An irregular journal of Thoughts, Stories, Ideas, and Recollections
Craig is not his real name. I chose this pseudonym for reasons that should become apparent as this sketch progresses. I worked with Craig for a brief time, decades ago. He did not report to me, nor I to him. We were “colleagues”, peers reporting to the same higher manager.
Imagine that you are living sometime in the 1600s in America or England, and have been accused of witchcraft. Only a few things might save you: being very skinny, underfed, very lean or very muscular. Or being a man. There were not many ways of proving innocence to witchcraft, but
Usually titled “The Truth and the Lie” (sometimes the title contains slightly different wording), it is a story that has appeared many times on the internet, from social media to blogs to LinkedIn. Most websites cite Jean-Léon Gérôme as the author, but this — ironically — is incorrect. Gérôme was a French
Recently the news has latched onto a comment made in the United States’ political arena, and now the word “weird” seems to be everywhere. The word itself has an interesting pedigree. Most etymologies tend to move from the present and go backwards through time, but let’s take a different
Back in what we might consider a more “conservative” decade it was a Canadian who, in 1956, coined the word “psychedelic”. The orthography took some time to settle, and in its early years it was sometimes spelled “psychodelic”. No longer quite so popular a term (see n-gram chart below), the
From time to time I research and write histories about the ancestors or family members of various people. I am not personally related to John Moore Perkins, but I did write his biography for an individual who is part of his extended family. Perkins’ background and story is fascinating: John