Motomynd: Global warming: How concerned are you...really?

[In the article that follows, Motomynd puts the heat on Moristotle as well as on Moristotle's readers. But to show he's a good sport, Moristotle confessed yesterday that he turf turds his lawn.

Recently your blog was abuzz about global warming. From the responses [see comments on the post "In awe of Nature's four billion years on Earth"], the consensus seemed to be that not only was the earth warming, but people were causing it. So here is a quiz designed to find out if your readers are concerned enough about global warming to actually be doing their part to combat it—or if all is just rhetoric. Answer the following questions to establish your GWAR—Global Warming Action Rating:

1. The stereotypical great American lawn is a green desert that, from an environmental perspective, ranks only a couple of notches above a parking lot. In our quest for tidy expanses of green grass we kill the earth beneath it with chemicals, spew pollutants while mowing and trimming, and waste water and energy. What does your lawn say about your GWAR?
    A) I have a yard that requires no mowing, watering or fertilizing. It takes care of itself and I pay the necessary attorney fees to keep my neighbors and the zoning commission at bay. Perfect score! 10 points! You don't just talk the talk, you walk the walk!
    B) Most of my yard is natural. I never seed, feed, or water. I do essential trimming with hand tools, or with a battery powered trimmer—and I recharge the batteries with solar panels or a windmill. Great score! 7 points! You talk, you walk, and you compromise on your terms.
    C) Part of my yard is natural. The rest I feed, seed, and water and I take care of, or hire someone to take care of, with a traditional gas-powered mower. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) To keep peace with the neighbors I have a yard that requires mowing, watering, and seeding. And aerating and plugging, whatever that is. No score! Zero points! You talk, but you don't walk—you barely crawl.

2. American business commuters create an immense carbon footprint. When traveling back and forth to work, what do you do to help with the problem?
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I carpool, commute alone in an electric vehicle, or use a gas-powered vehicle that gets at least 60 miles per gallon. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and can’t be bothered thinking about it.  Zero points! But you knew that already, right?

3. American casual travelers also create an immense carbon footprint. How do you travel for fun?
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I carpool, commute alone in an electric vehicle, or use a gas-powered vehicle that gets at least 60 miles per gallon. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and can’t be bothered thinking about it.  Zero points! But you already knew that again, right?

4. Since this is America and we can’t get away from travel, let’s talk about how we go on vacation. Yes, there is a recurring theme here.
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I fly, or travel with three others in a vehicle that gets at least 30 miles per gallon, or drive with at least one other person in an electric vehicle. 4 points. At least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and still don’t want to be bothered thinking about it. Zero points! But you already knew that again, right?

5. The typical American meat-based diet is another huge waste of resources that creates an oversize carbon footprint. So how do you rate?
    A) I’m a vegan. I use no animal products at all. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I’m an ova-lacto vegetarian. I eat a grain and vegetable-based diet supplemented only with eggs and milk. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I am working on becoming a vegetarian. Eating mostly fish and chicken, and just the occasional burger, counts for something doesn’t it? 4 points. Again, at least you are trying.
    D) This is America, of course I eat a lot of meat. Zero points! Yes, I already knew that.

6. How and where we eat can impact global warming almost as much as what we eat.
    A) I never cook. Really. I eat everything raw. Perfect score! 10 points! (But how on earth do you do it? We really want to know!)
    B) I cook once or twice a week. The rest of the time I warm leftovers in a solar oven or microwave. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I cook when I want and eat out when I wish. But at least I favor dimly lit restaurants that serve mostly vegetarian fare. 4 points, keep trying.
    D) I drive a gas guzzler, sit 10 minutes in a drive-thru with the motor running, and cook outside on a grill that uses more fuel per meal than a hybrid car does in a week. Yeah, I know, zero points.

7. Enough about food—how about shelter?
    A) I live in a tent (or tepee or yurt) and I travel as the season changes like Native Americans and Mongols, so I never use heat or air. And by Mongols I mean descendants of Genghis Khan, not the motorcycle gang. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I live in an environmentally friendly multi-family housing complex, or a single-family home completely powered by solar or wind. Great score! 7 points!
    C) My single-family home is powered by the grid, but at least I updated the windows and insulation and use insulated blinds, drapes, and curtains. 4 points. Keep it up.
    D) I’m pretty sure we added storm windows on the north side of the house, but gas, oil, and electricity aren’t really all the expensive, so I use what I need. Yep, zero points.

