Monthly Archives: June 2019

Are You Overly Concerned About Dinoflagellates?

[Bioluminescence at night on a beach. Photo source: Google search.]

You find yourself sitting up in bed at 2:30 am and thinking of dinoflagellates, the Valium hasn’t kicked in, your partner is in REM sleep and softly mumbling Bono Bono and your supply of Sleepy Time Tea has been deleted…you’re not alone.

I, too, suffer the same night terrors.  I feel your pain.  Several nights ago, sleep couldn’t find me nor could I find sleep.  It was 2:17 am.  I picked up a magazine and began reading an article about how to keep mud from getting stuck in the treads of your car’s tires.  I finished the lengthly piece and looked down at my copy of David Copperfield.

Should I pick it up and start where I left it three years ago, on page 346.  But it wasn’t to be.  My mind kept going back to dinoflagellates.

What brought comfort to my restless soul that night, I cannot say for certain.  But I decided to go down to my office and find a copy of a marine science textbook.  I went through book after book.  There it was…The Secret Life of Dinoflagellates.  I brought the heavy glossy-paged book back to bed and began to read.

It was so heavy, it left a strange imprint on my abdomen.

I was vaguely aware of the existence of dinoflagellates when I studied geology in college forty-six years ago.  That’s why I was vaguely aware, I had forgotten most of the facts I once knew.

To put it simply, dinoflagellates are two-edged swords in the form of a single-celled organism.  On the good side, they are responsible for bioluminescence, the strange glow-in-the-dark phenomenon of the oceans.  The eerie blue light is awesome to behold.  [See the lead illustration.] Sailors proclaim that a glowing sea on the darkest of nights is a sight they will never forget…something like seeing the bow of a freighter fifty feet away, coming straight out of the fog bank and straight at your boat.

On the downside of dinoflagellates is that they are the cause of the dreaded red tide.  Yes, the waves are tinted red.  The dinoflagellates are eaten by bivalves (clams and the like).  If you had ordered such a plate of these clams at the Ancient Mariner Restaurant and consumed it you would soon be begging for an appointment with Dr. Kevorkian…cause you’re gonna pay the piper…as the saying goes.

Here some advice about how to live with dinoflagellates:

  • Go sailing at night off some island in the Caribbean and be stricken silent with the beauty of the blue/green bioluminescence.
  • Avoid areas where the red tide is present.  Ask around.  Maybe go for the spaghetti and meatball option.

So, stop losing sleep over dinoflagellates.  Lose sleep over climate change instead.  That will bring on worse things that any single-celled organism.

[Some of the facts are from the June 22, 2019 issue of The Economist. The rest is just stuff I already knew.]

I Too Can Do Physical Labor

[Me on the steps…working hard.]

As a blogger I get tons of mail.  It’s mostly fan letters, notes of congratulations, invitations to weddings, birthday parties, fundraisers, dedications at mall openings and the occasional bris.  But I also get questions.

“Gee, Pat (I’m an informal kind of guy), what do you do when you’re not working on a blog post?”

“Gosh, Pat, you must spend most of your waking hours living inside your head.  That must be awesome and exciting!”  I didn’t have the heart to tell that fan that living inside my head is no picnic.  There are dark corners in my brain that I try avoid.  I know this because my insomnia forces me to confront the demons.  My nightmares are real and full of things that crawl on the ground and hiss and spit.

“Golly, Pat, your life as a blogger must so exciting and so totally awesome.”  I didn’t have the heart to tell the fan that my blogs often go unnoticed.

But I digress.

I am actually a very active guy.  True, I may spend weeks in bed waiting for the mosquitoes to die off.  But, on cool days when the breeze is steady and strong off the lake, I search for something to do around the house…outside that is.  One of the drawbacks to owning a home in the North Country is that there is never anything to do.  I mowed the lawn a few times last summer.  I stacked wood for about thirty-five minutes.  I swept the floor of the garage.  A couple times each summer, I put the ladder up against the house and I climb onto the roof.  I have Mariam pass up my favorite tool, the leaf-blower.  Then I attack the rain gutter to clear out the muck and pine needles.

Such a feeling of power to send clods of gunk sailing off into the trees.  It gives additional meaning to my life.

A few days ago, I decided it was time to apply a coat of Thompson’s WaterSeal to the railings and steps of our rear deck.  I gathered the rags, sander, the can of Thompson’s, the extension cord, my mask, a pair of ear protecters and a bandanna to keep the dust out of my hair.

The bandanna was orange.

