When I was little we had an old children’s book called The Bumper Book. I hadn’t thought of it in ages, but recently I was looking through Kathy’s impressive collection of children’s literature from the 1960s and before, and it occurred to me that The Bumper Book would make a fine addition. It properly belonged to kayigo-it was her third birthday ( Read more... )

The word eye has to be one of the funniest words in the English language. Especially when it's said all by itself: "EYE!"

I love stuffed Spanish olives. Piquant, salty, pimento-stuffed-what’s there not to enjoy? Even as a little kid, I adored them, and green olives are not the kind of thing you’d expect to tempt a rugrat, let alone a famously ( Read more... )

For the next couple of weeks we’ll have quite a menagerie of planets in the evening sky. Venus is slowly converging on the closely-spaced Mars and Saturn, which currently form a dim colon (the punctuation mark, and not the internal organ) above the western horizon after sunset. Mercury may also be spied, at least in the tropics, somewhat below. ( Read more... )

I’ve long ago conceded that my memory is far from perfect, but sometimes it’s shocking to realize just how poorly I remember some things. Take, for example, my father’s story of nearly being arrested for espionage on his way to Elmendorf AFB in Alaska. I spoke to Dad about it a couple nights after I posted my version, and found that I was ( Read more... )