Shortly after hearing the news that four of our friends became great-grandparents, I came across a news item about an upcoming reality show. The producers are seeking women in their thirties who are grandmothers. Well, the daughter of one of our friends fits that description. It seems though, that the grandmother in this case won’t...
National Geographic Magazine’s final issue for 2011 featured—wait for it—the Bible! That’s right; the publication whose motto is “Inspiring people to care about the planet” put the Bible on its cover. Well, it is nice to have National Geographic confirm my view–the Bible is crucial for the well-being of the planet after all. Their story...
Why is it that right now 80 million Germans are financing the siestas, supermarkets, railways and retirements of 120 million Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians? Germany is by far the largest contributor to the budget of the European Economic Community. In 2010, Germany exported double the total of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy all put...
There are meetings of Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Clutterers Anonymous and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, Alcoholics Anonymous. I would like to suggest a new addition – Bigots Anonymous, and Rabbi Joshua Hammerman should head the effort to get it off the ground. Rabbi Hammerman has apologized for his twisted remarks about those...
Between them, Fedex and UPS deliver about twenty million packages a day. If they operated with 99.5% reliability, each day one hundred thousand packages would go missing. That does not happen. If they operated with 99.95% reliability, each day ten thousand packages would vanish. Now 99.95% is pretty good, but that doesn’t happen either. In...
Before dawn that Sunday, Jerry Westfield and his two excited boys boarded their runabout at Ala Wai Harbor. Stowing the fishing gear along with their lunch, Jerry yanked the cord and started the Evinrude while his sons tossed the mooring lines onto the dock. The black sky turned to cloudless cobalt as they slipped out...
Many years ago, my mother-in-law asked a friend to pick up four strawberry jellies for her at the store. When her friend returned with four jars of strawberry jam, she was dumbfounded. It turns out that they weren’t speaking the same language, though English was both their native tongues. As they discovered, British English and...