8. And how about minimizing the environmental impact of that shelter?
    A) I carry my tent on my back and walk from winter home to summer hangout. What more can I do? Hard to argue with that. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) We use a state-of-the art thermostat to maximize the benefit of our environmentally friendly heating system, water the garden with rain water, and compost all we can. Great score! 7 points!
    C) We use one of those fancy computer-controlled thermostats, wear more clothes indoors in winter so we can set the heat lower, and we threw out a bunch of stuff and downsized to a smaller home. 4 points. You are getting there!
    D) If it is cold we turn up the thermostat and if it is hot we turn it down. So what? Zero points, at least you are consistent.

9. How does your recycling affect your GWAR?
    A) We buy items only in environmentally friendly packaging and recycle and compost everything. We never have trash. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) We recycle all our cardboard and paper products, and all the plastic bottles and jugs, but keeping track of all those different numbers on plastic is just a little too much. Great score! 7 points! That is a lot more than most people do.
    C) Cereal should be in a box, not a bag, so that’s the way we buy it. But we do recycle the boxes and a few other things. Four points, about average.
    D) We have four trash cans. Do you really expect us to find room for a recycling bin? Need we even say zero points?

10. Here is a chance to earn some bonus points.
    A) I never buy water in plastic bottles. Great! Add 10 points to your score!
    B) I maintain recommended tire pressure and check it weekly. Good! Add 7 points!
    C) I turn the thermostat down to 60 in winter and wear a sweater made from recycled plastic bottles. Nice touch, add 5 points.
    D) I always recycle all batteries and old electronics. That counts. Add 3 points.

So what does your GWAR say about you?
    100 or more points: You are a global warming action hero! They may make a movie and market a line of toys based on your exploits.
    80-100 points: You not only talk the talk, you walk the walk.
    60-80 points: Not awful, but you need more walk and less talk.
    40-60 points: Probably about average, sadly.
    20-40 points: Barely below average, even more sadly.
    0-20 points: Do you just not care? Or are you among those people who believe the world is going to end in a few months, so why bother?

Retired to turf-turding

Post-retirement employment wasn't long to seek. My wife and I agree that May is our month to aerate our Bermuda grass lawn, and I started the job today, using my Hound Dog Coring Aerator¹, bought in anticipation months ago at Lowe's Home Improvement, Mebane.
    The little reddish cylinders are the cores of clay pushed up when I stepped down on the aerator. "Cores"? They're turds! And I didn't spend two and a half hours today aerating a small section of lawn, I was turf-turding.

A healthy bag of turf turds

When you do your own turf-turding, if you have a boss who doesn't respect you and is no more your friend than the white ladies in the movie The Help (see my April 1st post), you can daydream about serving your boss a pie like the one Minny baked for Miss Hilly.
    Or if you very recently retired from such a boss....
_______________

1. 
   
   

My new daily retirement countdown

Appropriate illustration
from the parking lot
of the Alamance County
Arts Council in Graham
(from this morning's visit
there with Pineapple Girl)

As I start to write this, my Retirement Countdown clock says 2 hours 52 minutes to go. Goodness, that means it's after 9 p.m. Time to retire so I can rise eager early on my first official day of retirement....

Motomynd: A caution on "beyond the rail" experiences

[In conveying this article to me, Motomynd commented, "Think of it as a public service provided from a personal perspective. I was a pall bearer at a funeral last year of a man much younger than me who died of an allergic reaction very similar to the one that almost killed me. I was very fit, he smoked. I was fortunate, he wasn't. His heart blew up, mine didn't. That's all it takes to make the difference between being here and being gone."]

Walk across
Golden Gate Bridge?

Your thoughts on “the rail” and all the things that might be linked with it brought back a rush of memories. The question I would add to your musings is, Are you taking any new medications? It is also a question I would urge anyone else with similar symptoms to ponder. While your situation could simply be reacting to the deep thinking you are doing about the dramatic change coming to your life–retirement, and the unexpected stress it may bring with it–there may be more to the story.

