Welcoming 2022

We all age

Courtesy of a childhood friend

An African billionaire?

A look at Jamaicans

Where is Biden?

Recycling plastic

Recycling hair

Kids suing countries

Hell is being a child in Venezuela

More from the BBC

The World Economy

Smelly perfume

Earning their bread

Some animals in the UK

Views of wildlife via the BBC:

Moving parakeets

Parakeets surprised an animal shelter in Detroit - that's because there were more than 800 parakeets given to the shelter. The donor was the son of the owner of the parakeets. The shelter feels that the birds were in "a very unhealthy situation". But the shelter really had no choice.

Obviously, the owner had been breeding the birds for quite a while. He was spending $1,200 a month on them.

Capping abandoned oil wells

“The right thing to do.”

So says Davyon Johnson of Muscogee, Oklahoma. He's an 11 year-old who, on the same day, saved the lives of two people. 

At school on December 9 he saved a fellow student who was choking on a bottle cap. Davyon used the Heimlich maneuver, a technique he had learned on YouTube after being inspired by his uncle, Wendell Johnson, an emergency medical technician. 

Later that day his mother and he were driving to church when they spotted smoke coming from a house. There was a small fire near the back of the house. She turned the car around, and there it was: a small fire near the back of the house. All but one of the residents were running out, one was not. She was an older woman using a walker. Davyon helped her get to her truck.

He was honored by the Muskogee Public Schools Board of Education.

A premier trader

A different way of singing

Miracles with paper

Popular Christmas songs today

A Covid Christmas

Twas the night before Christmas, but Covid was here,
So we all had to stay extra cautious this year.
Our masks were all hung by the chimney with care
In case Santa forgot his and needed a spare.
With Covid, we couldn't leave cookies or cake
So we left Santa hand sanitizer to take.

The children were sleeping, the brave little tots
The ones over 5 had just had their first shots,
And mom in her kerchief and me in my cap
Had just settled in for a long winter's nap.
But we tossed and we turned all night in our beds
As visions of variants danced in our heads.

Gamma and Delta and now Omicron
I thought to myself, "If this doesn't get better,
I'll soon be familiar with every Greek letter".

Then just as I started to drift off and doze
A clatter of noise from the front lawn arose.
I leapt from my bed and ran straight down the stair
I opened the door, and an old gent stood there.

His N 95 made him look pretty weird
But I knew who he was by his red suit and beard.
I kept six feet away but blurted out quick
" What are you doing here, jolly Saint Nick?"
Then I said, "Where's your presents, your reindeer and sleigh?
Don't you know that tomorrow will be Christmas Day? ".
And Santa stood there looking sad in the snow
As he started to tell me a long tale of woe.

He said he'd been stuck at the North Pole alone
All his white collar elves had been working from home,
And most of the others said "Santa, don't hire us!
We can live off the CERB now, thanks to the virus".

Those left in the toyshop had little to do.
With supply chain disruptions, they could make nothing new.
And as for the reindeer, they'd all gone away.
None of them left to pull on his sleigh.

He said Dasher and Dancer were in quarantine,
Prancer and Vixen refused the vaccine,
Comet and Cupid were in ICU,
So were Donner and Blitzen, they may not pull through.

And Rudolph's career can't be resurrected.
With his shiny red nose, they all think he's infected.
Even with his old sleigh, Santa couldn't go far.
Every border to cross needs a new PCR.

Santa sighed as he told me how nice it would be
If children could once again sit on his knee.
He couldn't care less if they're naughty or nice
But they'd have to show proof that they'd had their shot twice.

But then the old twinkle returned to his eyes.
And he said that he'd brought me a Christmas surprise.
When I unwrapped the box and opened it wide,
Starlight and rainbows streamed out from inside.

Some letters whirled round and flew up to the sky
And they spelled out a word that was 40 feet high.
There first was an H, then an O, then a P,
Then I saw it spelled HOPE when it added the E.

"Christmas magic" said Santa as he smiled through his beard.
Then suddenly all of the reindeer appeared.
He jumped into his sleigh and he waved me good-bye,
Then he soared o'er the rooftops and into the sky.

I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight
"Get your vaccines my friends, Merry Christmas, good-night".
Then I went back to bed and a sweet Christmas dream
Of a world when we'd finished with Covid 19.

From a childhood friend

Will you join the Metaverse?

They survived the tornado

And still more photos

These are from My Modern Met

Random impressions

Poll assesses healthcare in the U.S.

Gallup and West Health, two major polling organizations, tell us that 38% of respondents to a recent poll—representing around 100 million Americans - characterized the for-profit U.S. healthcare system as either "expensive" or "broken." 94% of Americans believe the cost of healthcare in the U.S. is "higher than it should be."

Two years ago things looked different. Close to half of Americans (48%) believed the quality of care found in the U.S. was either 'the best in the world' (13%) or 'among the very best' (36%). This was two-and-a-half times the 18% who reported that the quality of care was either 'the worst in the world' (3%) or 'among the worst' (16%)."

Money is a problem; nearly a third of U.S. adults report that they could not afford quality healthcare if they needed it today, up from 18% in February. One in 20 respondents—representing around 12.7 million people—told Gallup and West Health that a friend or family member died over the past year after not receiving treatment because they couldn't afford it.

Who is his dentist?

A traveling eagle

Steller's sea eagle is native to Asia, but visited Massachusetts this week, according to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. It is thought that this is the same Steller’s sea eagle spotted in Alaska, Texas and Canada.

He won't catch anything

Courtesy of a childhood friend

The Border Wall

We don't hear much about the wall between the U.S. and Mexico that was going to protect our border from illegal entry. The Biden administration killed the project. But, it had been started and now portions of it sit there unused, costing us at least $3 million a day guarding the steel and other materials that was bought for $350 million.

Where the really big companies are

Democracy in India

Fleeing a Fire

Checking the facts

The rich get richer

Santa Claus is coming to town

Whales migrating

Why?

Did you know that we have 750 overseas bases in 80 countries on every continent but Antarctica? They are not cheap, they cost $100 billion annually. Could we make better use of this money? William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, thinks so.

Money and Congress

Insider has been studying the finances of our Congressmen. These are some of their conclusions:

48 members of Congress and 182 senior-level congressional staffers have violated a federal conflicts-of-interest law. 

Nearly 75 federal lawmakers held stocks in COVID-19 vaccine makers Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer in 2020, with many of them buying or selling these stocks in the early weeks of the pandemic. 

15 lawmakers tasked with shaping US defense policy that actively invest in military contractors. 

More than a dozen environmentally-minded Democrats invest in fossil fuel companies or other corporations with concerning environmental track records. 

Insider's "Conflicted Congress" is also rating every member of Congress on their financial conflicts and commitment to financial transparency. Fourteen senators and House members have received a red "danger" rating on our three-tier stoplight scale, while 112 get a yellow "borderline" rating.

The tornadoes in Kentucky

More photos

These are from The Atlantic:

If the Supreme Court gets rid of Roe v. Wade

Believe this?

Saving a hand

Is stress a problem for you?

Pregnancy deaths in the U.S.

The United States is one of only 13 countries in the world where the rate of maternal mortality — the death of a woman related to pregnancy or childbirth up to a year after the end of pregnancy — is now worse than it was 25 years ago. Each year, an estimated 700 to 900 maternal deaths occur in the United States.

Considerable racial/ethnic disparities in pregnancy-related mortality exist. During 2014–2017, the pregnancy-related mortality ratios were: 

41.7 deaths per 100,000 live births for non-Hispanic Black women. 

28.3 deaths per 100,000 live births for non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native women. 

13.8 deaths per 100,000 live births for non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander women. 

13.4 deaths per 100,000 live births for non-Hispanic White women. 

11.6 deaths per  100,000 live births for Hispanic or Latina women. 

Variability in the risk of death by race/ethnicity may be due to several factors including access to care, quality of care, prevalence of chronic diseases, structural racism, and implicit biases. 

Interesting photos

These were selected by the BBC as some of the most striking images of 2021:

A mother to many

A different kind of doll

doll

Every body should be space-worthy

Walking across Canada to help Scotland

The Camel Beauty Contest

Every year Saudi Arabia has a beauty contest for camels. They are looking for long, droopy lips, a big nose and a shapely hump. The contest provides $66,000,000 in prize money. It is the largest in the world and lasts 40 days. This year 33,000 camel owners from as far away as the US, Russia and France are participating. It is quite popular; about 100,000 tourists visit every day.

This year's contest had a major problem: more than 40 camels have been disqualified for receiving Botox injections and other cosmetic enhancements.  Twenty-seven contestants in the cup for Majaheim camels alone were disqualified for having stretched body parts and 16 were ejected for having received injections. Botox was injected into camels' lips, noses, jaws and other parts of their heads to relax muscles; collagen fillers were used to make their lips and noses bigger; and hormones were given to boost muscle growth. Rubber bands were also used on animals to make body parts bigger than nor mal by restricting the flow of blood.