Oxword(s) of the year

Nov 25, 2020

What will be your dominant memory of the year 2020? Each year the Oxford Dictionary people come out with a word of the year, a word (or phrase) that became extremely popular and in some ways describes the dominant theme of the past year. Last year it was “climate...

Beware the perils of hot taps

Nov 18, 2020

Strange, how impressions sometimes leave us with ideas that are totally wrong. Did you know that, in a typical year in America, more people are killed by hornets, bees or wasps than by terrorism? More people die by contact with hot tap water than by terrorism? More...

The week Biden stole from me

Nov 11, 2020

I don’t know about you, but the long drawn-out U.S. election really stole a lot of my time last week. For someone who likes sports—well, really all competition and challenges—what could be a more ultimate challenge than the U.S. presidential election, especially with...

Thoughts on a wild US election

Nov 4, 2020

In a contest some years ago to give a motto for the US in six words or less, the runner-up, and the one I’d have chosen, was “Caution! Experiment in Progress since 1776.” And I would have subtitled it “still in beta version”. That “experiment”...