From age 25 to 37 I made my living by photographing, writing about, and competing in adventure sports such as mountain biking, white-water kayaking and canoeing, rock climbing, trail running, snowmobiling, and downhill and cross-country skiing. One June morning halfway through my 37^th year, I was out for a pre-dawn run with one of my Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, and as the sun rose over a hill in my suburban neighborhood I was suddenly overcome with symptoms similar to what you describe: unsteadiness, a bit of disorientation, and a sudden bizarre, unexplainable fear of the eight-foot drop to the small creek that flowed beside the road. Despite having run that exact route hundreds of times before, I had to slow to a walk to get myself together. The 200 yards along that small drop felt like I was on a tightrope.

An hour later I felt fine and since we had no web back then to research such things, I dismissed it as a one-off, as the Brits say, and got on with my life. Two days later, on a beautiful Friday morning, I was making the three-hour drive from my home to participate in a 50-mile mountain bike race in West Virginia when I crossed a favorite bridge over the James River on Interstate 81. I had canoed and kayaked that section of river many times and I always loved looking at it and rekindling those memories as I crossed high above at 70 miles per hour. This time, however, as I looked downstream I felt my pulse climb and a sense of dread and dizziness descend.

In retrospect this should have been a clue to stop and think about what was different in my life, but a mountain bike race and a national ranking were at stake, so I drove on. The race actually went well. I won my age group decisively, placed very high overall, and except for one moment of unexplained fear on a steep downhill, felt my old self. Then I drove over the same bridge on the way home and had what could only be described as a panic attack: racing pulse, sweating palms, the works.

The rest of the week passed uneventfully as I firmed up plans to head west the following Monday to do a spate of national mountain biking assignments. The only speed bumps were a wedding to photograph for friends and a bit of a cold or allergy, for which I had gone to the doctor a week earlier and was taking some sort of new medication.

Wrapping up my work week, I was driving to the office on Friday when my pulse roared to a level I had never felt. It was going so fast I couldn’t begin to count it–and I was used to doing such in calculating how hard to run or pedal and how much rest to take in between. In a wicked bit of irony, I drove right past our local hospital just before the road rose up to meet me and twisted like a scene from one of those black-and-white Godzilla movies from the 1950s or 60s. Finally having realized that something wasn’t right, I pulled into a parking lot on the right, turned off the ignition, tried one last time to count my pulse, and, for all practical purposes, died.

To make an already too-long story at least a bit shorter, let me simply say that instead of heading west to go mountain biking the next week, I went north to specialists at the University of Virginia. And for the next several months I made trips between there and other cutting-edge medical facilities instead of trips to great biking and climbing venues.

The problem? An allergic reaction to a new allergy medication.

The result? Some bleeding in the brain, a “miracle” survivor’s story to tell, some lingering occasional bouts of vertigo, and suddenly having to give up a dream career and take on the horrors of doing studio photography to pay the bills.

A footnote: Within six months the panic attacks from driving over bridges went away. After a few years they became so distant I would laugh as I recalled them. Nearly five years later I drove north on I-81, hauling a van-load of gear for a commercial photo session in Massachusetts. I crossed the spot over the James River without incident and thoroughly enjoyed driving the huge spans across the wide Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Later I crossed the mighty Hudson River near West Point, all without incident.

That night some friends and I joked about it over drinks. “Thank goodness that is behind me,” I said, “since I’m driving to Alaska and back in a few months. I can only imagine the bridges out that way.”

Three days later, with our photo assignment done and all wonderful in the world, I loaded the van and headed back to Virginia. Then, as I approached those same bridges over the Hudson River, I was suddenly gripped by a panic attack so violent I wondered if my heart was going to stop again. Slowing to barely thirty miles per hour I somehow stayed in my lane and made the crossing, but I still don’t know how. Later that day I suffered through almost identical symptoms crossing the Susquehanna.  

In the years since I have learned frankly way too much about the long-term impact of injuries to one’s brain and heart, about the affects of caffeine, alcohol, sugar, and stress, and about how once a “trigger” is planted deep in the brain, you never know when it will fire. Your “trigger” may have been set at the Golden Gate Bridge, even though it didn’t fire until years later at the hotel in Atlanta. It may never fire again, or it may the next time you get in an elevator to the third floor of a modest office building. I would suggest you give especially careful thought to your state of mind and balance before braving an escalator, no matter how small.

