Can You Believe?

Olga Kotelko is 91 years old! She is an amazing athlete, she runs, does long jump, throws the discus and javalin. A long article about her in the NYTimes Magazine yesterday has me stunned at her accomplishments. She is not a life-long athelte. She spent the middle part of her life as a single mother raising two children, teaching school and struggling to make ends meet. She had enjoyed sports as a girl and turned to very serious sports training only after she retired.

No, I will not say, "if she can do it so can anyone". That's very clearly not true. Much of the article talks about physiological matters explaining why some older people are physically so much more able than others. Much has to do with working at physical fitness during the 50s and onward. But doctors really don't know how to explain the few people who are like Olga, super fit and with muscle fibers that work as efficiently as a very much younger person.

An article like this isn't being published to tell everyone "get out there and do it," but to say that, indeed, there are considerable physiologic differences but that constant physical endeavors help maintain fitness when most people have become couch potatoes. On a personal level I was relieved to learn that often [perhaps most of the time] our muscle fibers stop being efficient sometime between 45 and 65 and we lose fitness which makes us feel that exercise routines are tiresome and largely useless. I've been a long, long time practitioner of yoga but have found it very hard to maintain my routines in the 4 or so years since I broke my hip and had to avoid strain for a couple of months. I still feel, in my head and gut and muscles, that getting back into the routine would be an extremely good idea. I know elasticity can be regained.

This article talks about studies Olga Ketelko underwent in Finland. And just last week I read an article saying other fitness studies in Finland showed that some people -- usually people in their 30s or so, simply do not benefit for exercise routines while the majority do benefit. The point being that not everyone has the same muscular ability to get stronger or limberer or to increase their cardiovascular ability. But I also remember reading more than once that when it comes to medical studies, the Finns perform them as strictly and well as other people but frequently come up with results that are simply not replicable in any other study. Who knows why? However, I look at this picture of Olga Ketelko and I think "This is what 91 looks like!"

Chaucer's hopefulness

I was reading a poet writing about writing - something I do very little of on this blog, but I do a lot of thinking about it. The poet quoted Chaucer who wrote at the end of Troillus and Cressida, "go, litel bok, go". I have been haunted to these four words for a couple of days now and even started a poem. I suddenly felt so a great closeness to dear Jeff [fancifully shown in the picture on his way to Canterbury]. Doesn't every writer finish a piece of work and want to release it to the world like a bird one has nurtured from it's hatching but wants to free to live the life that it deserves in the wild? And isn't that a fitting metaphor for a story, poem, play, whatever piece of writing and for the writer's desire to have fashioned an entity that can exist on its own?

In Chaucer's time story tellers were admired but they probably had little hope of their work outlasting them. Not many people were literate and books were rare except in rich men's homes. He couldn't have guessed that his poetry and his simple tales about a bunch of fairly ordinary people on a pilgrimage "that April" would still be read and enjoyed well over 500 years later. Today we have too many books and publishers are miserly gatekeepers. Few of us can hope that when we finish our work and say, "go, little book, go" that it will reach any audience beyond our friends and family -- and most of us have learned that both friends and family are unreliable readers. Of course the same is true of blogs -- of the thousands and thousands, only a handful have many readers. And yet, when I hit the "publish post" I am saying, "go, little blog, go" and hoping someone will read it. Certainly I am not alone, but in this case company is part of the problem -- how will anyone have time for me or I for the many who are saying interesting things?

Saturday Summary

Not surprisingly, I've been reading a lot about food this week. I was also given a few "sent from Florida" grapefruits but I don't know yet if they are the white or red variety. I prefer the red and I just found out that I'm smart to do so. Red grapefruit have 25 times the vitamin C of white grapefruit. Plus they have as much lyocpene as fresh tomatoes -- why's that good? Because it's been shown that lycopene prevents osteoporosis far more effectively than calcium -- for those post-menopausal women who are most at risk. Better to eat grapefruit or tomato salad than drink all the milk.

And about dates: The date palm grows naturally in arid, sandy soil but near a source of water which in North Africa where the majority are grown, means oases. In the US we mainly see brown dried dates but they only turn brown when they're dried [preferably in the sun], they are red, yellow and shades of color in between when ripe on the trees. 90% of the dates produced in the world are produced in northern Africa, from Egypt right across to Morocco.

Olive oil usage has increased more than 50% in the last twenty years as Americans, not just those of Mediterranean background, discover that it is the healthiest cooking oil. Extra virgin olive oil [which has never been subjected to heat processing] is the only oil that can be kept at room temperature and will not go rancid.

Still in the plant world, teasel, the herb that resembles thistles, is often used in fall floral arrangements. But it's many sharp pointed bracts, when dried were long used in the woolen industry to "tease" up the nap of fabric after it was woven.

No, there can't be a week when I don't read about something negative and generally stupid: this week it was that while dentists are generally careful to shield patients when their teeth are X-rayed, and it is well known that young children are more negatively affected by radiation than older people, the majority of orthodontists use radiation that is much stronger than used in adults and use it more frequently on their young patients.

Gee, I'm sorry my daughters were subjected to orthodonture, although I'm glad they have attractive adult smiles.

Airport security - TSA invasion of privacy

On any given day in the United States hundreds of thousands of people board airplanes ... and not one of them is a terrorist. Yet everyone submits meekly to increasing acute invasion of their privacy by often ill trained, sometimes loutish, sometimes perverse security "guards". Why are these people acting like sheep? Can't anyone realize that something is very wrong here? Why are toddlers forced to take off their shoes? Why are people with medical conditions, colostomy bags, titanium hip or knee joints subjected to treatment as if they are criminals? Why is a bottle of water of a normal size container of shampoo a matter of suspicion?

