Author Archives: Bob Welbaum

Real Fake News

With all the talk recently about which news is fake and which is real, I’ve found a real example of how fake news was used to win World War II.  Call it “real fake news.” If you were a German citizen during the period 1941 to 1943, you might have heard some very realistic-sounding shortwave

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Happy April Fool’s Day!

  From the I-Wish-I’d-Written-That Department, this is the Poem of the Day from the Poetry Foundation (http://www.poetryfoundation.org.) —   April Fool by Myra Cohn Livingston The maple syrup’s full of ants.                                     A mouse is creeping on the

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Running While Female

Running is my recreational sport.  When I run, I never think about running alone, or at night, or in the country.  But then, I’m a man. I remember when I lived in California, almost every weekday I used to run after work on the Santa Ana River trail with some coworkers, including a young lady. 

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Happy Birthday Fannie Farmer

There is a lot we take for granted in our modern world.  Like cookbooks, for example. March 23 is kind of a milestone anniversary in home economics.  On that day in 1857,  Fannie Merritt Farmer was born in Boston.  According The Writers’ Almanac, Fannie is remembered for publishing the first cookbook in American history.  Up

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The Answer to Fake News?

Talk about change, President Trump certainly has stirred up a debate about the press’s role in our society.  As one might predict, members of the Fourth Estate are very much engaged.  In the recent past, I’ve seen the following — The Christian Science Monitor’s March 13, 2017 cover story, “Trump vs. The Media: The War

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Presidents Who Change Their Minds

I am a history nerd, and politics is a fascinating subject, so an article entitled “The Presidents Who Changed Course in Office” really piqued my curiosity. Certainly a lot can happen over the course of four to eight years — nationally, internationally, and in a president’s personal life.  As the article’s author Sean Braswell states,

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A Way to End Genetic Diseases?

Science gives us wonderful tools — everything from penicillin to a GPS system to life itself.  How we use these tools, however, is up to us. What has caught my eye recently was a report, originally in the Chicago Tribune, that Great Britain’s Newcastle University has been given permission to create babies using the DNA

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