Musings

“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don’t burn the paintings in the Louvre, that’s all.” I came across this quote by Lestat de Lioncourt in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat. We don’t talk about ‘kingdoms’ much these days. The language is a bit outdated. However, kingdoms are just as significant today as they have ever…

The North American Bison is often improperly referred to as a “buffalo.” History records that the word buffalo is derived from the French “bœuf,” a name given to bison when French fur trappers working in the US in the early 1600s saw the animals. The word bœuf came from what the French knew as true…

If you are among the 13% of the global population (mostly North America and Europe) that observes Daylight Saving Time (DST), hopefully you remembered to set your clocks back one hour before you went to bed Saturday night. DST is a relatively recent enactment; however, even ancient civilizations acknowledged and adjusted to the variation in…

A pyrrhic victory is not worth winning because the winner loses so much to achieve it. The term comes from the Greek general Pyrrhus who defeated the Romans at the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC but lost so many troops that he couldn’t defeat Rome itself. This is where we get the term “winning…

When I start my car (Elsa) a warning appears on the touchscreen display: “Do not let the system distract you from the traffic conditions” Apparently the Germans do not use contractions. It is interesting to me how we can see or hear something many times without thinking about it, and then our particular circumstances and…

I did not see a little bear while I was in the Teton National Park last week. However, I was warned that I might. A young black bear had been showing up around the home where I was staying in the days prior to my arrival. Even little bears can be dangerous, and our host was concerned…

I was watching the sun set behind the foothills that surround Bear Lake, which straddles the Idaho-Utah border just ten miles from Wyoming. Sunsets are beautiful, but after them comes the night. We often refer to the end of something as a sunset, and I wonder if we are thinking about the night that may…

I have very large feet. Not large in the NBA basketball player sense, but certainly large in the everyman sense. It has always been hard for me to buy socks. One-size-fits-all socks do not fit me. Shopping at the “Big and Tall” store as a teenager was really terrible. Currently, online shopping has made my…

In 1814, Russian poet and fabulist, Ivan Krylov, wrote “The Inquisitive Man”. This fable tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things but fails to notice an elephant. This is where we get the proverbial phrase “the elephant in the room”, meaning the obvious thing that everyone…

Do you ever feel like your life is out of control? In the song “Locomotive Breath,” Jethro Tull sings: Oh, he feels the piston scrapingSteam breaking on his browOld Charlie stole the handleAnd the train it won’t stop going, No it won’t slow down Tull said the song was about overpopulation. It’s definitely not about a…