To fully understand how intense this project is, I will simply say that I have fairly serious issues with my lower back.  My L3, L4 and L5 are held together with gossamer threads.

“Gosh, Pat, it’s age appropiate arthritis, said my doctor.”

I fully understood that  once the work was done (it took almost six hours) that I would barely be able to walk across the room without looking like Qusimodo or the Elephant Man.  (Full disclosure: it hurt like bloody hell at the end of the day).

As I was working my way down the stairs, step by step, my hand sander suddenly came apart.  Luckily, I had a spare so the work never stopped.  This was a good thing because it was proof to Mariam that for a skilled laborer such as myself (and for all handymen) that when it comes to tools, one should always have two of everything.

Later that night, after a couple of Ibuprofen, I was able to move about without actually crawling on the carpet.  The railings are good for another two years.

So, that’s how a blogger spends time when not sitting at a laptop.  Although, for me, even hunched over a keyboard can cause pain.

If you read this post and click ‘like’, then I will get better.  That’s the way it works.  My health is actually in your hands.

Use the power wisely.

The Two Faces of the Summer Solstice

[Summer Sunrise over the Heel Stone at Stonehenge. Photo source: Google Search]

A short time ago a friend posted this on Facebook:

Hooray! Only 59 Days Until The Summer Solstice!

Most of us know that the Solstice marks the first day of summer.  It’s a moment when the sun rays are directly overhead at 23.5° N. Lat.  Where I live, this will occur at 11:54 am (EDT) on June 21.

[Diagram of the relative position of the sun (R) and the earth (L). Source: Google Search]

People think of BBQ’s, swimming, hiking and kayaking over seventy foot waterfalls.  Kites will fill the air at beaches.  Pyrotechnics are being prepared for the 4th of July.  Pom-Pom girls are practicing the baton tosses in their backyards while toddlers splash in small plastic pools under the watchful eye of parents, sitting in camp chairs, sipping bottles of Coors Lite.  Cans of Deep Woods Off are flying off the shelves at Target.  Tubes of SPF 65 lotion are in every picnic basket.  Big drinks with little umbrellas are served at pool-side.  The quarterbacks of the Fall flirt with the cheerleader/lifeguards of the Summer.  Sandcastles, surfing, hang-gliding, rodeos, NASCAR races, deer-tick bites and human pyramid water-skiing are the activities on any given day south of Manitoba.  (Actually, most of these events happen in Canada as well, but no-one goes up there this time of year to see for themselves.)

[This is how I spent my summer days at the lake. Source: Google Search]

And, in sunny England, the Druids are allowed among the Sacred Stones of Stonehenge to welcome the arrival of the SUN.

[Druids at Stonehenge on June 21st. Source: Google Search]

The Glory Days!  The Endless Summer.  Autumn is months away.  The Farness.  The Freedom.  The Freshness…it’s the eternal now moment everyone wants to be in and stay in.

And, best of all…it’s the longest days of the year!

[Allow me to muddy the waters a bit here.  The longest day?  No, of course not.  The length of the ‘day’ is and will remain twenty-four hours.  Can’t change that.  First day of Summer?  That depends on how you think of summer.  There are really two “summers”.  One is the Meteorological Summer, which traditionally is from June 1 to August 31.  This is when the thermal load begins to build in the Northern Hemisphere.  Hence, one can go swimming on June 7 because it’ll likely be warm enough and you are willing to hold your breath for twenty-three minutes underwater to escape the black flies.  But this post is mostly concerned with Astronomical Summer as described in the diagram above.  None of this seasonal stuff would happen if the earth was not tilted 23.5 degrees off the vertical plane in our relationship with the sun.  The planet Mercury has no tilt and therefore no seasons.  If you lived on Mercury, SPF would be your least problem.  The daytime temperature is approximately 800 degrees Fahrenheit.  Hot enough to melt your nail polish.  Hot enough to even…well, you wouldn’t have an arm to apply anything on.  It’s very difficult to rub SPF on a gelatinous mass of bubbling protoplasm.  But in the few seconds you perhaps survived, you’d need an SPF of 2,500.  I haven’t seen anything like that at Walgreens lately.  And, forget about a beach book.  The temperature is twice that of the burning point of paper.  You’d need a Kindle for sure.]

Back to earth.

And, there’s the catch.  Just when you’ve reached the peak (the Summer Solstice) you have to begin thinking about going down.

After June 21, the days begin to get shorter.

