Hip Hop, the alleged art form that includes rap, break dancing and drawing graffiti, is to the uninitiated, such as me, a cultural chasm as impossible to understand as it is to appreciate. I will try. Remember. I’m a middle-aged white man who as a kid   watched Roy Rogers on TV. But I supported...

String theory, the idea that the universe is woven into a web of eleven vibrating strings far beyond the mere three dimensions we know, for example, height, width and depth, is so new and complex that even its backers don’t understand it.     If you can’t understand it, it must be profound. I’ll...

What do you do when you haven’t taken a vacation for years, and you’re so over-worked you can’t remember your name? Do something stressful. I’m being facetious. But not much. I wanted to go to the South Seas and become a bearded Paul Gauguin, but agreed to a lesser trip to San Francisco for two...

I was given a car by a relative and I was overjoyed, because this was a Lincoln Mark VII, an upscale car without a scratch on the body. It looked to me like a Mercedes. At last I could give up my banged-up Toyota and look successful (my wife claims I’m an aristocrat without the money). I had to go...

The only significance I can find with the Fourth of July is that we all take the holiday together. We take the day off, fire up the barbecue, drink beer, go to the beach or forest, clog the freeways—-make love—–all on the same day (those on the east coast do it three hours earlier). This...

One of the inventors of brain fingerprinting, Dr. Lawrence A. Farwell, touted the new technology’s benefits, saying the criticism that it’s Orwellian—as in George Orwell’s book 1984—-is unfounded. “Use of the term Orwellian is misplaced since Orwell described a society in which innocent...

I’ve got this rotten dog I picked up from the pound. This dog will destroy everything you hold dear, everything of beauty. He trashed my front yard, digging holes, churning the earth into a lunar landscape. I planted some flowers. He dug them up. I planted grass. He dug craters in it. I replant them.     It’s...

I decided to try and communicate with my wife about the deteriorating state of our marriage in a way she could understand. After all, I figured, she attends so many community meetings, many of them governmental, I thought she could relate to the use of a flow chart. I set up an easel with a piece of...

It’s time for Americans to consider a woman president. If we can send a robot lander to Mars, we can have a woman in the White House. There are considerations. In general, I think women are a little more honest than men because they care less about strutting, arrogant (bring ‘em on) false pride turning-itself-into-close-minded-dogma...