A lovely young English couple are planning to visit my town in a fortnight, along with 70-odd out-of-town police officers, trucks-full of barricades and a personal hair stylist. As William and Kate’s arrival approaches, I find myself situated as a public servant, so I shan’t venture any opinion at all on Canada’s future with the […]
Sex
On LWON’s first birthday, Richard Panek asked me to explain why being circumcised makes a man less likely to catch HIV. So I will. Here you go, Richard. Let’s be honest. Foreskin is weird. The rules of evolution suggest that it once conferred an advantage, but I can’t fathom what that advantage might have been. […]
I see two problems here. Number 1 is that no squirrel ever slipped and fell off a tree. Squirrels’ understanding of gravitational physics is hard-wired and mathematically immaculate. Number 2 is with AG’s mouse-overed comment, “Not even an insatiable thirst for knowledge can compete with our innate affinity for cute fuzzy little animals.” I agree […]
“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a good night to murder the king. Even a century earlier, the collective noun was “a murder of crows.” Three centuries later, a poet watches a horse that’s been shot: “gorged crows rise ragged in the wind. […]
A few years back, when anyone Googled me, they were directed to a bunch of (and I apologize but there is just no nice way to say this, though those nice British editors at New Scientist tried) piss fetish sites. This had nothing to do with my predilections, which I must hasten to add don’t venture […]
The term ‘cougar’ — referring to an older woman who pounces on a younger man — used to be an insult. Remember the most famous cougar of the ’90s? Mary Kay Letourneau, the 34-year-old teacher who slept with her 12-year-old student. She went to prison for seven years. (Ok, so Mary was more of a […]
Abstruse Goose added a mysterious little tag that says something like, “Now, how many pop culture references can you find?” None for me, not one, geezer that I apparently am. But I did get the astronomy/physics references. The stardust one: maybe you already know this but most every element — the lithium in our batteries, […]
In the summer of 1993, just weeks before bulldozers began rolling in for the largest transportation project in Boston’s history–the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel–archaeologists discovered what appeared to be two 19th century privies and a cistern along the old waterfront. Unable to come up with funding to dig them, Boston archaeologist Martin Dudek and his […]