The moral? Don’t live in fear, because your world will shrink faster than you can begin to imagine, but don’t confront too many fears head-on without professional help because you may blow up your heart in the process. Most importantly, if you do have a sudden unexplainable symptom you have never experienced before, stop and ask yourself: “What new medication am I taking?” 

Two days to go minus two

I've told some people who asked me what I would do in retirement simply that I'd go out a little later in the morning to put out the bird seed.
    I was going to do that this morning, but it hit me that our feathered visitors shouldn't have to wait because of my change of circumstances. I took the seed out at about the usual time (early).
    I'm glad I did. I felt better in my heart and conscience. (Aren't they sort of the same thing?)
    Today has effectively been the first day of my retirement, because I'm taking a vacation day on Monday, the day before Official Retirement Day One on Tuesday. It has been a happy day. I've enjoyed yelling "I'm retired" to neighbors out in their yards as I've driven or walked by.
    I went into a shop along Clay Street in Mebane (the site of the City's annual Dogwood Festival today) and told the proprietresses that I had a tie rack I don't use anymore, would they be interested in buying it from me to sell in their shop?
    They would. "Congratulations on your retirement. What are you doing to do?"
    "I'm going to go out later in the morning now to put out the bird seed."
     (It's still a good line, even though I now know it's a lie.)

Beyond the rail

Renaissance Concourse
Atlanta Airport Hotel

My room was on the ninth floor. Yesterday (Friday), standing a few feet from my door, I took the photo to the right. By my estimation, the Renaissance Concourse Atlanta Airport Hotel has at least two hundred rooms whose door is about ten feet from a short railing leading to misadventure. Maybe three hundred rooms, assuming that you might not have to fall but two or three floors to kill yourself. And you can't see it well from that photo, but the balcony for each floor along the far right juts out farther than the balcony below. There's no chance on that side of grabbing a railing on your way down (obvious from the photo below).

From an elevator opposite the
spot where the photo above was taken

    Upon my arrival Thursday morning for an overnight meeting, the sight of the balconies had made me feel uneasy—the same way I'd felt walking across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge in 1967 or 68. I hugged the hotel balcony wall as I walked from the elevator to the far corner where it turned out Room 938 was located. (It was a good location so far as the window view was concerned.) When I returned to 938 at the end of the afternoon session, a housekeeper's cart blocked my way along the wall, so I had to get closer to the railing than I liked. I considered moving the cart, but I made myself buck up.
    Yesterday morning, preparing to go down for breakfast, I thought about calling the desk to send someone up to escort me to the elevator. The intervening hours had given me too much time to reflect on the Golden Gate Bridge Feeling—the sense that your body might suddenly try to jump over the rail and you wouldn't be able to stop it.
    It made me wonder how many suicides each year aren't really suicides in the sense of a willful act to do away with yourself, but just people's bodies acting on their own without the bodies' "owners" being able to intervene? Might be difficult to get statistics on that.
    Again, I steeled myself and went unescorted. I may have walked faster than the day before.
    But why was I having this uneasy feeling now? I'd been near high cliffs and rails quite a few times since 1967, and I had rarely had the feeling again.

When our meeting convened on Thursday afternoon, we'd all been asked to introduce ourselves and share "something interesting." Most of us already knew each other, from one or more previous annual meetings of our enterprise, but several people were new this year.
    When my turn came, I said,

