People seem to think that Rudyard Kipling, the British Nobel laureate who wrote about his experiences with colonialism, coined the phrase that “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”, but in fact it was Noel Coward in his musical, The Third Little Show (1931) where he says, “Mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun. The Japanese don’t care to, The Chinese wouldn’t dare to, Hindoos and Argentines sleep…
Comedy is on my mind today because we are planning to go see The Naked Gun, the Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson remake by Seth MacFarlane of the 1988 Leslie Nielsen classic by the same name. I watch a lot of Liam Neeson (who doesn’t?) and just saw several of his new thrillers recently, so when I saw the New York Times profile on him in this new comedic role where he puts his gravitas…
Cornell University, which has one of the most highly regarded food science programs in the United States, is our group’s school of choice, As I mentioned yesterday, six of us attended Cornell, my mother also attended and I was a member of the faculty for ten years as a Clinical Professor. Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences houses their Department of Food Science, which is indeed considered among the top food science programs globally.…
Today was more of a down time day than anything else. It’s a Monday and son-in-law John had to work and I had a trial prep call for my trial in mid-September. The purpose of these calls is to get my head back into the case after a three year hiatus. They want me to refamiliarize myself with the opinions and evidence used to create those opinions in my expert report. The understood balancing act…
There are 116,873 hotels & motels in the US as of 2025, an increase of 4.0% from 2024. Additionally, the U.S. has over 55,900 lodging properties, including over 33,000 small business properties, with about 40% of US hotels being independent rather than chain-affiliated. The United States also leads the world in Airbnb listings, boasting around 2.25 million active properties. This makes the U.S. by far the largest market for Airbnb globally. For context, France follows…
Gibberish refers to speech or writing that is meaningless, incomprehensible, or nonsensical. It’s language that sounds like it might mean something but actually doesn’t convey any real information or message. There is technical gibberish, which is when someone uses complex jargon or technical terms incorrectly or excessively, making their speech incomprehensible to others. Like throwing around buzzwords without substance. Then there is baby talk or developmental gibberish, which is babbling sounds infants make before they…
It’s Saturday morning here in the Rocky Mountain State and I woke up after a night of reasonably decent sleep. The Airbnb we are staying in has a master bedroom which Kim and I occupy on the main floor and then all the other bedrooms are one floor below. The benefit of being the patriarch of the family and the one who pays the bills is that I don’t have to fight for the best…
Marijuana usage has been a part of my consciousness ever since I was about fifteen. That was, after all, the peak of the hippie countercultural movement of the late 60s. For one reason or another, in my family, the impact fell very little on me or my oldest sister Kathy (we are only three years apart), but fell very heavily on my middle sister, Barbara. All of her friends were heavily into drugs where none…
A petri dish is a shallow, circular glass or plastic laboratory dish with a lid, used primarily in microbiology and cell culture. Named after German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri, these dishes typically contain a nutrient medium (like agar) that allows microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, or cells to grow and multiply. They are used for research or medical testing. When I was young I wanted to be a scientist, but the concept of science appealed…
I love all those expressions about the randomness of life. There’s “Feast or Famine”, “When it rains it pours”, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”, “Man plans, God laughs”, “The only constant is change”, or “Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get”. Sometimes these passages have a positive and optimistic spin and sometimes not so much. Sometimes you have to “Roll with the…