ONE BAD HOMBRE AND AN UNTOUCHABLE
I WAS thinking about bad hombres with foreign-sounding names, and Al Capone popped to mind. This is not the irrational neurologic activity it might seem: My mother and father, rest … Continue reading
MEN IN HIGH HEELS
RESEARCHING A recent item on the British workplace, Parliament and women forced to wear high heels, I stumbled (could it have been the heels?) on an interesting fact: The most … Continue reading
THOSE WITHOUT GUMTION NEED NOT APPLY
THERE’S A CONFLUENCE of art and science in the works of 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner. London Review of Books, October 20, 2016, contained an article titled “The Chase: Inigo … Continue reading
A FINE-LOOKING STRUT, THAT
TWO COMMITTEES of the British Parliament have recently challenged a London firm’s dress code that had required women to wear heels from two to four inches high. Women at PwC, … Continue reading
A QUARTET OF ALTERNATIVE-FACT BOOKS
AMAZON RECENTLY noted a spike in sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s 1949 novel of a dystopian (as opposed to utopian) future. This brings to mind three other works about … Continue reading
MAKING AMERICA GREAT—AND TASTY TOO!
FOR THE FIRST time in its 15th biennial existence, the Bocuse d’Or, the Olympics of international chefdom, has been won by an American team. Head Chef Mathew Peters and his … Continue reading
A MOCKING APOLOGY
RECENTLY I mentioned the Wizard of Oz in an item On Satire, Self-Inflicted and Otherwise. In retrospect, after more research, I owe an apology to the Wizard. True, the Wizard … Continue reading
FRACTIONS CAN BE MEATY—SO SLEEP ON IT
MATH FUN CAN appear in the oddest places: in quick-food marketing or in mattress sales, to name two. McDonald’s was ahead of its time in 1972 with supersizing a hamburger … Continue reading
ON SATIRE, SELF-INFLICTED AND OTHERWISE
SATIRE STRETCHES from Aristophanes’ The Wasps to Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to Vaughn Meader’s parodies of JFK to today’s Saturday Night Live and recent goings-on with the U.S. … Continue reading
MUST IT BE GOVERNMENT VS SCIENCE?
I HAD PLANNED today to highlight the 2016 Breakthrough of the Year, as identified by Science, the weekly magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 23, … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 