Looking back long ago...

I don't usually blog about myself, but for whatever reason I'm feeling a bit introspective and reminiscent today.

I found a few old photos of yours truly and so here they are--taken long ago.

I never knew how much I weighed when I entered this world, until someone mailed me the birth announcement (from my parents' possessions after they died a few years ago).

So I took my first breath--out of the womb, bloody, naked, screaming, thrashing about--weighing in at a whopping seven pounds!

The one of me looking happy and content in the crib was when I was two and one-half months old (this fact is scribbled on the back of the photo).

I'm standing in one picture next to my two grandfathers--Ed Jenkins (my mom's dad) on the left; James Avery Timbs (my Dad's dad) on the right.

Papaw Jenkins was an intensely religious man. He would sit alone on the porch and pray and recited Scripture every day and every night. He was good, gentle, caring--devoted to his church, Valley Forge Christian Church, which he helped found early in the 20th century. Papaw Timbs, a deputy sheriff in his younger days, liked to fish and hunt, and he loved to play games--horseshoes, checkers, card games such as setback and spades and rummy. I think maybe some of my playfulness derives from him. I cherished every day I had with him. He died in the late 1960s, when I was in the USAF, serving in the Philippines. So I never got a chance to say good-bye to him, something I regret to this day.

And, of course, that's me as an Indian (maybe I should say Native American??) with the knife in my mouth.

I loved playing cowboys and Indians.

I remember having guns and holsters and bows and arrows. And when I got older, I enjoyed watching westerns like Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel (with Wire Paladin). (And whatever happened, as the song says, to Randolph Scott?)

Today, I'm 66 years old (soon to be 67) and I dearly wish I could get that playfulness back!

As a bumper sticker prompted me the other day, I should be wagging more and barking less. No truer words were ever spake...

It's worthwhile to look back and try to figure out how I became the man I am today. Where did I come from? What forces (or people) shaped me? And then, of course, there's those inevitable questions dealing with finality: what happens now? Where do I go from here? What will be my legacy? Patrick Yeung, my son-in-law, has put that legacy question to me a few times.

I still don't know how to answer it.

Maybe some day.

Looking into a dog's eyes

I've been wondering about something I heard recently on National Public Radio.

As noted in a blog by Rachel Feltman, a researcher has concluded (not suprisingly, in my opinion) that dogs and humans can communicate very naturally and can easily become friends.

But much of this is all about the eyes--of the dog and the human.

Because locking eyes with a dog, according to the study, creates a tight bond between dog and man.

It has something to do with the oxytocin feedback loop in both the canine and human. Oxytocin is a hormone acting as a neuromodulator in the brain.

When you and your dog stare at each other for several seconds, even, in some cases, for minutes, human and dog each get a chemical boost that leaves both life forms better at bonding and reading social cues.

This only happens with canines and humans, not with wolves (even wolves raised as pets).

One researcher believes that the feedback loop (again facilitated when a dog owner stares into his dog's eyes) accounts for the positive feelings humans have for their dogs. Canines use this mechanism as a "shortcut to our hearts," he writes.

This makes complete sense to me--even though I had never heard of oxytocin. Because when my sheltie (Joe) or my bichon (Michael Jackson) locks eyes it does seem we are somehow bonded closely. And sometimes I believe my dogs can even sense how I feel (well, sick, up, down, depressed, happy, sad...).

I always knew my dogs were smart, perceptive and somehow could get inside my brain.

Now we have evidence.

Bark, bark!! Ruf, ruf!!

What ran through his mind in those final seconds?

One of the biggest mass murderers in history is 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz.

He was the presumably bright, skilled co-pilot on that ill-fated Germanwings jet that crashed a few weeks ago in the French Alps, killing 150 people, many of them high school students and their teachers.

We now know Lubitz was severely mentally ill and should have never been allowed into the cockpit, let alone had the lives of 150 souls in his hands.

Why did Lubitz crash the plane when he locked the pilot, who had taken a bathroom break, out of the cockpit?

Evidently, according to audio recordings found in the plane's wreckage, the captain did his desperate best (unsuccessfully) to get back into taking control of the fast plunging jet. He banged on the door. He yelled, "For God's sake, open the door! Open this damn door!"

But cold-blooded murderer Lubitz kept the plane--an Airbus 320 en route from Spain to Germany--diving into the remote, jagged, snowcapped Alps.

Wonder what he thought in those final seconds--as terrified passengers in the back, realizing their lives were about to end, screamed and pleaded for mercy?

Perhaps it was something along the lines of: "I'm taking this baby down, and soon I won't have a worry in the world. Dumb trusting, stupid, idiotic people. None of 'em deserve to live any way. And after I'm done with 'em, nobody'll even be able to find their bodies. Not even a fingernail for some of
'em. Ha, ha!"

I can see him smirking, licking his lips, eyes wide with anticipation, grinning with devilish delight, fist pumping.

And then, the big, horrendous, monstrous collision into the mountainside.

So many dead. So senseless.

One reason I'm blogging about this is I have a close friend who's mentally ill. I've visited him a few times when he was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit.

Not a pleasant place to spend much time. Last visit, for example, a woman kept pounding on her food tray, angrily demanding this or that from the nurses. Finally, they sent her from the dayroom out into the hall (similar to putting a 3-year-old in time-out). Another man, learning that I was a veteran, asked me if I could take him out of there to the VA Hospital, cause 'they always treat me the best there. I love the VA.'