You may say that after reading this that I’m a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I’m the eternal optimist.  After all, in a mere six months, the days will start to get longer!

And then you have the Holidays to look forward to.

 

Languid June

[Languid June As Seen From Our Back Deck.]

Languid June.  Languid June.  The name has a certain ring to it.  Like Lay Down Sally, Calamity Jane, Black-Eyed Susan, Axis Sally, Typhoid Mary and Moaning Myrtle.  I chose the title of this post with care.  I do believe that I saw a Sad-Eyed Lady at the corner stool in a dusty bar in El Paso in 2013.  I do believe I heard the bartender ask: Same again, Languid June?

But, already I digress.

It’s that time of year.  We had a Spring, but I can’t tell you what day that was.  It certainly wasn’t March 21, the Vernal Equinox…there was still snow on the ground.  Now, it’s summer, only a few days before the Summer Solstice.  I sit on the living room sofa and look out toward the lake.  The leaves are out in full now, so we’ve lost nearly all of our view of the water.  It is uncannily still considering the wind storms we’ve been having.  The fresh new maple leaves flicker almost imperceptibly.

It’s quiet, so much so that you can hear the blood rushing in your ears (or maybe it’s my tinnitus again).  A man and a woman talk quietly as they kayak past our dock.  The crickets buzz on occasion.  The crows squawk away in the near-by woods.  The bullfrogs down at the lake never seem to tire of their amorous croaking.  Okay, sounds like a noisy place…but it’s not.  It’s quiet.  It’s lonely.  It’s languid.

I was a science teacher so I know that just beyond the frequency of our hearing range, there is a riot of activity, in our yard, in the nearby woods and down by the lakeside.  But, speaking only for myself, I can’t report a “riot” of anything going on in my brain.

When I look out at the motionless trees, the only term that comes to mind is Dog Day Afternoon, then I remember that’s a 1975 movie with Al Pacino. It feels like the Dog Days of Summer, but I think that happens sometime in July or August; I can’t remember and it’s not on my wall calendar.

Maybe I should ask Alexa.

Late Night Thoughts on Thumb Twiddling

[Mariam in the act of thumb twiddling. Photo credit: Me]

Twiddle. (v) To wait idly because one cannot take action.

Not that many weeks ago I found myself behind the wheel of an Avis Rent Car.  I had set the cruise control at 71 mph.  We were heading north out of Albany, coming home from several months in England.  I was fixated on the highway beyond the windshield.  We were on I-87, the ‘Northway’.  It was no use using the radio because if you found a station that was interesting, you only had about nine minutes to enjoy it.  Then it would fade into crackling static.  I was bored and apparently so was my wife, Mariam.  I knew that because I glanced at her during an hour of quiet.  She was twiddling her thumbs.  I never noticed her doing that before, but upon later questioning, she admitted she often twiddled her thumbs while I drove.  (Refer to the above definition.)  I further wondered about her actions knowing that she had a thumb joint replacement about thirty years ago.

Now I must confess at this point that I tried, really tried to enjoy twiddling.  I really tried.  But, like piano jazz, it wasn’t working for me.  I consider it akin to chewing gum.  I’ve actually chewed gum before, mostly while a teenager, and all I ever got out of it was a sore jaw.  I’m fully aware that the main purpose of chewing gum is that you can stare down a guy named Slash while sitting in a bar in Reno.  It makes you look confident and nonchalant.  I never actually tried it, but I assume it works.  I saw it work in a few Clint Eastwood movies.

But, I digress.

I decided to delve deeper into this twiddling thing.  The further I went the more fascinating it became.  For example, the word origin is likely a blend of TWIST (or maybe TWIRL) and FIDDLE.  It’s past participle form is Twiddled.  It’s Gerund form is Twiddling.  Don’t ask me about that.  I never really understood what a gerund was anyway.

A further confession:  I found myself twiddling my thumbs a few months ago while I sat in my doctor’s office in NYC.  Why?  Because the office staff had failed to put a recent copy of Arthritis Today magazine on the table.  I love those articles and sometimes I can copy out a recipe.

So, that’s it.  I’ve covered twiddling in my blogs.  Next topic?  Maybe Bone Spurs.  Who knows.

By the way, if you are a thumb twiddler, always keep your thumbs in contact.  Less stress on the joints.

Or, so I’m told.

One final comment: A priest once told me that twiddling your thumbs would make you go blind.  I haven’t seen any evidence of that in Mariam, although she may be having cataract surgery sometime in the next ten years.

[Photo credit: Google search (CartoonStock]