On Packaged Dinners, Etc.

The game is to find out what to do with the stuff ... in very fine
print. Now a good many of the purchasers of these one-person
packages are actually one person. They are one person because
their companion has left once again, or they never had anyone, or
everyone else has died off, and with the passage of time their
eyes are not good, even if both of them are operational.



If the maker of the product "believes" in it, he/she should surely
want the message of what to do with it to be clear. So, to get at
the mystery. While "Nutrition Facts" are in quite large print, and
"Ingredients" are in capital letters, the finest print is reserved
for what the hell to do with it to make it edible. By the time you
scrutinize this minutiae, if your time is worth anything, you are
better off to take a taxi to the nearest fast food outlet, because
this cute package is sure as hell not fast food.



Skipping "For firmer rice, decrease water; for softer rice,
increase water", you come to microwave instructions. By this time,
you have had two drinks more than you should, and a couple of
chocolate bars are starting to look good to you.



It seems that food purveyors spend zillions on experts to design
everything, from recipes to more efficient packaging. Hell, I
could do that, much better. Could you tell me where I apply?
I'm tired of just working for a living.

That Y Chromosome

Princess Kiko
has had her baby and it is a boy. This will end Japan's facing
the possibility of one day having an Empress instead of an Emperor.
For 2000 years there has been an Emperor, held to be divine until
Hirohito
resigned the idea of divinity after the atomic bomb led to surrender
in World War II, and an American general ran the country.



All this is against the background of advances in knowledge of
DNA
and of the nature and mechanisms of life. Eggs have X chromosomes,
while sperm have either X or Y, meaning that sex is determined by
which brand of sperm gets to join the X egg -- XX gives a female
individual and XY a male, so chance determines whether the ruler
is divine or not. In many other cultures the same has been true,
where only a male could be the boss. It is a flip-of-the-coin matter.



Always, there has been a method of selecting sex of infants, age-old
in India and very current in China. This is usually by drowning or
suffocating unwanted female babies, although smashing the head end against
a wall was often the method when, in the southern American colonies,
a white mother had a "tarred" baby.



It is interesting to note that eggs are few, like one a month, while
sperm come in the millions, and also interesting that more males
are born than females, who make up by living longer -- there
are more old women than men.



We are talking sex, and as we consider other species, that becomes
very interesting indeed. Some invertebrates, I think among the
molluscs, have adults which are male some years and female other
years. I'm sure we will get back to discussions of sex again.

A Few Good Men Books

One of our more recent philosophers said, "The trouble with reading
books is that there is so much in them that isn't so." So I am
suspicious of all books, including the few that I am so
fond of that I re-read them, some frequently.



On the matter of wealth, the top of the list is
The Richest Man in Babylon;
what he said was that to be rich, we should put away the first ten
percent of income at least, before we use or spend anything. Soon,
we should consider how these "slaves" can work for us, in complete
safety. In time, we become very wealthy, of course.



If I have a favourite book, it must be
Instincts
of the Herd in Peace and War, by
Wilfred Trotter,
pointing out that enlargement of the group affords protection within
the group; this is true from single cells to great societies.



Of Stars and Men
takes up the story and emphasizes again that families, villages,
cities, nations and leagues of nations all attain strength and
variation by the smaller units becoming dependent and giving up
some functions. Today we see world becoming more and more of a unit,
with resulting internal pressures and clashes
by formerly independent states, cultures and religions.



My list is not very long before I hasten to add
Alice in Wonderland,
by a mathematician, for a favourite young friend.
It is full of sly, worldly wisdom. Really good books are worth
re-reading, again and again. So they do tend to be few.

What's Wrong With The Morning?

There are people I know who are adverse to getting up before noon.
Since I fade at about 9 p.m., I do not know what time they put their
heads down, but I suspect 2 or 3 a.m. My going off so early and
their going off so late can't be accidental, but why? It must
have to do with diurnal rhythms, acquired or built-in or the result
of outside agencies.

In the wild realms of nature, we have extreme examples of such rhythms.




