbers tied and gagged a cashier after learning the combination to the safe, then herded the other employees into a separate room under guard.

After the men rifled through the safe and were about to leave, the cashier made desperate pleading noises.

Curious to hear what he was trying ti say, one of the burglars loosened the gag.

"Please," the cashier whimpered, "take the books too.  I'm $8,000 short!"

03.  Should have asked Alexa

WABC-TV reports:

To find out where the cable needed to go through the wall to connect to his TV, a "genius" set the alarm on a battery-powered clock to go off in ten minutes, tied string around the clock, and slowly lowered it through an air vent.  When the timer went off, he'd know where to drill.

Except the clock slipped from the string and fell out of reach.  Ten minutes later, it went off.  That was in 2004.  It has been going off at the same time every day since.

04.  At the Gamber Country Store

People loved to shop at the country store because whenever the owner put money in the cash register, he would recite an appropriate bible verse.  Here are a couple of examples:

When he sold penny candy to kids, he would say' "Suffer little children and forbid them not, to come to me..."

Whenever someone would buy a Father's Day gift, he would say' "Honor thy father..."

One day a man drove up in a fancy car, pulling a horse trailer.  He burst into the store and said, "I want to buy a blanket for my horse."

The owner showed him the only ones that he had on display.  The first cost $5.  The man said, "I'm not going to put a cheap blanket on him, what else do you have?

The owner showed him another one, exactly like the first, but he said that it cost $10.

The horse owner yelled and said that he wouldn't buy such a cheap blanket.  "Show me something better!"

The owner went into the back, picked out an exact copy of the other blankets, but in a different color.  He said that it cost $100.  This made the horseman feel good, because it was different from the others.

As the owner placed the $100 in the register, he recited the bible verse:  "I saw a stranger and I took him in."

05.  Call me up

Ann Hubby wrote in RD:

I returned home from vacation only to discover my phone was dead.  So I went to a neighbor's house and called the phone company. They assured me they would be over by the end of the day.

The day came and went.  So did the following day.  On the third day, I borrowed my friend's phone and called to complain.

"I'm sorry," said the customer service rep.  "We tried calling you to set up an appointment, but your phone didn't work."

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More about whales

But first:  Viet Thanh Nguyen on book banning:

"... book banners are wrong no matter how dangerous books can be.  Books are inseparable from ideas, and this is what is at stake:  the struggle over what a child, a reader and a society are allowed to think, to know and to question.  A book can open doors and show the possibility of new experiences, even new identities and futures."

Whale Info

I'm not sure if you can easily read the visual aid that follows.  Just be aware that there are over 80 species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, and they are enormous creatures.

Facts:

The humpback whale is a songster. It creates original 20-minute long songs from clicks and grunts and melodic squeals.  These songs are repeated by other humpbacks.  It's a lot like "Your Hit Parade."

If you want, you can "adopt" a humpback.  They are all named based on their original tail flukes.

I "adopted" "Stub" for a few years.

The humpback is a mysticeti or baleen whale.  Mysticeti means mustache whale because of the hanging baleen sheets in their mouths, through which they screen water to catch minute creatures

(krill) to eat.

The sperm whale has the largest brain ever evolved. It can stay submerged for over an hour and, as mentioned, can dive way way down to get its lunch.

The sperm whale is an odontoceti, or toothed whale, and it is the largest of such creatures.

Captain Ahab didn't have a chance!

Mysticeti (baleen)

Bowhead Whale

Right Whale

Humpback Whale

Gray Whale

Blue Whale

Odontoceti (toothed)

Sperm Whale

Killer Whale

Bottlenose Dolphin

Harbor Porpoise

Susu

Giant Bottlenose Whale

Cuvier's Beaked Whale

Strap-toothed Whale

There is a set of facts and special story about each of our friends, the whales.

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Rambles:

The Amazing Sperm Whale

The United States whalers almost caused sperm whales to disappear.  After New Bedford stopped hunting them, the Japanese and Icelandic whalers almost finished the job.

The New York Times reports on a new book about these endangered creatures. Sperm Whales (The Gentle Goliaths of the Ocean) by Carl Safina.  It's rather pricy at $50, but I think that is a decent price for an interesting book like this.

Mr. Safina writes in his forward:  "... after near-extinction in the 1970's, many species of whales - and thus our oceans - are slowly repopulating."

With other scientists and photographer, Gaelin Rosenwaks, Mr. Safina traveled to the blue waters off of the Dominican Republic, where it seems that one can look clearly to the bottom of the sea. 

There, the crew could:

listen for the sperm whale sounds

watch sperm whale family activity

watch them dive a mile to catch squid

watch them sleep (vertically)

watch them groom

watch them nurse

watch them play

and take some fantastic pictures.