In eleven days I'll no longer be who I am, so there seems to be little point in telling you who that was. But for those who don't know me yet I will say that this is my tenth annual meeting. I am, for the few days left before my retirement, the state coordinator for North Carolina.
    I've been asked one particular question so often lately, it might possibly be of interest to you how I'm dealing with the prospect of retirement.
    The most interesting thing about it to me is the strong polar-opposite feelings I have about it.
    On the one hand, I'm really glad to be leaving the organization I've worked in for fourteen years. One of the reasons is that it has already ceased to be what it was, and I very much dislike what it has become. Your organizations back home are hierarchical too. So has mine always been. But over the past few months it has become rigidly so—more top-down, more chain-of-command. The commands come down, and subservience is supposed to go back up. If you want to communicate with someone in a different part of the hierarchy, don't call them directly, but go up your chain to where the two hierarchies meet.
    Enough! I'll be relieved to escape my division's oppressive regime.
    But on the other hand, I'm already sad thinking that this is not only my tenth annual meeting—it's also my last. I'm going to miss working with all of you on our beloved tuition-savings program for college students in our states who want to pursue degrees that our own state doesn't offer. I'm going to miss each of you personally. We have become friends.
    Of course, no one likes to feel sad, so I'm trying to focus on the glad part of the situation —escaping the division I've worked in for fourteen years. I'll try to put off the sad part until later.

Well, the truth is I can't feel entirely glad about retiring from work that has given me a great deal of satisfaction. I think I'm feeling...diminished.
    It happens to many retirees. Some feel that they no longer have anything to live for, and a number of these die soon after their last day at work.
    Walking along the hotel balcony, think I feared that some hidden part of me might commandeer my body and pull or push it toward the rail....

After passing through the The Zimbabwe Exhibit at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport yesterday afternoon, a World Wildlife Fund poster brought back a powerful feeling I'd had the day before on the flight to Atlanta. The sound of a young child talking to its parent had provoked in me a profound sense of vulnerability. My heart went out to that child. I ached with the knowledge that it would not always be taken care of, that it was subject to wanton hurt, ill-treatment, even abandonment. How helpless are our children, how dependent on us our pets and even the livestock we raise...to slaughter. How vulnerable wild animals subject to legal hunters, to poachers, to each other.
    On the plane, I thought it was the child's vulnerability I felt. Stopped before the poster of the young elephant and its mother, I thought it was the vulnerability of the small elephant.
    I suspect now it was my own vulnerability that was trying to speak to me.

Don't beat yourself up (I'll do it for you)

Apricot blossom
(photographed late January)

Because one of our flowering apricot trees is starting to overarch our rain gauge, my wife asked me to move the gauge.
    It's mounted on a four-by-four set atop a metal stanchion driven about eighteen inches into the ground, which is hard clay beneath the planting bed's conditioned top soil. It was a bear to pull the post out of the stanchion mount, and three bears to pull the stanchion out of the ground.
    To drive the stanchion back into the ground, about ten feet away, I mounted a shorter length of four-by-four, which I failed to notice fit more snugly than the four-by-four the rain gauge is screwed onto. It seemed to be going to be four or five bears to pull this four-by-four out of the stanchion mount.
    I ended up pulling the stanchion out of the ground (easy because I'd loosened the soil and not driven it in as far as before) and striking the four-by-four on a brick by holding the tapered end of the stanchion roughly the way I held a baseball bat as a boy.
    My wife came out to see what the racket was, and I gave voice to what I was thinking with each swing. "I don't seem to be able to do anything, without doing something stupid at some point."
    "Oh, don't beat yourself up," she said.
    I appreciated that. Nice to hear.
    "Why aren't you wearing safety glasses?"
    I'd actually already realized I'd left them in the garage, but hadn't bothered to go get them.
    "That's a stupid thing to do," she said.

I laid my "bat"down and went to get the safety glasses, reflecting on the way that I had no need to beat myself up, my wife would almost always do it for me.
    But she's earned the prerogative. We've been married forty-six years today.

Still fire

Last evening we had dinner with some friends in Carrboro, in their lovely, cavernous, cozily civilized home. We sat on their back-yard deck overlooking a few of their many bird feeders and their dense stand of bamboo, mesmerized by the flames of their Jolly Rancher grill, which leapt so high we almost had occasion to sing "Sire, Sire, pants on fire."
    We were all amazed at the variety of still images my Coolpix P300 could see even if none of us could:

[Click to enlarge]

In ointment

Come on baby, rub it on, anoint it!
Make it slick, then hold it firm and point it.
    I'll slide it right in,
    Cram its full height in—
Oh my God, what a smooth entry ointment!