The most extreme I can think of is the breeding of the
palolo worms
in the South Pacific. With precise timing each fall,
the adults ready for it simply rise to the surface layers and burst,
releasing tons of eggs and sperm, the whole mess a feast for sea
predators and marine birds (and humans).
Fertilizations take place, of course, nearly all wasted.
The successful ones are the survivors, the ancestors of the next
go-around.



Another is the return of the swallows to
San Juan Capistrano
in the spring. Accurate to within a day or so, something moves them
to migrate. There are many more examples. So, what about us?



Just as babies become slowly enculturated, necessarily embedded in
human groups, we adults are the effects of just such continued

multiplied habits and groups of habits.

For myself, coming from
farm people who had to get up early to accommodate the animals,
I was never surrounded by people who were late starters. Also,
at one stage I had to get up early to write radio items I was to
record later that day.



So, these habits are habits, but how acquired, how transmitted?
As I usually do, I'll give it some more thought.

The Fat Of The Land Is Sinking The Land

One third of the world's population goes to bed hungry. Drugs are
saving the disease-prone, and many who have not considered the
consequences are having large families, often without attending
males and with increasing statistics on
AIDS.
Natural resources are exported or used for products that are
exported, with the benefits going to non-residents, mostly
corporations, mostly foreign. However, in the rest of the world,
people are getting fat, disastrously fat.



Everywhere, we are urged to eat carbohydrates which turn to
fat, or fried foods, or meat whose production involves great
use of land, water and food. In short, we are all, worldwide,
either starving or getting fat.



Even in rich countries, "health" services, meaning services for
the sick and unhealthy, are stretched to limits and face
impossible demands in the all-too-near future. It is clear
that young fat kids are almost certain to become obese adults;
fat adults represent increasing percentages of
diabetic and
coronary
cases; and as the
"baby boomers"
become older, and ultimately old, numbers will soar. All this
is for sure, and may be a lot worse than we think.



So, food industries with very efficient promotion through
the media are, although maybe unintentionally, but hardly in
ignorance, producing sickness and early death.



Yesterday, we killed off
passenger pigeons
and most species of
bison.
Today we are fattening ourselves for the kill, while starvation and
AIDS
stalk the less "fortunate". Individually, we may be
intelligent, but collectively, this seems stupid.

My Wonderful World

I understand that not everyone's world is good, and some are very bad,
as for the one-third of humanity which lives and dies without ever
not being hungry. But my world has been just better than I could have
hoped or managed. My original geography, my family DNA, my early
childhood crossing with world events, were all so unusual, even
startling, that it was as if someone was orchestrating my
introduction into this life of collisions of cultures we witness now.
We may experience it next door, or by media, or airline, but in any
case it is inescapable. To encapsulate it, for my sins I live in
Toronto,
by far the most cosmopolitan city in the world, if you count
the 150+ languages, cultures and religions which flourish and, of
course, clash here. I'm not saying all is good, whatever that might
mean, but boring it is not. Now, back to me.



I was born at an early age, I understand, and according to all reports,
with fairly firm opinions in advance of any direct fresh air evidence
of the things about which I held these opinions. We are all born
somewhere, among people, and so our first views come with the words
and grammar of our parents, relatives, friends, and enemies, and
the views of these people we soak up as geese adopt whatever they see
as they hatch, whether that is a farmer, a hen, a rock, or a PhD.
And so, like yourself, I was pushed out physically, and punched out
mentally and physiologically into whatever I was when I began to
experience this world, which, I insist, is wonderful.

With Respect To Age

I have been moved to write one on how I am regarded, treated,
looked at, and all that. I thought of "My Age is Showing",
"People Are Getting Nicer", "A Grin in Time Wipes Whines",
but maybe I can write this again, later of course, with a
different tag like one of these, or maybe "It's the Way I Walk".



