Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

John, I would do the same as you in terms of recycling. I'm not quite as much of a recycler as my wife, but I am still committed.

Here is a very interesting article that gets into some the problems connected with recycling. I like how it explains some things about the different kinds of plastics. I'll quote two paragraphs here:

"Only two kinds of plastic are commonly recycled in the United States: the kind in plastic soda bottles, polyethylene terephthalate, or PET; and the plastic found in milk jugs and detergent containers — high-density polyethylene, or HDPE. Together, those plastics make up only about a quarter of the world’s plastic trash, researchers reported in 2017 in Science Advances. And when those plastics are recycled, they aren’t good for much. Melting plastic down to recycle changes its consistency, so PET from bottles has to be mixed with brand-new plastic to make a sturdy final product. Recycling a mix of multicolored HDPE pieces creates a dark plastic good only for making products like park benches and waste bins, in which properties like color don’t matter much.

The difficulties of recycling plastic into anything manufacturers want to use is a big reason why the world is littered with so much plastic waste, says Eric Beckman, a chemical engineer at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2018 alone, the United States landfilled 27 million tons of plastic and recycled a mere 3 million, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

Whatever problems there are, we won't get to a good result unless we keep on recycling and even get better at it.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/c...

I think anyone can fall prey to hackers these days. Good practices on our part help to some degree, but it’s also just a matter of luck.

John wrote: "I may be quiet for a few days. My smartphone may have been hacked and its network card destroyed. I’m concerned about my WiFi and my iPad and MacBook.I managed to get my old smartphone going and ha..."

Ugh ... So sorry, John. The modern tech world has risks that are truly scary. Key loggers--malware placed on devices, especially computers, to record every keystroke and hence make it easy to steal passwords, etc.--scare me the most.

Carol wrote: "In France they also hunt small birds. President Mitterand's favourite meal was an ortolan, a little song bird. Evidently it is eaten whole, bones and all, and is so repulsive to watch that the person eating it is meant to hide his mouth with a handkerchief or serviette...."

Carol,

I had read about that and have forgotten about it. I will try to forget it again. :-)

Larry

Carol wrote: "Re: starlings brought to the US . I gather that passenger pigeons were once so numerous in North America that the whole sky became dark with so many millions of them when they flew over, so I shoul..."

When my son was in elementary school, he did a report on Martha, the last passenger pigeon. https://www.si.edu/spotlight/passenge...

Alan wrote: "Near us is Buzzards' Bay, which was named in the early 16C (John Smith, I think) for Cormorants, which they mistook for Buzzards, which we also have, but seldom over the sea, and far bigger, higher...."

John, you are such a great addition to this group ... and especially to this thread!

John wrote: "The town I moved to in North Carolina is ending its recycling program on June 30. Recycling has been done for a generation now and they are ending it as a cost-saving measure. Now it will be all one garbage bin for the landfills. I’m flabbergasted, but it is beyond my control..."

Having lived in North Carolina for eight years (a long time ago) but still reading the Raleigh and Charlotte newspapers daily, I marvel at how the state is such a mix of progressive and regressive policies.

Alan wrote: "You may not know that Starlings were brought to the US, where they thrive, by a Shakespearean who thought we should have all the biology (and plants?) in Shakespeare ..."

Oh, the damage that some classicists have done to our world!

Carol wrote: "Lovely, interesting information, Alan. I believe many plants came over to America from Britain and Europe, brought on shoes and tools by settlers. Milkweed doesn't seem to have made the return trip though, although, of course, other plants such as tomatoes and potatoes did. ..."

Sometimes when plants make the cross-Atlantic passage, strange things happen. A Facebook posting I made on a friend's (she's a chaplain for hospice patients, so I knew she would get my religious reference at the end) page yesterday:

""London planes" ... "The London Plane is of hybrid origin – it is the offspring of two different species, the American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) and the Oriental plane (Platanus orientalis), and it is a tree that did not exist prior to European colonization of the new world. Before then, American sycamores and Oriental planes were kept separate by an ocean (the Atlantic if you’re going east from the US, or the Pacific if you want to go all the way around the other way), and they didn’t come together until the 17th century, when John Tradescant the Younger, a botanist and gardener (as was his father – John Tradescant the Elder, that is), came to the colonies in the early part of that century and in 1636 took the American sycamore to England." Don't look for Zacchaeus in that hybrid tree!"

It really is great information, Alan.

I think that anyone who reads about the crews of container ships will be much more appreciative of these people who are crucial in bringing goods from all over the world.

John wrote: "Here's another that covers the globe, without specific country or region...

Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men

My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/..."

John, a while back I read a similar book, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George. She traveled on a container ship and I thought explained a lot about the hard lives of those who worked on those ships. She had some real insights about the problems with modern pirates. The one area that I wished she had explained more was the logistics, especially connected with loading and unloading the containers.

My review of that book is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Jeffrey wrote: "Has anyone else noticed that the Goodreads search has been wonky the last couple days?

I put in the exact book title and it comes back, not found."

Jeffrey, it happened to me. I hope that with Bezos leaving his CEO position at Amazon the next CEO may realize that GoodReads deserves just a little more in the way of resources.

Thanks, Carol. Just great.

We've had about five inches of snow over the last 48 hours ... very easy to deal with ... especially since the neighbor on one side (we live in a townhouse) has kept the front walk and steps clear and the neighbor on the other side put ice melt on our steps. I basically just had to clean off our car.

It's a different story if you live in a place like New York City and have to deal with two feet of snow. Still beautiful but not so much fun if you have to go out and try to get somewhere.

John wrote: "I saw this book here under new releases. I have liked Joan Didion’s writing for years and have several of her books. Although a new release, this book collects essays going back 50 years. I just pu..."

John,

I posted both of these links on Facebook this week:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

https://www.vox.com/22240627/joan-did...

John wrote: "I am definitely a believer in life elsewhere. I still have a tough time grappling with the immensity of our solar system, let alone galaxies, of which there are billions. The sheer size dictates li..."

John,

You may be interested in downloading the CIA files on UFOs. Some of them are really fascinating.

https://www.livescience.com/cia-decla...

John wrote: "One of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson is this one. She did not title her poems. Her modern editors, Thomas H. Johnson and Ralph W. Franklin, gave the poems numbers based on what they believed..."

John, it's absolutely wonderful that editors have worked to put her poems into chronological order. For a major poet, it's great to understand the evolution of their published works.

John, Carol, and Sher ... I don't think we should ever be hesitant to post more than one Poem of the Day! Please feel free to post other ones today ... and any day.

Tulips for Elsie
by Jonathan Potter

The day before you died I thought I’d bring
You tulips for your bedside table, bright
Ones, pink and white, to give your gaze a place
To rest, to make your labor seem less harsh.
I told my daughter so, my four-year-old
Who’d told me I should visit you, who’d hinted:
Your work, this dying business you were in,
Was making worldly things seem flimsy, thin.
The day moved on and tulips left my mind, though,
Until I thought of you again, too late,
The night descending, bringing sleep’s regrets.
The morning came and with its obligations
Distracting me, I let my dream of tulip
Fields plow under and turned to hear the news.

SOURCE: https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio...