Thursday, May 26, 2016

Bio 76

Ted English, one of my colleagues here in AHTD is a hunter; he goes deer hunting in late fall and early winter seasons when it is allowed. They call it the hunting season. There are several seasons for different hunting methods including bow and arrow, muzzleloader hunting, and modern gun hunting. The bow season starts somewhere in October and after a month or so, the muzzleloader season begins. Sometime in December, the modern gun season starts while it doesn’t last long. After a season for any method starts, you may still use the previous method as you wish. Ted says some people do not switch to guns and stick do bow and arrow because they like the challenge. He does all of them though and fills his freezer with deer meet.
The last time I was talking to him about hunting and how I used to go hunting with my dad with those double barrel shotguns and how we mainly hunted birds as there was no deer in Iran. In our conversation we came to a point where he explained how tough and challenging it is to use the bow and arrow or the muzzleloader guns as you only have and only one shot to take the deer or otherwise you will lose the game. Sometimes, the arrow hits the bone and it’s just an inch or two into the flesh and the deer just thinks he was bit by something and moves along. Sometimes, using bow and arrow you may injure the game and he runs off and you need to track them to find them; it mat even take a day if the shot is not serious enough to knock him out in time.
For the muzzleloader you also have only one shot as you don’t have time to refill the gun and all that trouble, because after your first shot, the deer escapes, so you just have to be fully careful on how you take your shot. Like bow and arrow, muzzleloader is not quick, it’s a one shot chance. As he was talking about these something popped in my mind: Eminem’s song named “lose yourself” where he starts the song by saying “if you have one shot, one opportunity …” and I told Ted about it and later sent him a link to the YouTube music video saying that you may put this song into the context of muzzleloader hunting. How interesting was that!

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Instance of Insanity

A second I am writing an equation on the moisture content of the wood, being equal to the difference in the mass of the wet and over-dried wood sample divided by the over-dried mass, and right away I picture the well-known junction of Raahband in the city of Sari! Within a few seconds, my close friend in Sari is marching in front of the screen of my mind and I recall how that junction looked like and how they were going to transform it to an interchange with connected over-passing loops and ramps and so on, how Mahdi, my friend waited at the Times Square of the town through the line of people waiting for taxi and the route cab would take to reach Raahband and then their house!

Then I find myself totally baffled by the flash back; how did this happen, such an absolutely out of the ordinary mental reminisce! How could the wood moisture content connect me to the city of Sari and specifically that junction in town! Out the millions of buried memoirs in my subconscious, why would it pick this specific location, and why would it even needed to be a location and not a person or an event or some scent or taste etc. It is dazzling how the nature works and it’s even more stunning how all these little nerves connect and their little chemical and electrical linkage to the past and future is. It is just something I guess can never be totally understood. But it was definitely something worth to write about; an instance of insanity!