AM I SAPPY, OR WHAT?

A cute little girl

A long time ago

Yesterday I spent several hours sitting on a park bench in Zuanich Point Park, experiencing  beautiful sunshine and views – but still filled up with sour,  gloomy thoughts and pessimistic  speculations.  To boil it all down the way my Beaumont family would have done, it just seems like the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.  Fast. You  know what mean.

And then a marvelous thing occurred.  

A little girl, all dressed up, rode by on what obviously was a new bike – and flashed me a big smile.  Her smile clearly meant that she was proud of herself and her new toy, happy to see me look up and, startled,  smile back – and that she was simply filled with joy.  Poof! went all my black and ugly thoughts.  Poof!  They'll come back, but for the moment - Poof!

Lucky are the parents of that beautiful little girl. Lucky is society that such innocence and goodness still exist in the world. – and lucky was I to be so thoroughly booted out of my foul mood.  Thank you , little girl.

Maybe there’s hope for us, after all.

THE MYSTERY OF DNA PACKING

Have you ever lain in bed at night, unable to sleep because your brain insisted on wrestling with the eternal, vital  question, to wit “How can you stuff a human DNA molecule that is six feet long into the nucleus of a single cell”?  Probably not too often.  Well, Dr. Collins gives you a colorful hint, here:

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/08/13/a-new-view-of-the-3d-genome/

Of course, now you have to cope with the equally important conundrum:   how in hell does the copying mechanism find the right spot to do its job, in all that knotted-up, colorful mess?

There’s lots we don’t know – and, I suspect, lots we will never know.

Nuts!

Abu Becker ibn Myrl al Beaumonti

has some irritating news

Google, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to "improve" the program I use to post my blogs.  This means that I must wrestle with new complications and, so far, I have lost.  So postings may be irregular and look peculiar for awhile.  Please bare with me.

Hiroshima & Bataan

Today is August 6^th, 2020, the 75^th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima.  I always felt that the bombing was justified and necessary.  Without a demonstration of our overwhelming military superiority Japan almost certainly would have fought on, with the consequent death of thousands of Americans and possibly hundreds of thousands of Japanese.  But, like most people Hiroshima continues to trouble me.

It so happens that, quite by circumstance, today I have been reading an account of the Bataan death march and the subsequent treatment of our soldiers by the Japanese army.  I confess that I have to struggle against the impulse to regard Hiroshima and Nagasaki as condign retribution for Bataan.  But I shouldn’t feel that way, and I know it.  However, it is difficult.

As someone surely must once have said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth eventually must lead to a blind, toothless humanity”.  So I am going to stop reading about Bataan,  and watch something mindless on TV.  Moral cowardice, I guess, but then, that’s me

If God really did create us, He shouldn’t be too proud of His handiwork..