People have begun to hold doors, to wait for me in various
circumstances. Is it pity, is it admiration, or just respect
to old age? True, I am older than I have ever been, in fact
older than any related male I know of. My maternal grandfather
mowed by hand all day, and that evening ran over a mile to help
the bucket brigade up the lake to put out the fire at the local
creamery, owned by them all, and got "cold in his kidneys" and
died at 87. My paternal grandfather died with a knife in his
back when he was throwing a troublesome drunk from his saloon
restaurant in a mining camp in Colorado. But I am the oldest
male living past 90. So perhaps my age is beginning to show.



Maybe I should lie about my age and say I am only 85 or so,
or perhaps I should lie the other way and say I am 99. Depends
on how much respect I want, or do I want pity? Not that, please,
as it might be catching and I might begin to pity myself, and
that would interfere with my plans to go see my grandchildren
in Wales, and come back by going the rest of the way around the
world.



People do form opinions about age, and their attitudes
are affected, sometimes for the better. Altogether, getting older,
and even old, does have its advantages in some respects, sometimes
including more respect, I think.

The World Is Getting Smaller

If you were able to control a large area which had many kinds of
plants and animals that lived on the land and on each other, and
which had roughly the same critters and climate as one hundred
years ago, and you put a fence -- an impenetrable
barrier -- around it, and each year made it smaller, do you
imagine that the "balances of nature" within your enclosure
would not be affected? Not so. Species dependent on the same
resource would, of course, be in conflict with each other. As
your fence hemmed in less territory, the conflict would become
more deadly, and some things would decline or perhaps disappear.
Fear, anger, slaughter would increase. So should we wonder that
as populations grow, our world with its finite resources would
be fought for and endangered? Add wild growth in communications
and you have the world we live in.



The world, in effect, is getting smaller. Something has to give.
The earth is for all life, and we humans are not the owners and free
exploiters we have thought we are. We imagined God to be made
in our image -- or was it the other way around? -- and we paid
no mind to the evidence of the past -- the fossils, the
disappeared species such as passenger pigeons and bison, victims
of our "free" enterprise.



Mostly, we think that we humans, or at least our particular colour
in our generous open spaces, will be alright. Whatever is wrong
we will fix, somehow.



However, our world is getting smaller, more crowded, its
irreplaceable resources exhausted. God has watched many experiments
fail. It seems we are determined to join the list.

Habits CAN Be Changed

I have just come from Sunday brunch with my wife, youngest daughter
and her husband at my Country Club, and during lunch I kept thinking
about how habits hold us all. We were on time at twenty after ten
as agreed, which is my own life-long habit, partly from my years
in radio and television but also following the ways of life of
my maternal grandfather, who was always ready twenty minutes early.
I favour him because he was short among tall people, as I am. My
paternal grandfather was six foot ten, or rather a brother of his
was. About my father's father I never knew, as he was knifed in
the back by a drunk whom he was throwing from his dining room saloon
out in Colorado during one of the gold rushes. I'll get back to
that later, but this column is about habit.



Actually, my daughter and her husband were right on time, on their
own time, because they are knowingly and even consciously twenty
minutes late for everything. I know that they could change that
if they wanted to enough. Now I'll go back to a time when a surgeon,
whom I had taught to cut up cats in pre-medical school, took
two-thirds of my left lung for
cancer
in a nine-hour operation.
When the pathology report came back the first of the following week,
the suspicious lump had been calcified tuberculosis. So I was sent
to the TB hospital for some months for a disease I hadn't had for
years. There we were on bed rest for the first couple of
months, except once a day to the toilet. We were supposed to sleep
from noon till one o'clock, although in bed 24 hours a day, and
I thought this was hilarious. However, after about three weeks
I could tell when noon approached because I was falling asleep.




That's when I really learned about habit, and have used it to my
benefit many times since. It works especially well if you use it
to replace a bad habit. After two weeks, you feel guilty if you
don't do whatever it is now your habit to do.



Change of habit can be done, and you can almost make yourself over,
habit by habit, to a new, better designed you.



I have been writing these pages or columns or whatever long enough
that I feel vaguely badly if I were not to do it. Since it is a
habit for me to tell other people what to do, now you can go do it.