De Lovely

This afternoon Concetta and I watched the movie De Lovely about the life of Cole Porter and came away with a whole new appreciation for Porter's work. Some of his well-known hits of the dozens he wrote in a four-decade-long career include, "Night and Day," "Paris loves lovers," "I Get A Kick Out of You," "You're the Top," "I've got you under my skin," "Begin the Beguine," and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." I enthusiastically recommend the movie (see jacket above). And if you want to read more about Cole Porter, click here for his bio on Wikipedia.

Life moves pretty fast...

The couple in the above photo is gazing at Mt. Whitney, California, and the adjacent peaks. I climbed that mountain when I was 18 years old, spent ten days backpacking through the southern Sierra before I reached the summit. In those days everything seemed to take forever. Now here I am forty years later wondering where the time went. In the immortal words of that great philosopher, Ferris Bueller, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

New Monitors

Hey everyone, I just wanted to show you the new monitor I bought with the money you generously gave me at my retirement party. It's a Dell 19" wide screen model (one on the right). Coincidentally, my son gave me an Acer 19" wide screen as a retirement gift. So, here I am, all set up with a dual-screen display just like those I had at work -- only better. Thanks again everyone. You're the best!

Lunch together on the patio

If you want to know what finally brought retirement home to me it was lunch today. Today we enjoyed a weekday lunch together out on the patio for the first time since I retired. Concetta has been working for the Legislature lately, which means that I have been home by myself when lunch rolled around. Normally, I'd spend the time with a sandwich, a cup of coffee, and a Turner Classic Movie. Sweet. But today, we officially kicked off retirement together. No looking back now.

The beat goes on -- just more slowly. . .

Well, here I am in my first week of retirement. I've spent this week running around doing errands and tying up loose ends for our upcoming trip to the UK. Yesterday I thought I'd lost the passports somehow, but after fifteen very tense minutes of racking my brain on their whereabouts, I finally remembered where I'd put them.

At this point I'm all packed, at least tentatively. My plan is to take roughly ten days of clothes and I have arranged in advance to do laundry at a couple of the B&Bs. The goal is to keep the checked bags at 50 pounds or less. I know world-traveler, Rick Steves goes to Europe for a month with two changes of clothes and a camera. He just re-washes everything every two days in the hotel sink. Somehow, I can't get enthusiastic about that scenario. For the first laundry day I found a B&B in southern Wales that has a contact who picks up laundry and delivers when finished. Can't beat that. I think the B&B in Lincolnshire, about 2/3 of the way into the trip, has laundry facilities in house, which will be even better.

The bags we are using are the rolling duffel style, which I really like. They have lots of zippered compartments on the outside and a big zippered lower compartment underneath the main duffel for things you want to keep flat. With the telescoping handle and wheels they're really easy to transport and their pliable sides make them easy to "stuff" places, like the diminutive hatch back on the Mini Cooper we're renting.

Anyway, along with the note for today I thought I'd include a nice pix of my buddy and co-worker, Jim Hansen and me, photographed on my last day in the office. Some folks might say Jim doesn't smile enough, but here's proof he's actually darn good at it.

Cheers, Jim!

First Day of Retirement

Well, here we are at last -- the first day of the rest of my life after retirement. Funny thing, I don't feel any different. This morning I still had to take out the trash, wash the patio, and pick up my socks as usual. I suspect that it will take a great many days before my blissful freedom materializes. But for all those co-workers who together made my working days so interesting and so rewarding, I say many, many thanks. I certainly won't forget you nor allow you to completely disappear from my life. This may seem like the end, but it's only the beginning.

Tomorrow. . .

To commemorate tomorrow's special day, here's the lyrics from the musical, Annie. And just for fun, at right is my 1973 passport:

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun!

Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
'Til there's none!

When I'm stuck a day
That's gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And Grin,
And Say,
Oh!

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
I love ya Tomorrow!
You're always
A day
A way!
!

The day before the day before the day

Well, here we are on the day before the day before the final day. Tomorrow is the good-bye lunch. We already had the good-bye breakfast/lunch here in the technology building with all my long-time techie co-workers. The plane in the picture was signed by all the helpdesk and desktop folks to send me off. It certainly feels like momentus things are about to happen.

Towards better photograhy

Want to improve your photographs? At right is a photo by LatentE," a photograher I found on tabblo.com using a software package from Photomatix.com that really does a nice job of combining a series of photos into one truly great shot.

