Brown Motion

 Ratings and revenue.  That is the American way.  Television which in its legacy form is dying due to content no one cares for is trying to use other legacy franchises like the Olympic Games to stay relevant. Is it succeeding? I have no idea.  I do not watch any Olympic action myself.  But perhaps I am minority.  For those that do the spillover from what athletes do on and off track / or podium is gossip. Take the Simone Biles story.  Everyone and their uncle including NPR discussed her as a hot favorite for Team USA.  Reality not so. She backed off after complaining she had lost her sense of space not being able to tell up from down when spinning mid air.  Could be dangerous. 100%. But wait.  So she is human?  Yes. But is she an Olympian? Yes.  Because she possessed and perhaps continues to possess skills that distinguish her from most mortals. But is she a gold winner.  No.  To me that should have been end of the st...

 I knew not what Parvo meant.  But that is what connecting with or in my case re-connecting with an old colleague did.  Old not by age but in terms of people who I knew sometime back.  For the record I looked it up and it is a virus - the one that can make canines sick. Canine in question - Australian Shepherd and part Poodle.  And that she (pronoun as is the zeitgeist) aka my friend is now the proud parent of aforementioned mix breed also a she.  Apparently it is an undertaking.  Also costs a bit.  What with an all organic lifestyle with hard to understand meat preparations that this brown colored four legged creature thrives on. We also chatted more about non four legged beings that we used to know.  Many have moved on to change their marital status or added dependents of the sapiens kind.  Some found new livelihood with more dollahs to do basically the same mind numbing work but hey covid has changed the paradigm some. This friend of ...

 America is full of them.  Bill Bryson in his uncanny ways showed us many of them and I can relate.  Bill wrote a book about his return from England where he spent two decades and then settled back in New Hampshire. Book was aptly called 'I am a stranger here myself'.  In it he went on to point out many things that are normal in America and very convenient like an insinkerator. Sounds like an incinerator (google even spell check suggests the latter but it is not the same thing). This is a disposal installed in most American kitchen sinks that can grind food waste if it enters the hole.  It also makes satisfying gurgling sounds as it digests solids and sends it to the drain. Does not exist in other advanced countries.  True that. But on the flip side Americans will also spend time looking for a closest parking spot at a gym only to stand on a rubber belt that goes round and round to walk off their extra fat from a quarter pounder with cheese. Whilst securing...

 There are two problems in American thinking.  The title highlights them both.  Americans or at least the install base of leaders of this country seem to view the world as to be won and that ideas or events not to their liking need to be dealt with as if in a war. Think of all the media or press on decades of past events .. 9/11 plane crashes in NYC led to a war on terror Ongoing drug epidemic caused by poor legislation has manifest into a war on drugs Recent SARS novel virus driven pandemic has led to rhetoric of war on the virus And to boot the ever present hubris of America shall win this war too. It is beyond laughable, it is downright criminal.  That this line of thinking simply adds more fuel to the fire and causes people's perception (wrongly so) that we as humans can in fact solve this favorably by declaring this so called jihad on things we cannot accept as reality. Oddly there is not much of a war on climate change.  The liberals are trying to drum up ...

 The Carolinas.  Our new home.  Close to Lake Wylie named for a founder of what is now Duke Energy - the local power company. We also made friends with people who own a boat - a tri pontoon affair that can do 30 knots without much baggage and is stable as she goes. This Sunday eve we went out with a group of local friends to check out the lake views.  Fun fact  - a road bridge over Lake Wylie is the only route where North Carolina is to the south and South Carolina is to the north of the highway as it crosses over the lake. Below are some pics.  Some on the lake, some under the aforementioned bridge and some of the shoreline.  The lake has 320 some miles of it along its perimeter. illustrative map of the water body - Lake Wylie SC and NC A burger joint on the water Under the Buster Boyd Bridge connecting the two states

 Continuing to seek out the new this weekend we drove due west.  Encountering the green towns of Greenville and further west the university town of Clemson in SC.  Couple of my cousins went there to further school themselves and thrive in academia after that. Wonderful southern style barbeque discovered along the way.  Satisfying burps all the way.  Below are some pictures from the trip. Clemson University, Botanic Garden  Huge Football Stadium @ Clemson - Tigers is their mascot hence the paint Smoking Pig - amazing barbeque in Pendleton outside Clemson SC.