He was emaciated and pale. Pitiful and so sad and bored--slumped there in the dayroom in his pajamas.

Of course, I couldn't have gotten him out of that psychiatric care facility even I'd wanted to, because such places are locked units. Only a doctor can get you out.

If only Andreas Lubitz had been in a locked psychiatric unit instead of at the controls of that Germanwings jet...

A few questions about last night's Academy Awards

Like millions of other people, I watched the 2015 edition of the Academy Awards. The show started early yesterday evening and lasted till midnight (I guess.)

I'm guessing because I fell asleep at 11 p.m. after watching endless (it seemed) Oscars awarded for really trivial (my opinion) aspects of the movies. Things like best sound editing and best short animation (or words to that effect) and best costume design and best short documentary (or whatever) by a foreign director, and best makeup and hairstyling.

Yawn!

Okay, I get it that it takes great skill to be a sound editor or set designer. But why put viewers to sleep with all these minor awards and the endless, boring acceptance speeches? Why not start strong with Best Picture or Best Actor or Best Actress and work your way down?

My other question is who or what organization chose Neil Patrick Harris to be the emcee last night? He wasn't funny. And he probably missed his husband. Better he stayed home so he could have stayed in his underwear.

And what happened to Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper"? The movie that has taken it some $300 million at the box office and that many have raved about as perhaps Clint's most stunning production ever? Why on earth didn't it win "Best Picture"?

And finally, in the segment where homage is paid to actresses, actors and others in the entertainment business who died in 2014, why no mention of Whitney Houston? Why wasn't one of the best voices ever totally ignored at the Oscars ceremony?

Why?

This blog post is for you, Whitney. God bless your soul.

(Oops, I guess Whitney died in 2012. But I don't care. Her spirit lives on...)

How does SK do it?

When you're a writer, you always wonder how others write. And you wonder about what makes a successful writer tick.

I've been wondering a lot lately about worldwide best-selling novelist Stephen King.

He's 67 years old and has written 55 novels. More than 350 million copies of them have been sold.

He writes, I learned in a recent YouTube interview where he spoke to an audience of academics and students at the University of Massachussetts, about 2,000 words a day.

Other tidbits about the worldwide best selling novelist SK:

His mother essentially raised him, because dad skipped the premises. His wife, whom he's been married to for more than 40 years, is Tabitha King. He frequently acknowledges her in his books. He once had a severe drinking problem. He almost died a few years ago when, while out for a walk, he was struck by a car. His genre of writing is variously described as horror, science fiction, macabre, frightening, ghastly. He got his first big financial break in the early 1970s from a manuscript he had gotten disgusted with and tossed in the trash. Tabitha fished it out of the garbage, and Stephen, at his wife's urging, decided to finish it and send it off to a publisher. The couple had a baby at the time and hardly any food or money. But the paperback rights to the "Carrie" manuscript, later made into a full length feature movie, fetched SK $400,000!

Such is how the life of one starving writer can be forever transformed (for the best).

I love Stephen King's novels. I love how he can spin a tale. How his characters come alive and the story holds you--no GRABS you the deeper you get into it. How he can scare the bejesus out of you!

Stephen King, you rock. Below are some of his novels I've read. Get them if you want to read a true literary giant's work.

Bill Gates gives us clean drinking water

Dorothy and Patrick, my daughter and son-in-law, recently made me aware of an interesting, almost unbelievable humanitarian achievement backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Hundreds of thousands of people die each year, mainly in Third World countries in Africa and Asia, for lack of safe, clean drinking water.

But what these people always have plenty of is their own feces (human poop).

And who knew that feces has water?

How to get the water extracted from the feces and to make it clean and drinkable?

Scientists (again backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) have devised a process, at something called an Omniprocessor plant, that does the trick.

Notice the picture accompanying this blog post of Bill Gates drinking water made from human poop:

Gates says he'd drink the feces-derived water from the Omniprocessor every day. It's that clean and delicious.

After the water is taken from the solid waste, that dried out poop is used to power a process that purifies the water.

Think about the implications for travel into outer space. It will take humans months, maybe years, to travel to another planet. And now they might not have to worry about where they get their next drink of water.

Thank you, Bill and Melinda Gates!

A salute to the fallen cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo

It was a dark, sad day yesterday for free-press loving journalists all over the world.

Twelve people, including some talented cartoonists at the editorial office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, France, were senselessly slaughtered.

Their offenses: creating so-called blasphemous caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.

We often talk about the enormous "power of the pen" in journalism.

But sometimes we forget about the consequences of that power. And we disregard how a few deranged others might respond to it.

The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had poked fun and ridicule at Muhammad. Some, I'm told, had even drawn him in unflattering sexual poses (distasteful but their journalistic right).

How dare they insult Muhammad??!! (Who's been dead, by the way, for some 1,400 years).

Their drawings doomed them. Murderous terrorists, believing the cartoonists had crossed a sacred line, invaded their editorial offices and within minutes left behind a trail of blood, screaming and panic.

Today, the people of France (and free spirited souls worldwide) have united on behalf of freedom of expression.

"Je suis Charlie!"

I've said it before: the greatest profession in the world is journalism.

A free and rambunctious, aggressive, untamed, unpredictable press is the cornerstone of democracy. (Okay, maybe someone else said that before I did, but you get my point.)

Condolences to the families of those slain at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. And a curse on the murderers. May their souls burn in everlasting Hell. And while they're burning, I hope they have to eat their own poop.