I have to say that I've never been a fan of manipulated photographs, however photograhers have always known that your eye sees much more detail than the camera can ever capture. With LatentE's technique your photo captures a greater range of light and dark that more closely portrays what your eye saw originally.

To do this you have to have a stable shooting platform, preferrably a weighted tripod, so your shots don't vary from each other. Then you find a perfect spot and expose a series of photos using the camera's automatic over/under exposure feature. Finally, you import the shots into photomatix and manipulate the melded image. For instructions on how it works and to see other great shots from LatentE, go here.

British Mortality

Ever wonder why our ancestors died at such an early age? Here's a discussion I found on an Canadian web site about 18th century England:

"Every visitor to 18th-century London was impressed by the noise and the throngs of people. But the city itself was neither quaint nor clean. Most residents lived in appalling conditions. After the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed more than 85 percent of the city, London was rebuilt in a hasty and haphazard manner. Then rapid surge in population - from 675,000 in 1750 to 900,000 just 50 years later - caused enormous pressure on city planners to get buildings up quickly. Houses and tenements were thrown together in a slapdash manner, with little attention to plans or codes. Buildings were patched up, subdivided, and subdivided again to cram as many people into as little square footage as possible, which left a jumble of narrow, unlit passageways between residences and shops. Walking through one of these stinking, airless alleyways - especially after dark - was terribly risky, since the convoluted pattern of streets provided excellent cover for lurking criminals.

According to Richard B. Schwartz's Daily Life in Johnson's London, 'The city had become honeycombed with what were intended to be temporary dwellings but which grew to be permanent ones. The scarce available land was continually subdivided. Courts were built upon. Business establishments were cut up into tenements. Hovels and shacks were commonplace. Many of the poor crowded into deserted houses. A sizeable number of the city's inhabitants both lived and worked below ground level.'

Commercial streets were no less hazardous. Many London buildings were made with such shoddy materials - crumbling bricks and knotty timber - that it was not unusual for them to collapse. Heavy, pendulous shop signs projected out from storefronts on large iron bars. The signs, regularly whipped by the wind, could create such force that the entire façade of a building would come crashing down. Often this happened on top of passers-by. The din and danger from these creaking signs led the city to pass many ordinances restricting their use.

London was filled with the smell of wet horses and the waste materials associated with them. Sanitation was unheard of. Water was unpurified, and raw sewage ran down city streets in open drains. It was common practice for people to empty their chamber pots out of their windows, and to leave garbage out in the street to rot. C.P. Moritz wrote in 1782, "Nothing in London makes a more detestable sight than the butchers' stalls, especially in the neighborhood of the Tower. The guts and other refuse are all thrown on the street and set up an unbearable stink." (4)

An amazing variety of filth slopped down London's cobblestone streets. Along with dirt, dust and animal manure, there was the ever-falling London rain to add to the mess. Cesspools of human waste collected in puddles everywhere. Dead animals (dogs, cats, rodents, even horses) were left to decay in the streets. In darker corners of the city, an occasional human corpse might even be found. To add to all this, horse-drawn carriages with heavy metal wheels often splashed through puddles, slopping the street's putrid muck all over strolling pedestrians

With its overpopulation, bad sanitation, and out-of-control housing, English cities like London was a breeding ground for bacteria and disease, and death was common. Epidemics, infections and occasional food shortages led to an extraordinarily high mortality rate. Medicine was still quite primitive. In fact, in 1775, more than 800 deaths recorded in the Bills of Mortality were attributed simply to "Teeth." Lice and dirt were everywhere. Soot and grime covered overcrowded tenements. In these circumstances, unbridled disease ran rampant, and even the smallest wound could lead to death by infection.

The connection between personal hygiene and good health was not fully understood. Francis Place wrote that in the 1780s well-off women "wore petticoats of comblet, lined with dyed linen, stuffed with wool and horsehair and quilted...day by day till they were rotten."(7) Baths were extremely rare - in fact, many people considered them harmful. In all six editions of Sir John Flyer's Inquiry into the Right Use of Hot, Cold, and Temperate Baths in England, he never once mentions bathing simply for the sake of cleanliness.

There was also a grave fear of fresh air, in part because of airborne diseases like "consumption," so windows were kept tightly shut. And because entire buildings were taxed according to the number of windows they contained, many landlords sealed them off, with disastrous results for their tenants.

