OF TWO WORLDS–BORN IN THE 1800’s

In all of the world there are only a two known people still alive that were born in the 1800’s. Can you imagine that?

Emma Morano who lives in Verbania Italy, and Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn were all born in 1899. The oldest, Jeralean Talley of Detroit, recently passed away on June 18th.
Jeralean Talley
Emma is still fairly healthy and is on no medications at all and Susannah has some high blood pressure but otherwise is in good health. Jeralean was still bowling at age 104.

Although the women have lost much of their eyesight and hearing their attitudes and positive outlooks are still going strong.
Emma Morano

They have had different diets with Emma eating raw eggs every day but little fruits or vegetables. She does come from Sardinia though and there seems to be a lot of centenarians in Italy. I would like to think it is that Mediterranean diet but as we see Emma never followed that much.

Susannah eats bacon, scrambled eggs and grits every day. Jeralean’s favorite foods were chicken wings and head cheese but had stayed away from butter and cheese recently. This was not for medical reasons however.

Susannah Jones

Emma and Susannah never had children and were not married for very long. Jeralean, however, was married for many, many years and did have a daughter. 

Can you imagine the changes in the world these women have seen? It is incomprehensible to me. The advances in medicine. Technology. Wars. Laws. Rights. They are living history.

Susannah will turn 116 next week and Emma is a few months younger. 

Happy Birthday to both of you.

Have a really big piece of cake.

OCEAN CLEANUP- THERE IS HOPE

There is plastic in our oceans. Lots of plastic. Literally tons of plastics. 300 tons generated per year.

The birds eat it and die. The fish eat it and die.

There is more and more added every day.

What are we going to do?

We are hopefully going to listen to Boyan Slat. Never heard of him? Understandable.

He is young, very young, but he is wise beyond his years. He has come up with a concept for cleaning the ocean of plastic debris that has been proven out through many feasibility studies.

It is a very complicated task due to ocean conditions, weather, sea life, sheer volume and costs involved. I believe he has the right idea.

I am not going to get all technical and scientific on you but there is a word used throughout his work that we need to understand first.

Gyre : definition from National Geographic Education: An ocean gyre is a large system of circular ocean currents formed by global wind patterns and forces created by earth’s rotation. The movement of the world’s major ocean gyres helps drive the “ocean conveyor belt”".” The ocean conveyor belts circulates ocean water around the entire planet.

Photo from National Geographic, click here to see more.

It is gyres that are moving much of the plastics into an area known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is not the only patch but is the biggest.

It was discovered by a racing boat captain named Charles Moore while sailing from Hawaii to California and becoming absolutely surrounded by the plastic debris. Some of it washes up on the beaches but tons of it just floats around decomposing and leaching chemicals into the sea water.

 

So what can be done about it besides the obvious point of not polluting our waters to begin with?

Become aware and support the brilliant minds that are trying to clean up what is there. Have a look at Boyan Slat’s video that show them in action developing their ideas into something that most certainly can work.

Since the areas are so far out to sea individual countries are not taking responsibility for the clean up. Does that surprise anyone?

How about a video of the young guy nervously giving a TED TALK speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROW9F-c0kIQ… click here….

The thing is the collected plastic will be recycled into other uses paying the costs for the collection and then some.  

So what do you think?

 

Click here to read his responses to his critics… and we know there are always critics.