Who is the “monkey in the middle”? Who gets bullied? The new kid? The small kid? The smart kid? The unpopular kid? Don’t you want your book back? shout the tormentors. Here it is! But of course the new, small, smart, unpopular kid can never jump high enough or run
How much is six plus four plus five? Did you put together the six and the four first because six plus four is ten and it’s easy to add stuff to ten? Or did you notice that four, five, and six are all in a row so six plus four
Eight eggplants, five dozen little tomatoes, twenty peppers, and a watermelon. Not a bad harvest for one afternoon. Admittedly a little straightforward financial accounting would suggest that the watermelon alone cost some two hundred dollars to produce—not including principle, interest, taxes, or insurance on the property in which the eye-catching
Willy Loman’s son Biff has his ups and downs. Biff is the star of the high school football team, is well liked, and anticipates a bright future. Yes, Biff has bullied Bernard the smart, small, supportive neighbor; yes, Biff has stolen construction material from a nearby site; yes, Biff absconded
Warning: there is a four-letter word that many find offensive in the punchline of this vignette. If you would prefer not to be exposed to the adjectival form of this term that can be triggering, now would be a good time to stop reading. That said, I want to put
President James Garfield was standing on a train platform in Baltimore when Charles Guiteau, in Dr. Howard Markel’s delightful phrase, “broke through the crowd and entered the history books” shooting the 20th president twice. Medicine in 1881 was nothing to write home about. Doctors poked and prodded their unwashed, unsterilized
“Go ahead and shoot, you’d be doing me a favor” quips Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Warner Brother’s classic Casablanca. Ingrid Bergman—spoiler alert, she was married, not widowed, when they were dating in those sparkling flashback scenes—has blown back into his life. Rick is inconsolable, if a tad self-absorbed.
A chicken, it is frequently remarked, is an egg’s way of making another egg. Or something like that. Assigning causality, that one thing is directly responsible for another thing, is tougher than just noting correlation, that two things frequently go together. That my favorite sports teams seem to lose an
I don’t believe that I have ever abused the power, such as it is, of these columns by endorsing a product or service. I didn’t have time this week to reread all 680 of these previous essays to ensure that I have never suggested that my gentle readers buy anything
My father’s father was killed when my dad was not quite six years old. In 1929. My dad started smoking cigarettes when he was stationed in Texas during the war. By the time I was born in 1956 my dad was up to three packs a day. My dad would
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