There was a seasonal pattern of death. In winter months, when thick, heavy, encrusted clothes were worn day and night, respiratory tuberculosis, influenza and typhus raged. Dysentery and diarrhea came around in the summer, when flies transmitted bacteria from filth to food and water was at its most foul.

Of every 1,000 children born in early 18th-century London, almost half died before the age of 2. Malnutrition, maternal ignorance, bad water, dirty food, poor hygiene and overcrowding all contributed to this extremely high mortality rate. And if an infant did survive, it then faced the perils of childhood - namely malnourishment and ongoing abuse. Many poor children were dispatched to crowded, backbreaking "workhouses" or were apprenticed to tradesmen who used them as unpaid laborers. A Parliamentary committee reported in 1767 that only seven in 100 workhouse infants survived for three years. Stephen Inwood notes in his book The History of London that "workhouse 'apprentices' swept London's chimneys, hawked milk and fruit round its streets, and labored unpaid in the worst branches of tailoring, shoemaking, stocking making, baking, river work and domestic service. Later in the century industrialization offered new outlets and London pauper children were packed off to work in the cotton-spinning mills of Lancashire and Cheshire."

Fascinating, right? Click here to read the whole account.

Widows and Orphans

Here's an interesting factoid from the ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council) website that I thought I'd include on the blog because so many of my male ancestors (and a few female ancestors) died at an young age:

In England, between 1650 and 1700, the average age of women at widowhood was 47, rising to 53 by the early 19th century. Early 18th century valuations of widows' property in three different parts of England suggest that the property was worth between 38 and 79 per cent of their husbands', meaning that they didn't inheirit the entire estate after their husband's death. Where there were adult children, husbands left only part of the property to their wives. And, property was often granted to widows only for the length of their life rather than outright.

Friday before the Friday

Today is the Friday before the Friday when I turn off my computer here at the Technology Division for the last time. I'm going to miss a lot of folks here, many that I've known for nearly two decades. And I'm surely going to miss this great Dell computer with the dual-monitor setup. If you haven't tried dual monitors, by the way, you should try it. It makes everything you do so much easier.

Last night I watched a documentary on the Plague years of 1347-1351, the infamous Black Death that consumed Europe and the Mediterranean region back then. Now that I'm a budding genealogist, the program got me to thinking just how lucky we descendents of the survivors are to be here. After all, whatever individual ancestors were present in the mid fourteenth century, by the time the effects of the Black Death had waned, anywhere from a third to a half of everyone was dead. In some cities the death toll was even higher. Venice, Italy suffered a 60% death rate, while in the Italian city of Florence as many as 75% of the population died.

So how come we're here? What stroke of incredible luck decreed that our ancestors from 650 some odd years ago survived while so many did not? Naturally I turned to the internet to answer the question. I found the following possible explanation which was taken from a 2008 International Tribune article by Nicholas Bakalar:


"Many historians have assumed that Europe's deadliest plague, the Black Death of 1347to 1351, killed indiscriminately, young and old, hardy and frail, healthy and sick alike. But two anthropologists were not so sure. They decided to take a closer look at the skeletons of people buried more than 650 years ago. Their findings, published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the plague selectively took the already ill, while many of the otherwise healthy survived the infection. Although it may not be surprising that healthy people would be more likely to survive an illness, it is not always the case. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed thousands of healthy people in their prime while sparing many children and the elderly, whose weaker immune systems did not overreact to the infection. Sexually transmitted infections like HIV disproportionately affect the strongest and healthiest, for the obvious reason that they are the most sexually active.

Plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, and it is usually transmitted to humans by fleas; flea-infested rats caused the 14th-century epidemic. The bacteria invade the bloodstream, causing internal bleeding that leads to shock and death. In the new study, the researchers examined 490 skeletons exhumed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London. The site, like many other cemeteries, was set up to bury victims of the Black Death and was almost certainly used for no other purpose. The scientists determined the victims' state of health when they died by counting bone lesions, defects that suggest previous infections and other existing health problems. The researchers also estimated age at death by noting dental development and using other established methods. As a comparison, they analyzed the bones of 291 genetically and culturally similar people buried in a Danish cemetery shortly before the plague began.

