D. RANDALL FARO

Phyllotaxis. Unless you’re a botany major, five will get you ten you don’t know what this is. To help make your day, I’ll tell you. It is...

A year ago today I almost kicked the bucket . . . bought the farm . . . bit the dust. Choose whichever lingo you fancy. While riding a...

Confucius said: “Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated.” He could have also said that life can be really easy but...

PULL-TAB LIVING I’ll bet you 10-to-1 that you’ve never heard of Ermal Cleon Fraze. I’ll bet you 100-to-1 you’ve used his invention. In...

“I swear! I swear on a stack of Bibles, I’m telling the truth! Cross my heart and hope to die, I am not lying to you.” You’ve either...

Charles Dodgson. It’s very likely you have read one or more of his books. His first one has been translated into one hundred seventy-four...

The German medical doctor and avocational artist, Carl Gustav Carus, wrote nine letters to an anonymous “Ernest” between 1815 and 1824....

“Guilt. It’s a very powerful emotion. It can motivate or it can suffocate.” So writes Alan Jacobson in Hard Target. An ongoing debate I...

NO MORE Benjamin Franklin said it: “There was never a good war, or a bad peace.” A short list of words associated with war: evil –...

“Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its...

Small, tiny even, does not necessarily mean weakness or the inability to do great things. Consider flying couriers of misery. Much of my...

Patriotism (appreciating and a commitment to one’s country) is not the same as nationalism (believing that one’s country is better than...

Life is relatively easy for some. For others it can be difficult. For many it can be hard-to-imagine hard. When finding oneself in the...

Nineteenth century Swedish playwright, August Strindberg, corresponded with Helena Nyblom, a Danish-born author who married a Swede and...

In a recently watched TV show a man and boy were fishing. The boy asks the man why the fish pull so hard against the line when it just...

It happened a quarter of a century ago but is as fresh in my mind as if it were yesterday. The setting was the most prestigious and...

MAYBE I SHOULD JOIN A JIM 18 June 2020 Maybe I should join a jim. Working out at gyms has been a regular and intense part of my life...

Holy is a good thing, yes? Some fraction of one percent might say no, but they would be in the wingnut ultra-minority. This is especially...

Greg Iles is one of my favorite authors. If he has written a novel that I haven’t read it’s because I don’t know about it. His latest,...

A recent issue in a periodical to which I have subscribed for decades included an ecological article on the relationship between human...