One of the questions children are most commonly asked is, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It was once mainly boys who were asked, because all good little girls, people assumed, would naturally want to be wives and mothers. Being a shy little boy, I myself didn’t often get asked, but […]
My closest experience to living a dream come true was being hired to teach on board a cruise ship converted into a “floating university,” and sailing with it twice around the world. I had long fantasized that, one day, travel and education would be combined in ways like this – but to become part of […]
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We fall in love. So why don’t we fall in hate? But we all know that “falling” is much more complicated than that. There is, for instance, a big difference between a “fallen soldier,” and a “fallen woman.” Slipping and Falling too is acknowledged to be a major cause of death and injury, especially among […]
Some time ago, somebody at the Guinness Brewery (headquartered in Dublin, Ireland) had a brainwave. People in pubs were always arguing about the most this, or the longest or tallest that – but there was no handy authoritative way of settling these disputes. Why not publish some kind of reference book, to be available in […]
I am thinking of founding a religion in which everything is permitted. It would be the First Church of Anything Goes, and its followers would be known as Any’s. Wouldn’t it be great to have perfect freedom, sanctioned by the Almighty! But I must admit that this idea, attractive as it may seem at first […]
You probably know that the last four months of our calendar are wrongly named. “Sept,” “Oct,” “Nov,” and “Dec,” mean, in Latin, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, whereas those months are actually our ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. How did this happen? – and, even more to the point, why, for two thousand years, has […]
It was Edward Gibbon – himself one of the world’s great historians – who said that History was little more than a record of “the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” I don’t know about crimes, but you might put my own academic career, which included two degrees in History, among my personal follies and […]
One of the most famous pieces of literature in the English language is about a talking bird. No, it’s not a parrot or a mynah – and I don’t mean Edward Lear’s accomplished Owl who eloped with a Pussy-Cat, and could sing and play the guitar while operating a sailboat. The particular bird I am […]
Here and there in your life, you may have come across the expression “A Message to Garcia.” It’s one of those phrases useful in such a wide variety of situations that the original meaning has largely been forgotten. Those words became a cultural icon after appearing as the title of an essay, published in 1899, […]
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Why? Why should I do it? Because. Because why? Because They said so. And who are They? They are your Authority Figures, in the shape of your parent, your teacher, employer, minister, officer, judge, ruler – or even your spouse (remember that rash promise to “Love, honor, and obey”?). A powerful bunch, I must say […]
As far as I know, God never bothers about what’s right and what’s wrong. Even so, we’ve always been gifted with self-professed intermediaries, from the days of Moses descending Mount Sinai bearing holy commandments inscribed on tablets of stone, all the way to the “televangelists” of today, telling us in no uncertain terms how God […]
If anybody asked you (for some diabolical reason) to use the word “unpremeditated” in a poem, you might think it a considerable, almost an unfair, challenge. The word isn’t very poetic-sounding, is it? But prepare to be flabbergasted: That word happens to appear in the first stanza of one of the most famous poems in […]
I was eight when planes piloted (in my comic-books) by sinister-looking Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Even before then, “Made in Japan” reputedly meant “cheap and shoddy.” During the war, of course, Japanese were simply our diabolical enemies. And, thanks to war-movies like God Is My Co-Pilot, the image of evil Japanese pilots was strongly planted […]
You may remember an old campfire song containing repeated vows that “I ain’t gonna grieve my Lord no more,” interspersed with a lengthy list of ways in which “you can’t get to Heaven.” One of those ways, which I have always remembered (perhaps because this is one case in which I strongly agree with the […]