I've watched and adopted Humpback whales, but I've never seen a sperm whale in its environment.

Those of you who live in Massachusetts are missing out on a treat of a lifetime if you don't go on a whale watch.  I've been on a few, especially out of Plymouth.  (You know... near that rock!)

You won't see sperm whales, but you definitely will be entertained by humpback antics.

Think about a whale's brain. The sperm and humpback brains are much larger than ours and much more convoluted.  It's too bad that we can't communicate (mind bend?) with them.

And think about the size of the largest creature on earth today - the Blue Whale.  I read somewhere that humans could probably walk through the Blue's brain tubes without touching the sides.

By the way, I was upset to read how packs of Orcas are attacking and eating some Blues.  I hope that wasn't true.

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(Su Zee and I are roaming around this empty house, awaiting word on Elaine's condition. 

Meanwhile, I just tried a recipe for onion pie.  Never heard of it until the other day.  Supposed to be delicious. It was very easy to make and I'm waiting for it to cool.)

Curiosity

The New York Times runs stories about living in Manhattan each Sunday and I like to read most of them, like this one (paraphrased) from Howard Deixler.

He tells how he was intrigued by three netted balls in a deli cheese section.  He couldn't resist and squeezed each one, finding them very hard.

As he squeezed the last one, the proprietor yelled, "It's a bocce ball, leave it alone!"

02.  Rain Storm?

As I have been sitting at my computer, I have heard what sounds like a raging rain storm battering our house.

Apparently, it's just a crew power-washing the house.  This has not been done in years.  There has been an accumulation of grime and grit permeating all parts of the house from the acid rain gift to us by the State of West Virginia.  

03.  Brain Size

Over the years I have read that two alcoholic drinks per day does not harm your brain, and may even be good for it.  Now, Professor Gideon Nave, PhD of the Wharton School says: "One daily drink is linked to the shrinkage of white and gray matter we see in aging." OY!

04.  Risky Foods

Gregory A. Plotnikoff, Minnesota MD, says that mycotoxins, naturally occurring toxins by molds in certain foods can cause shortness of breath, chest pain, sinusitis, cognitive impairment, anxiety and depression.

Foods to look out for:  corn, cereals, nuts, spices, dried fruit, fresh fruits and coffee beans.

Greg says that you should not store foods in high-moisture areas, and consume such risky foods in moderation over six months periods.

Double OY!

05.  Pass the spices?

These food items contain mood-enhancing chemicals:

Basil

Black Pepper

Cacao

Cinnamon

Cloves

Flax

Omega-3s

Oregano

Rosemary

Truffles

Turmeric

Joseph Feuerstein Md of Columbia University reports that the use of these spices favorably impacts your mood, immune system, sleep and overall health.

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 (I'm sad and lonely today.  Elaine is in the hospital for an infection, but I expect her home in a few days. Meanwhile I will gorge myself on episodes of "Better Call Saul.") 

More Inventions

Bobby Mercer has another list in his book "ManVentions." 

"Top ten best Manventions of the 1980's." 

01.  Personal Computers - What would we ever do without them? What! No more Facebook?  Life would not be the same.

When I first started programming computers for the Social Security Administration (SSA), they were monsters that filled rooms and required large storage areas that contained data on magnetic tape.  And then, personal computers appeared and allowed me to have on my desk computer power that was unimaginable in that earlier time. 

Would anyone except Isaac Asimov have believed this back in the 1950's?  Just think about the future.

02.  Post-it Notes - another amazing invention.  Who doesn't use them.  I know that I can't function without them.

03.  Pac-Man - Japanese video game that never interested me or my kids.

04.  Spandex for Women - this is a synthetic fabric that is praised for its elasticity.  Dirty old men love to look at its clinginess.  Women think it is extremely comfortable, and they like how it retains its original shape when not used.

05.  Big Hair - enough said. (However, I just remembered a nice lady at SSA who was already over six feet tall and whose hair put her into the seven-foot range.  All of the ladies complained when she sprayed that bird's nest in the lady's room.)

06.  Cell Phones - another amazing invention.  With very little effort I can call and talk to my cousin Lulu in London (UK).

Forget about:  "Hello, get me long distance."

07.  MTV - an American cable TV channel that launched in 1981.  It's still around.  It plays 24 hour music videos as well as "exciting" movies. (Or so I've been told.)

08.  Members Only Jackets - From Europe Craft imports:  narrow epaulettes and collar strip and knitted trim.  I have a couple of these but didn't know I was so "with it."

09.  Game Boy - this is "an 8-bit hand-held game console developed by Nintendo."  I guess its a wonderful thing for the "game-addicted."

10.  Leg Warmers - ugly half-stockings that one applies to cold legs.  Women like to show them off, men hide them under their trouser legs.

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