Month: October 2018

National Truthiness

This may be a bit more serious than my usual brilliant yet humorous insights. It was inspired by a local newspaper feature in which specific questions are posed to a group of people. The audience is probably not a diverse sample, so it tends to be by my guess a collection of high school students in a parking lot, children at a fair, or folks out of the grocery store. Most of the questions are not particularly worrisome, like “What’s your favorite family Thanksgiving tradition?”  It has that spontaneous, unscientific feel to that either puts a smile on your face or in some cases horrifies, much as Jay Leno’s “Person on the street” interviews a few years ago. Continue reading “National Truthiness”

Stalking the Wily Fruit Fly

They fly into our lives.  We see them individually and small clusters, hovering over bananas and apples, pears and nectarines.  Since our daughter, our resident health expert, began remarking on the amounts of fresh fruit we weren’t buying and consuming, we’ve attempted to create a facade that it’s happening on an ongoing, sustained basis. In fact, it’s become part of our household fruit culture.  Each purchase stays a while, and some actually gets eaten.  Most important, it provides a veritable wedding feast for the fruit flies.  They seem to be proliferating at an alarming rate, so I’m presuming there is a ritual involved for which we’re supplying the reception banquet. Continue reading “Stalking the Wily Fruit Fly”