Many people believe in many different things – yet (speaking personally), I find it hard to believe in anything at all. Of course, the primary “belief” hurdle is whatever people think of as “God.” And there is nothing new about this. There is a whole field of study concerning belief without proof, called “Theology.” But […]

One thing wars are good for (if anything) is the spawning of new words and expressions. Soldiers are particularly involved in this, especially when they’re far from home, and have chances to leave their own form of calling-card. In World War II, one of the most widely spread expressions inscribed, usually by American troops, was […]

The little glass balls we call “marbles” today were once probably made of real marble – but they were no doubt being played with by children thousands of years ago. Just when “having all one’s marbles” became a semi-humorous metaphor for being sane is probably much more recent in origin. And not having all of […]

There’s not much that has stuck with me from a course in Political Theory I once had to take (it was a requirement for getting my B.A. in History at the University of London). But one thing I remember was that it began with Plato and his book The Republic, which was all about an […]

In times past, it was more important for many things to be sharper than we now care about. This applied not only to weapons, such as swords, spears, and arrows – but also to culinary ware, when animal parts often went directly from the place of killing to the place of cooking. And, in pre-modern […]

In a famous passage from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the character Portia, disguised as a lawyer, is defending Antonio from being required to pay Shylock, to whom he is indebted. By the laws of the time and place, the debt is legitimate – and only by being shown mercy can Antonio escape paying it. Portia’s […]

In the early chapters of the Old Testament, we find the story of two brothers, Jacob and Esau, one of whom (Esau) sold his entire inheritance (his “birthright”) to his brother for a single simple meal (a “mess of pottage”). That might be regarded as a very bad bargain. The more civilized method of determining […]

There is probably nothing more thrilling to the average reader than the idea of somebody being saved or rescued from something terrible. I have just seen part of a video in which a woman is apparently trapped in her car which has been swept off in the middle of a raging flood. A man, who […]

For much of my life, I have been battling against noise. The most notorious episode was my crusade against what are still called “Leaf-blowers.” For several months, I was the leader of a local campaign to get enough signatures on a petition to have a ban on those outrageously noisy machines, which are more accurately […]

As a child, I had grown up in America, in pre-television days – and radio was a major influence on my life. Since practically all the programs were commercially “sponsored,” their primary purpose was to attract and maintain customers in the form of listeners, which they did by providing entertainment, mainly in the form of […]