The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
The Super Constellations took three days to reach London [from Australia] and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but t...
That a word or phrase hasn’t been recorded tells us only that it hasn’t been recorded, not that it hasn’t existed. The
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to pe...
So woods are spooky. Quite apart from the thought that they may harbor wild beasts and armed, genetically challenged fellows named Zeke and Festus, there is something innately sinister about them, som...
She would only make me take my seat if I didn't act calm and Swiss about it all.
Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening.
Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state’s farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not...
Once there were many more in like vein—e.g., tuifu (the ultimate in fuckups), tarfu (things are really fucked up), fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition), and fubid (fuck you, buddy, I’m detached).
ONE OF THE THINGS that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself. Recently, in France, I was hit square on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I...
New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with number plates bearing the feisty slogan ‘Live Free or Die.
Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.
Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages.
Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury...
Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, wa...
Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world’s largest exporter of woodchips
Jennings quotes the response of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA competition when asked to explain why so many Americans couldn’t even find their own country on a map. With solemnity and conviction s...
It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a...
It was always Christmas at my grandparents’ house, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody’s birthday. There was always happiness there.
It was a haven, a little island of light in the darkness of the downtown, very like the diner in Edward Hopper’s painting ‘The Nighthawks’.