Are you getting tired of staring at your walls and need something to cheer you up? Me, too. So I did an Internet search for ‘silver-lining sayings’ and stumbled upon Wise Old Sayings: Words To Live By (https://www.wiseoldsayings.com/silver-lining-quotes/). Here are the quotes I especially like from the list of 30 that popped up — “Every
What have I been doing at home the past four weeks? I realized I’ve written 19 short stories over the past several years, seven of which have been published on the Bewildering Stories website (http://bewilderingstories.com/). So I put them all together into a book that’s now available on Amazon.com. The book comes in two flavors
April 14, 1828 saw publication of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language. According to The Writer’s Almanac of April 14, 2020 (https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-writers-almanac? ) — “Webster put together the dictionary because he wanted Americans to have a national identity that wasn’t based on the language and ideas of England. And the problem wasn’t just
I realize this is not a good topic for the middle of a quarantine, but is it possible to show too much love? Apparently so. Our bodies are very complex and anything can go wrong. For example, the current PBS show “The Gene: An Intimate History” by documentarian Ken Burns (https://www.pbs.org/show/gene/) is exploring some genetic
In the course of being quarantined and following everything that was happening around the world, I ran across some interesting explanations for the origin of the term itself. The actual word “quarantine” is derived from the Italian quaranta, meaning “forty.” It is traced back to the language of Venice, Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. During
Perhaps it’s appropriate at this time to note that April 5 was the birthday of Joseph Lister, considered the father of antiseptic medicine. Lister was born in 1827 in Upton, England. He graduated with honors from University College in London in 1852 and became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and house surgeon
We use a lot of expressions in everyday speech, and their origins are frequently lost to history. But I’ve found an interesting exception. A friend recently asked me if I thought the coronavirus pandemic is a black swan event. This was a new one; I’d never heard that phrase before. I went scrambling to the
It’s April Fool’s Day as I write this, and for the first time in memory I didn’t find any celebrations of this day of pranks until 10 pm tonight (although the main reason is quarantine). This is more proof that the coronavirus is having a profound impact on our society. We shouldn’t let an opportunity
Since reading is such a safe quarantine pastime, who would you think was the world’s first known author? So far as we know now, our first credited author was Enheduanna, a woman who lived in the 23rd century BCE in Mesopotamia. According to the archaeological evidence, she was remarkable figure: a princess, a priestess and
In an era when Nationalism appears to be the ascending political philosophy, I ran across what I think is a good example of how international cooperation can make a small but meaningful difference in our lives. This is an entry in the March 27 issue of The Writer’s Almanac — On this day in 1912, President