Oh, I've read know about Bin Laden's threats and about the bombs sent in cargo planes and the few nut cases who got on board planes -- despite warnings, in one case even by the would-be-terrorist's father that were ignored by our so called Homeland Security. The fear rampant in this country is almost beyond belief. Characters in Orwell's 1984 were not so terrorized by Big Brother as we are by the TSA. Can't anyone count the numbers of people who are harassed and manhandled at airports against the number of people who have boarded airplanes with intent to do harm and wonder how the pictures got so badly skewed? Who is pulling our strings?
It seems the only thing the government is doing to ease the joblessness situation is hire more TSA employees and then do a lousy job of training them in anything like human decency. It looks sadly like Bin Laden and any other terrorist groups really have already won -- America is a land of the terrorized, afraid to board airplanes, even for commuter flights within own country. Surly I am not the only person who is appalled by this state of affairs. As people crowd the airports to join their families for Thanksgiving, I wonder if they'll be in any mood to enjoy what is supposed to be a peaceful and grateful event.

Saturday Summary {on Sunday]

Jellyfish are fascinating to look at and to read about which I've been doing. I've also seen their blobby bodies on the sand now and then, sometimes looking quite fresh. So here are some facts: they have been in the seas for 500 million years which is known because very complete fossils have been found in Utah's mountains which were once part of a shallow sea. Fish have only been around for 370 million years. We don't yet know how many kinds of jellyfish that exist but they are being studied. Overfished areas and polluted areas of the sea attract jellyfish which are sometimes found in vast numbers. The equivalent of 50 dump trucks full of jellyfish caused a rolling black out on the island of Luzon, Philippines in 1996 when they were sucked into a power generator. Others have forced a company to stop diamond mining in the seabed off Namibia because they slime the equipment. I read much more about how their stingers work -- you don't really want to know, but it's good to have a bottle of vinegar in your beach bag, that's about the only thing that relieves the pain of a sting.

We tend to think that every kind of flora and fauna on earth must have been discovered by now but, not true of kinds of jellyfish and not true of any other life form. Just since 2000 300 new kinds of mammals have been discovered, one of the most appealing being a very furry brown monkey found in the highlands of Kenya. The native knew about it but our academics did not. Most mammals and plants not yet "discovered" are being discovered because of deforestation and roads in areas that were not easily accessible previously. Very large numbers of insects and kinds of bacteria are being discovered all the time. There's a lot to learn out there.

I did read a few other things: on the education front, many college professors use "clickers", little handheld electronic devices, in the classroom which allow students to answer questions, take tests and even make their presence [or wakefulnes/ sleepiness] known to the professor. Another plus is that since the students never know when the professor is going to ask a question that requires a click, it's hard for them to text during class.

Only in 1994 did it become legal in the USA for Native Americans to practice their native religions. Whenever you get into a freedom of speech and religion conversation, bring up that fact.

A winter wind

I promised myself I would be brave even though summer's sun is gone and the beach is no longer a warm and welcoming place to walk. Bundle up and walk anyway, I decided. Autumn had blown in on a nasty, wet and blustery wind but we've had hiatuses. Two nice days last weekend I did the whole walk on both sides of the spit called Long Beach. These wave marks were more pronounced that I saw over the summer. The winds and waves had crimped the sand like early permanent waves used to crimp flapper's hair styles. The tide was out, obviously, the sand was formally pleated.
Yesterday, midday the sun came out it was warm and balmy, the air had the soft moistness that, in April, brings out the forsythia. It was very breezy but I thought that would be fine. So off I went to walk on the beach. I immediately found that it was more than breezy -- it was gale force windy. I actually could almost make no headway against the wind on the ocean side of the spit of land. All the sandy beach was smooth a a dance floor. The wind was a great broom that had swept the sand flat, burying shells and seaweed. None of those lovely crimps at all. The waves crashed furiously. After about 50 feet I walked up and over the lowish dunes to the inlet side which was somewhat protected. I walked about half the distance to the point where I had reached a wider marshy area beyond the part with scattered shrubs and low trees. The bezach had a personality that was new to me. I'm glad I went. Back home, a mile inland, once again the weather was lovely.

A Very Long Engagement

No photo for this post because the only photos I find are from the DVD of this French movie which I saw today and they are the very romantic opening shot of the lovers in bed. it's modest enough and, of course, as the title suggests, this might be called a romance. But it's not -- or wasn't to me. It was about French soldiers in World War I. The romance was a girl who refused to believe her young lover was dead and indeed finally, after well over two hours of movie, finds him in a psychiatric hospital with amnesia. Half the movie, I think, takes place on battle fields. All war is hell but WWI was especially brutal and certainly seems so in this movie. The movie was artistically done mostly in tones of sepia with a lot of black and white for the battle scenes -- the blending of colors -- some full color scenes after the war too -- was so well done it was never jarring.

I might not have gone if I had realized that there would be so many battle field scenes and that the story was a fairly simple, but relentless, search for information. I've just been reading a couple of blogs that remarked on Veteran's Day and also on the numbers of people killed just in WWII without adding the millions from WWI ... and then the world had all those other wars -- I should make that a present tense. For we HAVE indeed wars at this very minute with people dying.

I met with a couple of writers this noon, one of whom is a German woman who was, as teen, a prisoner of war when the Russians advanced toward Berlin at the end of WWII, taking over her home in Pomerania. Her experiences are something no Americans had to endure. To hear her continual terror that she would be raped is only a small part of the story. The movie had none of the usual glorification of heroic figures in most such movies and listening to this writer's experiences and her struggles to tell her story in a clear and direct way, no heroics although, indeed, she was very brave, carry me into a world I feel I need to recognize but am grateful I have never experienced.