The help

Octavia Spencer won the Oscar for
Best Supporting Actress in The Help

In Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help (but not in the Academy Award-nominated movie based on it), the character Minny Jackson's mother told Minny when she was fourteen, "Sit down on your behind, Minny, because I'm about to tell you the rules for working in a White Lady's house."
    Rule Number One included the advice, "Don't go crying to White Lady with your problems. You can't pay the light bill? Your feet are too sore? Remember one thing: white people are not your friends. They don't want to hear about it." [p. 38]
    Like most of the while folks (not all of them) depicted in The Help, many employers (most? nearly all?) are not their employees' friends either. When push comes to shove, their employees, too, are just "the help."
    I'm coming to know this well.

Of course, I can't tell you about it right now.
    But there are only thirty more days until retirement.

Frozen by Frozen Planet?

Certain people of your acquaintance will tell you they can't watch movies that portray violence. They can't watch gangster movies, war movies, even movies about marriage or family life that involve rape or physical abuse. That sort of thing.
    I would never tell you that about what I watch; I'd watch anything portraying those things if its dramatic/artistic/cinematic quality were up to a certain standard (which I won't attempt to define, but which is implicit in my list of rated "Last 100 Films & TV Programs Watched").
    But in watching the first episode of Frozen Planet off our DVR Monday evening (To the Ends of the Earth¹), I learned (or was reminded) that the type of violence I do have a hard time watching is the violence of Nature's food chain. In that first episode, for example, a surfing penguin struggles valiantly (but unsuccessfully) to escape a hungry sea-lion, and a team of orcas create giant waves to (successfully) wash a seal off an ice floe. The doomed seal does manage to scramble back onto the floe, but it is so exhausted that moments later it can't resist when an orca grabs its tail and pulls it off the floe. The sadness of that seal's slow descent into the water to be made a meal of was almost unbearable to me.
    I think that's why I've watched nothing but episodes of Hack since then, rather than watch the second episode of Frozen Planet (Spring²).
_______________

1. From the Internet Movie Database:

   David Attenborough travels to the end of the earth, taking viewers on an extraordinary journey across the polar regions of our planet, North and South. The Arctic and Antarctic are the greatest and least known wildernesses of all—magical ice worlds inhabited by the most bizarre and hardy creatures on earth. Our journey begins with David at the North Pole, as the sun returns after six months of darkness. We follow a pair of courting polar bears, which reveal a surprisingly tender side. Next stop is the giant Greenland ice cap, where waterfalls plunge into the heart of the ice and a colossal iceberg carves into the sea. Humpback whales join the largest gathering of seabirds on earth to feast in rich Alaskan waters. Further south, the tree line marks the start of the Taiga forest, containing one third of all trees on earth. Here, 25 of the world's largest wolves take on formidable bison prey. At the other end of our planet, the Antarctic begins in the Southern Ocean where surfing penguins struggle to escape a hungry sea-lion and teams of orcas create giant waves to wash seals from ice floes -a filming first. Diving below the ice, we discover prehistoric giants, including terrifying sea spiders and woodlice the size of dinner plates. Above ground, crystal caverns ring the summit of Erebus, the most southerly volcano on earth. From here we retrace the routes of early explorers across the formidable Antarctic ice-cap—the largest expanse of ice on our planet. Finally, we rejoin David at the South Pole, exactly one hundred years after Amundsen then Scott were the first humans to stand there.

2. Ibid:

   Each spring, massive sweet water thawing rapidly transforms the polar regions and the surrounding seas, where broken-off ice floats to. This is crucial in the life cycle of many species, sometimes extremely elaborate. Many colonies (re)unite to mate, hatch and/or start raising offspring, especially in 'temperate' parts, such as South Georgia island.

Nature programming to look forward to (tonight)

Television programming not to miss tonight comes as Frozen Planet on the Discovery channel, according to the Associated Press article, "Frozen Planet thrills with its shots, stories," by Frazier Moore.
    The seven-part series's producer is Alastair Fothergill, who also produced the documentaries The Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006). Moore writes that the series

takes a fresh look at Antarctica as well as its north-end counterpart, the Arctic, in seven gorgeous episodes premiering tonight on Discovery. And while you may not be ready to dismiss filmdom's stars and screenplay writers as unnecessary, Frozen Planet makes a strong case that Nature—captured in the wild—can equal Hollywood for epic sweep and drama.

