This Week

This week has been productive.

- I read another book of time travel; specifically, how to build a time machine. Written earlier than the first one I read, this said traveling to the past was possible, but had some limitations. I'll discusss all of this in a later post as I said before.

 

- Read a book about oranges. It was written in 1965 by John McPhee. Actually, it's a re-read.I first read it in 1993. Everything you wanted to know about oranges.

- Read a terrific novel about a Russian count who sentenced to confinement to a very plush Moscow hotel for the reast of his life beginning in 1920. The book ends in 1958. A major surprise in the last sentence - and no, it was not all a dream!  one of the very best I've read in years.

- Discussrf with my doctor to increase my daily insulin shot. Still once a day, just going up 5 units to 30 from 25.

- Still watching re-runs of MASH. Saw the two where Radar left the show. He was going back to take care of his mom and the farm in Iowa becasue his Uncle Bill died. The real reason he left the show was because of burn-out and wanting to spend more time with his family.

- Actually went out twice this week: had to follow my wife as she dropped off our cars for inspection and oil change. Strange feeling being out. I pretty much styed in the car. 

- Watched two DVD movies this week. One was about finding rhe famed City of Gold. It was National Treasure 2: The Book of Secrets. The other was also a sequal: Night at the Museum 2. This one had Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart.

 

 

 

Time Travel Problem

 Something very disturbing regarding time travel has come up. Reading over my notes from the last book I read, Time Traveler, a nonfiction book by a physicist who as a young boy lost his father to a heart attack when the son was ten years old. He decided to build a time machine to go back in time to tell his father to not smoke and live better so he would not die. Short story, he became a physicist and developed a theory that might work. Just one problem.

One cannot go back in time, only to the future. I'll explain next time.

COVID Activities

 I was reading my favorite blogs today - Far Side of Fifty and A Percussionist's Notebook - and was amazed all over again how creative and capable people are. Whether it's whittling, growing flowers, replacing tamborine heads, making different sounds on a triangle, or making drum pads, I am truly envious of folks who have those talents.

The latter blog is my younger brother's. My wife says that he's "a man of action", while I am a thinker. But he thinks too. We talk every Sunday via Skype and get to reminisce about our younger days.

What do I do? I read. And I study. When I was younger and in the Army I was active. I led soldiers in tanks. I fought in Vietnam. I carried the Olympic torch in the 1984 Olympics. I ran marathons and ultramarathons.

But with COVID, my active physical skills are limited. But I still read. I learn. What am I reading about? A few things recently:

    - Time travel

    - History of major pandemics in the last 100 years

    - The Black Death in England in 1348

    - The 1920 Osage Indian murders in Oklahoma

    - The colonization and slavery of Africa in the 17th-19th centuries

What am reading about now?

    - Oranges

    - Making concrete for building

    - The discovery of the telephone

What's on tap?

    - The American ice trade in the 19th century

    - How to build a time machine

    - A memoir about working at menial, low paying jobs and trying to survive

    - The last voyage and death of Captain Cook

I guess I am too busy reading and studying to do any other things.

Things I've Learned From Recent Reading (TILFRR) #1

 It's pronounced "tilfer". I've decided to periodically write about some things that I learn while reading my books. Sometimes the information will come from different books; sometimes from just one. Today it is just one - At Home,  by Bill Bryson.

Where does the word board in "room & board" come from? Originally, board comes from when people, particularly in rural homes, often did not have a table from which they would sit at to eat. Instead, it would be a piece of wood, or board, that they would use straddling their knees and balance their meal on it. When they were finished with the meal, the board would be hung on a nearby war. After a while, the word board became to mean the meal as well. When some traveler wanted a place to stay and came upon an inn or house with rooms, an added meal would be an extra; hence room & board". And the persons who rented the room were called boarders.

Before electricity one of the best things to use for lighting was whale oil. And the best whale oil was from the sperm whale, who stored large amounts of it in its skull. It is called spermaceti and the whale can store as much as three tons of it in their cranium. When the spermaceti hits the air, it turns a creamy white. Hence the name. No one is quite sure what use it is to the whale. It contains large amounts of nitrogen. Some think it may help with buoyancy. Some think it may help protect the cranium because of the tendency the whales have headbutting ships.

