New Year

Happy New Year!  It's now 2017, according to the Julian calendar, and I am hoping that this year will be, truly, "good."    Good to me means: peace, health, happiness, and earning enough to pay all bills and have a little left over to participate in a few fun things...
   My parents always told me that we learn something every day we're alive - and that when we stop learning, or cease being amazed, that we might as well die.  A few years ago, I learned, to my amazement, that humans have anal glands, just like cats and dogs.  I don't know why  that surprised me, given the reticence that society imposes regarding the act of defecation.   ....  That's just my lead-in to the two new things that I learned during the last two days of 2016.
   I learned on Friday, 30 December, that one-quarter of the world's population has a small heart abnormality.  When babies are in the uterus, surrounded by amniotic fluid, they don't breathe.  They get their oxygen supply through their mother's blood through the umbilical cord.  Since this blood supply doesn't need to be "scrubbed clean" by going through the lungs, there is is small opening between the upper chambers of the baby's heart, the right and left atria.  The opening is called the foramen ovale, and once the child is born and is breathing air, the opening closes by itself during infancy.  However, this opening does not close completely in almost 25% of the population - and it is then called a patent  foramen ovale, or PFO.  Most people never know whether or not they have a PFO, unless a specific test is run.  I had that test during my echo cardiogram of my heart Friday it's called a "bubble test," and mine was positive.  Meaning that my heart leaks uncleaned used  blood, in small amounts, over to the clean, oxygenated blood in my left atria, which then recirculates through my system.  It doesn't bother most people, and surgery is not known to help, except in extreme cases. Once all my test results get back to my regular doctor, we'll have a conference about it....
  Yesterday evening, while following a my family tree back, I was found myself laughing like an idiot.  I found my 54th-great grandfather was named Kenneth, son of Old Cole.  I thought - "Oh, no! Not the Old King Cole of nursery rhyme!" - but it was Old King Cole.  His name was Coel ap Tegfan, and he was known as Coel Hen - or Cole the Old.  He was head of several post-Roman Brythonic Royal families of the Hen Ogledd, the "Old North" covering modern Northern England and Southern Scotland.  His titles were King of Northern Britain and Dux Britanniorum.  Of course, the nursery rhymes are based on ancient stories and legends, so a person can't swear that Old King Cole and Coel ap Tegfan were truly one and the same person - but it seems likely....  Which leads to a consideration of Old King Cole's pipe - did the Romans and early British Kings actually smoke?  I don't think so - but the old illustration of the nursery rhyme shows the King with a hookah...  Was he merry because of hashish - or opium?  Who knows....