Now, here’s a word for you: weird. I looked it up and found a trail back to around 1400 C.E. (C.E. stands for Common Era, a secular way to say A.D., which, by the way, means “Anno Domini,” or the “Year of our Lord” in Latin, and NOT “After Death”). Anyway, an online search gives […]
Author: Evelyn J. Willburn
‘Tis the season to be confused
Do you remember back in the Sixties and part of the Seventies, when you and your two older sisters and your two older cousins would enter a month-long state of frothing mania beginning on or around each December first? No, wait, sorry, that was me. Anyway, when we were kids, Christmas was a time of […]
Pardon our dust. . .
Hello, all! I am trying some things with my website, so please forgive me if you find yourself in a blind alley. Stay warm.
The further adventures of Raptor Boy
I get that chickens are close personal relatives of the dinosaurs, but what about cats? Look at this picture, and consider the curve of the spine, the counterbalancing tail, the back feet preparing to eviscerate, the glowing golden eyes, the slavering pink jaws,. . .at first glance, I thought he had gotten hold of a […]
My Martian vacation
Imagine Planet Mars from the surface of Earth: a bright, reddish star that sometimes appears in the early evening. Think next about the various reports that I had heard growing up: no liquid water, an entire surface bare of any plant or animal life, rocky soil composed mostly of iron oxide, also known as rust. […]
Oddball Earth
I am beyond picky when it comes to reading fiction, but recently I realized that one of my pet peeves isn’t founded in fact. I tend to get really irritated when a science fiction author describes a planet as a “desert planet” or a “jungle planet.” I was muttering about this to my husband one […]
Of elephants and paper clips
Oh my, but I do love a good sturdy paper clip, the bigger the better. Having thought about this phenomenon at some length, I have come to believe that a really skookum paper clip, keeping a stack of like-minded papers safely organized, is a visual representation of putting up firewalls in one’s brain. The human […]
A picture to tide me over
Flying between Anchorage and Fairbanks a couple of weeks ago, I got to see this, which I might caption “Denali and Friends”: Stay warm, my friends and loved ones, and share beautiful things in any way you can.
Bee-arruh-arruh
I should start by explaining that “bee-arruh-arruh” is how you spell “brr” when you are laying on your Southern accent with a trowel. This was a favorite remark of my father’s when he would come in from a cold day, or when he would head downstairs to stoke the fire. During the winter of my […]