Thursday Things: Possums and Bears Edition
9 June 2022. Vol 4 No 23 By Dan McGirt. #148
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know. You can post a comment by clicking the dialog bubble.
Keeping the neighborhood safe from bears. Photo by Gabe Pierce on Unsplash
The sound was unbearable. This harrowing tale comes to us from the wilds of British Columbia. All that stood between the bear and a school full of delicious students was one man with a trombone. A true story!
Though I may be overdramatizing a bit…
Music teacher plays trombone to scare bear away from school
"A British Columbia music teacher who saw a bear lurking outside the school where he works managed to drive the animal away by playing the trombone."
"Clausen said another teacher attempted to scare the bear away by banging on a door.
"I thought: 'Well I can do better than that,' and reached for my trombone and went out," he told Pique News.
"A video recorded by a student shows the bear become startled by Clausen's playing and hurriedly leave the area."
The story doesn’t really live up to the promise of the exciting headline does it? Especially if you watch the video. That’s the real lesson here — you can’t trust headlines.
So an possum walks into a bar...This is a headline you can absolutely believe: Alaska woman ejects invading opossum from Brooklyn bar
"June 3 (UPI) -- An Alaska woman became a hero in a New York bar when she calmly and efficiently ejected an opossum that had wandered into the establishment."
"Video captured at Temkin's Bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, shows customers panicking as the possum runs around inside the bar."
Wait, what? Who panics over a possum? Brooklyn people apparently.
But while terrified New Yorkers ran and hid, one woman rose to the occasion:
"Chris Egan, who recorded the footage, said a female customer named Sara Fulton stepped forward and said, "Hold my phone, I'm from Alaska."
She should have said "hold by beer", but close enough.
"Egan's video shows Fulton calmly walking up to the opossum, grabbing it by the scruff of the neck, and carrying it outside to be released."
Which, as anyone from Georgia also knows, is exactly how you eject a possum from a bar!
"Bartender Rachel Bessemer said everyone else in the establishment had been panicked and unsure of what to do about the invading animal. She said Fulton was the hero of the night."
Night of the Possum nightmare avoided!
“One bourbon, one scotch, one beer.” Photo by Mikell Darling on Unsplash
Treasures from the public domain. A Journey Round my Room (1794 / 1871)
In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. An impetuous young soldier, he was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel; there is no record of what happened to the other guy. It was during the 42 days of his confinement here that he wrote the manuscript that would become Voyage autour de ma chambre.
Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, with their digressive and colloquial style, de Maistre decided to make the most of his sentence by recording an exploration of the room as a travel journal. Like a modern teenager cataloguing their daily routine in a series of finely-tuned Instagram posts, de Maistre’s book imbues the tour of his chamber with great mythology and grand scale.
If you’re going to be locked in your room, you may as well make an adventure of it. Young de Maistre certainly made the most of his time in confinement. I’m not sure if my parents ever figured out that sending me to my room was the equivalent of tossing Brer Rabbit into the the briar patch…
At the link is the 1871 English translation of the original French text.
Coffee! What can’t it do? Research continues to find more and more benefits of drinking the magical elixir that it coffee: Drinking coffee may help protect kidneys
"We already know that drinking coffee on a regular basis has been associated with the prevention of chronic and degenerative diseases including Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and liver disease," said study author Dr. Chirag Parikh, director of the Division of Nephrology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“We can now add a possible reduction in AKI [acute kidney injury] risk to the growing list of health benefits for caffeine," he said in a university news release.
The researchers found that people who drank any quantity of coffee every day had a 15% lower risk of acute kidney injury, and those who drank two to three cups a day had a 22% to 23% lower risk.
Drinking coffee every day certainly gives your kidneys a workout. Every cup is like doing 100 crunches for each kidney! I made that part up. But you can read the real science in the recent issue of the journal Kidney International Reports.
By the way, today’s issue of Thursday Things is brought to you by several cups of coffee.
Thank you for reading Thursday Things! Again, please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!