I've been reading Grant McCracken’s blog for a while now, and enjoying his posts without quite feeling the need to point anyone else at them. But this is a beaut, and not just because I feel it strongly myself.
Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder, has a yacht that is 416 feet long. It cost some...
How does a tick know when it has reached the back of my dog's neck?
The best suggestion yet, from my friend Massimo, is that ticks feed on arterial blood and they use some sort of heat-seaking mechanism to go where the vessels are nearest the surface. Plausible, but I don’t buy it. Not yet. Not...
It’s funny how little links grow into a chain. A couple of days ago I was reading a post on Paul Butzi's blog in which he quoted a stanza from his favourite poem, Robert Frost’s Two Tramps in Mud Time. I know very little about poetry; I don’t even know what I like. But the piece was enough to se...
So the apostrophe — that key orthographic distinguisher that protects Western civilization from confusion between the genitive case of the 3rd person singular neuter pronoun and the result of attaching the clitic form of the 3rd person singular present tense form of the copula to that pronoun — is...
This post is number 35 in a series.
Moonflowers. Hyacinth beans. A Mandevilla I got from the big garden on Saturday. A sweet-scented white-flowered shrub that makes glaucous, dark-blue berries, nabbed from friend Cini's terrace. My own cannas, years old. An Ipomoea, ditto. And a tomato from some...