By the way, sperm whales are also known to produce ambergris, meaning "gray amber" in French, but often is black as well. It is often found floating or on beaches after the whale gets rid of it. It is made from the beaks of squids that the whale eats and is indigestible. It is used in the making of perfumes but can be eaten as a food as well. It's considered a delicacy and been said the taste reminds one of vanilla, though I wouldn't know.

Repairing Hershey's KIsses

 The other day my wife told me the strangest story. It was while we were sitting in our reading chairs in the living room, each eating a Hershey's Kiss candy. She said, "They still haven't fixed the tips". When I asked her what she meant, she said the tips on the Kisses were still broken off. I looked at mine and she was right.

As the story goes, the tips began missing as far back as early 2019. Eagle-eyed customers began writing Hershey's asking what happened to the points. It was ruining the look of the famous cookie that has a single Kiss sitting on the top of a round cookie (I forget the name). The company said it would look into it.

It never found out what was causing all of the tips to be broken. A spokesperson did say, however, that soon new Kisses would be coming out with complete tips. But that has not happened to date, a year and a half later.

An obvious answer as to what is causing the destruction of the tips would be the machinery that makes the candy. But nary a suggestion from the company. And when one opens the foil around the candy, there is no evidence of the missing tip.

I'll still eat them. And they will still look good sitting atop those cookies. But I sure would like to know what causes it and where are the missing tips. 

Maybe a future Twilight Zone episode?

My Reading

 I've been on a reading tear lately. I finally completed the book on pandemics and viruses and other epidemic-type diseases. It was an extremely readable tome - 500+ pages. I learned a lot about SARS, Ebola, AIDS, as well as the various flus we have had, like the Hong Kong, H1N1, and of course, the 1918 Spanish Flu. I recommend it to one and all. It's called Spillover by David Quammen.

I also finished next month's book club selection: Educated by Tara Westover. She wrote about growing up in a Survivalist's family in Idaho, working in her father's junkyard and being homeschooled after a fashion, and helping her mother with her midwifery and essential oil business. 

She ends up going to BYU, Cambridge, Harvard and ends with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. But her life was not easy. In fact, she is so brutally honest that I did not enjoy the book from that standpoint. She was so brutally honest. I kept yelling at her to "Do the right thing", and she wouldn't. But it is worth reading. It ends well.

The last book I completed this month was In the Wake of the Plague by Norman Cantor. It was about the Black Death, in 1348 England primarily, and it's after-effects on England and Europe as a whole. It was short, interesting, and not a difficult read.

Currently, I am reading three nonfiction books about the 1876 Presidential election,  our nation's first election that had an electoral question about it; a story of a young boy who becomes a physicist so he can build a time travel machine to go back and keep his father alive who died when he (the boy)was ten; and small tome about the history of an old - 1851 - English rectory, room by room, and discussing everything and anything that could reasonably be connected to it.

My fiction book is about a Russian count imprisoned in a plush Moscow hotel in 1922 and cannot leave it. I know the book goes to 1958. It was a bestseller last year.

More about all of these in the days to come.

Kardia App

This week I purchased an EKG device that works with an app you can download on your phone.

The ruler is only for size comparison. To work it, I open the Kardia app on my phone then place the tips of my first two fingers of EACH hand on each pad. It begins automatically for one minute, recording an actual EKG printout that I can send to my doctor. Or I can just keep it for historical purposes.

It will show Afib abnormalities - I have actually Aflutter so I hope it will detect that if I ever need it.

I did it once. Wednesday. Normal. My plan is to do every Wednesday unless I feel I need to do it to check.

"Prepare to Gird Your Loins"

Recently we were watching the film, The Devil Wears Prada, one of our very favorite movies - though any film with Stanley Tucci is in falls into that category - and Tucci's character is warning that Meryl Streep's character is on the proverbial warpath by saying, "Let's go, everyone, prepare to gird your loins!"

I've often heard the phrase and thought it meant to get ready for a verbal or physical battle of some sort and we would be playing a part. I was close. Dictionary app defines it as

"prepare and strengthen oneself for what is to come"

Looking further, I found this online:

 

So now you know. Pretty cool, yes?

Repairing

I have spent considerable time repairing the last post. This new update on the blogsite has given me problems. Anyhow, it's fixed now so hopefully, you can read what it was supposed to say.

I'm going to read now. I might get back to writing today.