How’s your poinsettia?

Well, whaddya know? It must be the end of August.

The Christmas card catalogues have started to arrive and the U.S. Postal Service has signs posted inviting persons in search of employment to apply for work sorting and delivering all those cheery end-of-the-year “I’ve been meaning to write; where does the time go?” messages about children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren you’ll never meet and probably don’t want to.

Are we all near-sighted?

As we get older, our eyes may get younger. No, I’m not kidding, though that statement is only partly true and only for some of us. People who have been near-sighted from childhood often find that, in their golden years, they can lose their glasses and not miss them for days. Of course, by the time we have reached that happy age most of us are into bifocals or trifocals, so we still need glasses for other purposes.

Fires are not all bad

Ever since the time of the ancient Greek civilizations, we’ve been trying to decide whether we think Prometheus was a hero or a villain for defying Zeus and giving fire to us undeserving humans. Well, it seems modern ecological thinkers are just as ambivalent about it as the Greeks must have been and, of course, it’s all very well as a myth, but the truth is that humans were using fire long before the earliest Greeks ever thought about it

Pursuing happiness

Recently, I happened to read that 84 percent of Americans describe themselves as happy. So there!

While we all know that the Declaration of Independence does not claim that being an American confers happiness, only the right to pursue it, that is still a very happy statistic in a world in which so much seems to be wrong.

Is it all in our genes?

Ever since Watson and Crick got to thinking about things genetic, the scientific community, with the help of modern technology and all that good stuff, has been giving us more and more excuses for misbehaving.