Just when a geezer gets comfortable with “the way things were” they morph out from under him. And that isn’t all bad. Nothing like a rocking boat to test your equilibrium. So now that I’m paid up for another year of life on Fragments without any great notion of the so-what of such a choice, WordPress mixes it up and changes their editing platform. And so I decided to change up my Style plugin for a while and see what a visual change might …
The FB post a few days ago about the Siberian worms (nematodes) that revived after 30k years in permafrost made me remember, back in my teaching days, of seeing similar-looking horsehair worms (or having students bring them in for extra credit). They were rather common around farms and wet margins of yards. Often they’d be found in a tight ball resembling the mythical Gordion Knot, giving them one of their common names. You can see how they move in this video: Â They are not …
And so this is where the actuarial rubber meets the road. Baby boomers appeared of a sudden, historically. We swelled the ranks of the middle class. We demanded and got affordable housing just out of town, and cheap gas to get us back and forth to the places we spent our money. Now we’ve grown up, grown old and grown to need a lot of new things that society is just now wondering how to offer to both the well-off and the not-so-well-off elders …
I made the mistake a few weeks back of saying I hoped to be doubling down on efforts to apply the brake to the creening path of humanity towards the brink–as if one person can make a difference; and yet… One person can be a bystander or can give aid at the scene of a horrific accident. Where we are as a species today is a horrific consequence of ignorance early on, followed by full intention in the past decades–since the Great Accelleration of …
Found in my collections of snippets, a quote from Wendell Berry, one of the few wise men of our era, in my opinion: To destroy a forest or an ecology or a species is an act of greater seriousness than we have yet grasped, and it is perhaps of graver consequence. But these destructions will mend. The forest will grow back, the natural balances will be restored, the ecological gap left by the destroyed species will be filled by another species. But to destroy …