    The version of this AP article that I read in a morning paper includes the information that

The many up-close-and-personal scenes they bagged say as much about Frozen Planet as the vast scope of the enterprise, which can be expressed in remarkable statistics: four years in production; 38 camera persons; 2,356 combined days in the field; 1-1/2 years at sea; 840 hours trapped in blizzards.

Apparently a work of love, and a work we can look forward to loving. David Attenborough was heavily involved; he does the narration.

In awe of Nature's four billion years on Earth

Where does the inorganic realm of non-life end and life begin?

From Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986), by Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) and Dorion Sagan (born 1959):

Cyanobacteria

The tasks undertaken by bacterial teams amounts to no less than the conditioning of the entire planet. It is they that prevent all once-living matter from becoming dust. They turn us into food and energy for others. They keep the organic and inorganic elements of the biosphere cycling. Bacteria purify the earth's water and make soil fertile. They perpetuate the chemical anomaly that is our atmosphere, constantly producing fresh supplies of reactive gases.

    The British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock [born 1919] suggests that certain microbially produced gases act as a control system to stabilize the living environment.  Methane, for example, may act as an oxygen regulation mechanism and ventilator of the anaerobic (oxygenless) zone, whereas ammonia—another gas that reacts strongly with oxygen and therefore must be continually resupplied by microbes—possibly plays a major role in determining the alkalinity of lakes and oceans. A so-called greenhouse gas (like carbon dioxide) that lets in more radiation than it lets out, thereby increasing the temperature of the planet, ammonia also may have been important in the control of the ancient climate.
    Methyl chloride, a trace gas in the earth's atmosphere, may regulate the ozone concentration of the upper atmosphere, which in turn has an effect on the amount of radiation which reaches the surface. This influences the further growth of gas-producing microbes. The list goes on and on. The environment is so interwoven with bacteria, and their influence is so pervasive, that there is no really convincing way to point your finger and say this is where life ends and this is where the inorganic realm of nonlife begins.
    ...For tens of millions of years excess oxygen was absorbed by live organisms, metal compounds, reduced atmospheric gases, and minerals in rocks. It began to accumulate in the atmosphere only by fits and starts. Many local populations were killed off, and many adaptations and protective devices evolved. From blue-green cyanobacteria that produced oxygen part-time emerged grass-green bacteria that emitted it continually. Thousands of species of aerobic photosynthesizers arose adapted to rocks, hot water locales, and scums. But by about 2,000 million years ago, the available passive reactants in the world had been used up and oxygen accumulated rapidly in the air, precipitating a catastrophe of global magnitude.
    People are gravely worried today about an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from 0.032 to 0.033 percent caused by our massive burning of fossil fuels...The Archeo-Proterozoic world saw an absolutely amazing increase in atmospheric oxygen from one part in a million to one part in five, from 0.0001 to 21 percent. This was by far the greatest pollution crisis the earth has ever endured. [pp. 92-93, 107-108]

47 Days to Retirement

Today I told a professional colleague in South Florida (whom I've never met but with whom I've had a pleasant relationship working via email) that I had 47 days left until retirement. He kindly sent me best wishes and three wry quotations about the uncertain advantages of retiring:

"A retired husband is often a wife's full-time job." –Ella Harris
"Don't play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty." –Harry Vardon
"The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off." –Abe Lemons

    Yes, even though most retired people I've talked with put a positive spin on retirement, there are two sides to it. I'll be exploring them soon.

Coming back on Monday

A colleague at work often thanks me for my "hard work" on our projects. I told her this morning that I could say the same thing about her work. "I'm sure that you work at least as hard as I do," I said.
    I added, however, that I didn't consider it hard work. "It's fun," I said, "it's entertainment."
    Not to be outdone, she said, "That's why you're so good."

A little later, another friend said he was motorcycling down to Myrtle Beach tomorrow. I said that was great, "Maybe you'll have such a good time at the beach you won't even want to come back on Monday."
    "I never want to come back on Monday," he said.

It occurred to me that the "it's fun" philosophy might be expressed in terms of always wanting to come back on Monday.
    Life is a bowl of fruit, isn't it?

Photo taken with my Motorola Droid (cropped and "negativized" there too)