 Humankind in its current form is advanced.  In certain parts of the world more than others.  Some regions are considered wealthy versus others.  Some more liberal.  And on it goes with labels and identifiers. But overall we are still inhabitants of this one single planet hurtling through space and perhaps. just perhaps this time we hear a major warning. Covid. Global weather extremes. Crime and Violence.  Wars and terror. Drugs and overdoses. Greed and destruction. Amidst this backdrop, the president of the IOC asked that we come together as one in solidarity.  Solidarity is what will win the day he proclaimed on the stage in Tokyo where the Olympic Games began a year later than advertised for the first time in the history of the event.  Pipe dream? Much of calamities listed are man made as in self -inflicted, and we have come to a cross road. The decisions we make will guide the immediate future.  The answer is not in solar farms or battery...

 First they said it came from China.  Then China got all mad.  How dare they call Covid a Wuhan Virus? Then they labeled it as SARS COVI 2 or some such.   It meant - severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2   So while it was bad for respiration it also introduced us to the idea that it had something to do with Corona?  It remains a popular lager in North America as well.  So now we were further confused as to the nature and origins of this so called virus.  Or syndrome. I for one then could not resist writing this blog to further expand on this arcane subject of which I have negligible knowledge and posit that we are now moving into Greek territory.  Wonder if the islanders are upset? First there was Delta (never knew what happened to the Alphas and Betas... but whatever...) then comes Lambda.  I just read about it.  But experts are asking us to not panic. What? Who is managing the alphabet please?  Clearly someone ...

 A trip to visit a couple University campuses in the south.  No reason.  Just explore their verdant grounds.  Stop by for a good meal in the surrounds and drive back via small detours to visit the furniture making epicenter of the world.  We visited University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus.  Followed by Duke.  They are both located in the Raleigh area of NC state. Former is part of the public school system and the latter is a private institution named for an industrialist and with foundations or religious affiliation with Methodist branch of Christianity. The campus of each school is nestled amidst dense Carolina pines a few miles west of the state capital of Raleigh.  This area has recently grown in popularity with many tech companies finding an eastern footprint where costs of doing business are lower than Silicon Valley. Both are renowned for their research grants and quality of academic excellence and the alumni that go on to grace ma...

 Written by  Siddhartha Mukherjee.  A very learned man.  Winner of the Pulitzer and so on.  This book is a tome and I could only finish reading it in a matter of days because I have nothing better to do.  I  had previously read another book he wrote about cancer.  That was intense. 'The Gene' is also characteristically profound.  It spans a period of 1,000 years in history and focuses on the one common denominator of all that is alive - the gene.  The manual for living creatures. The book specifically steers its focus toward discussing the human genome (the collection of all the code needed to make us human) and what it means in the arc of time from the past to the present condition and to what the future may hold. The book is phenomenal not because of being well researched and thought provoking but because it connects the dots with so many other fields in sciences and humanities.  It shows the reader that all disciplines and s...

 History.  From recent past to the very beginning when man started keeping track of time.  They even call it historic context for a reason. But to me history is really a matter of perspective.  It is in and of itself just a catalog of events.  How they are perceived or interpreted is what makes it someone's history. Humankind continues to advance the species through new ideas and innovations each year.  This week a private citizen (albeit richer than god) went flying to the edge of space (defined essentially as air 55 miles above the surface of the earth at sea level) using a special vehicle attached to a rocket. Richard Branson or as the platitudes suggest a prefix of Sir ahead of his name, made it into space for a few minutes on his own company's aircraft branded Virgin.  Talk about on his own dime.  Quite a lot of dimes this. What it marked was a milestone in human space exploration where essentially you send an untrained traveler blasting thro...

 I do not mean in places like India or Indonesia.  There it will take more than a mild pandemic to knock off sizeable chunks of humanity to have a dent on human density.  I am talking about venues or areas where you would assume people gathered voluntarily or not. Take traffic.  The much maligned idea in developed cities anywhere in the world.  Or on the highways that bring this mass of vehicular flow into them.  Humans evolved to create it.  Too many people want to arrive or leave certain locales by their own choosing. Going to work or home or to play.  Traffic everywhere. Or movies or plays or stadia or concerts.  Take any instance where we would normally choose to gather in quantities and have a go at whatever the going was meant for.  Covid has put it in perspective. It could be a good thing. Most of the human movement in the post industrial world to me has been meaningless for the most part.  A marketing machine gone crazy want...