The aim was to find out whether the Londoners, who all died of the plague, were frail when the epidemic struck. In the nonplague Danish cemeteries, bone lesions were strongly associated with earlier death. If the Black Death killed without discrimination, such skeletal defects would not be associated with an increased risk of death in East Smithfield. Many of the victims would have had healthy-looking bones when the plague killed them. But this was not the case. Among the East Smithfield plague victims, bone lesions were also associated with excess mortality. In other words, many of those people were already in poor health when the Black Death struck. Most of the bone defects that the researchers found can be caused by malnutrition, and the scientists suggest that the findings may show effects of starvation on immune function. It is known from contemporary chronicles that many survived the plague, and they, the authors write, were probably well fed and healthy enough to mount an effective immune response.

'Even something as clearly deadly as the Black Death is still selective,' said Sharon DeWitte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the State University at Albany. The Black Death, she continued, is comparable in some ways to various emerging diseases of today like Ebola or SARS, and studying it "gives us some insight into who might be at highest risk for these new diseases."

The authors acknowledge that their findings are not conclusive. The samples used were from two geographic areas, and similar lesions could have been caused by diseases of varying severity in the two areas. Still, the authors write, the fact that a pattern of excess mortality was associated with different kinds of lesions suggests that the plague more often killed the weak than the strong."

The above piece was very interesting. But since I suspected that there must be other reasons, I kept looking. Here's another piece I gleaned from the internet which is equally intriguing in its implications:

"While we commonly think of the rat acting as a host for fleas and the plague bacillus, it was certainly not the only animal that carried the disease. Besides humans and rats, most animals were susceptible to the bacillus and were infested with fleas. There was, however, one exception -- the horse. According to Robert S. Gottfried in his book, 'The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe,' however important black rats were in the dissemination of plague, it is essential to emphasize that they were not the only secondary carriers. Along with the rodents already mentioned, additional secondary vector hosts included virtually all household and barnyard animals save the horse, whose odor apparently repels even starving blocked fleas."

Wow! So now it seems our surviving ancestors may have been healthy horse owners. Seriously though, I suspect, as you probably do, there's a lot more to it than that. For instance, might there be a genetic reason? Following that tack, I found a piece by Dr. Barry Starr of Standford University in California, USA, who wrote:

"There may be. There are many stories where someone who was in constant contact with plague victims didn’t die. Maybe genetics is the explanation. For example, in 1665, the plague hit a small village in England called Eyam. The town quarantined itself to keep the Black Death from spreading into the rest of the country. A year later, the plague had burnt itself out but half of the townspeople were dead. Was there something special about the half that lived?

In 1996, researchers tracked down descendants of the people of Eyam and looked for any mutations they might have in common to explain this high survival rate. What they found was a mutation called CCR5-delta 32. The CCR5-delta 32 mutation was already known for a different reason—people with one copy of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation are resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. People with 2 copies are virtually immune to HIV.

The CCR5-delta 32 mutation probably arose a few thousand years ago in Northeastern Europe. It stayed rare until around 700 years ago when it suddenly became more common. The plague started in Europe around 700 years ago.

So, does CCR5-delta 32 protect people from the plague bacteria? Probably not. Mice infected with the plague bacteria died at around the same rates whether or not they had the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.

Why then is this mutation so common in Europeans and even more common in people whose ancestors came from Eyam? Maybe smallpox is the reason. Smallpox killed 3 in 10infected people for thousands of years in Europe. Recent studies suggest that smallpox, like HIV, can’t infect someone with the CCR5-delta 32 mutation.

Of course this doesn’t explain Eyam (unless there was a lot of smallpox in the area). A more controversial theory is that an unknown virus, not the plague bacteria, caused the Black Death. Besides the evidence of the CCR5-delta 32 mutation itself, some people contend that the disease shouldn’t have been stopped by quarantine and that it spread too quickly for a flea borne illness.

Anyway, as you can see, while genetics were probably involved, there isn’t yet a solid answer as to what genes were involved."

Now, that makes sense. We all know how immunity works. As kids, we get shots all the time to build up our immunity to nasty diseases. If our ancient ancestors, those that came before the plague survivors, had contracted some disease that provided them some protection against the Black Death, it would make sense that they might survive, especially if their non-surviving neighbors did not possess that genetic protection.

Of course, there's no way to know at present. But with the speed at which scientific advances are being made in genetics, I'm sure we're going to know more on this subject in the very near future. Until then, click here to see more information on the study being done on CCR5 delta-32.