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As the Bird Flies/Flew/Flu...

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      Have you seen the price of eggs?  Hmm, a silly question for most of us, despite friends telling me that eggs are still inexpensive in countries such as Mexico.  But unless you're looking at that frozen turkey in the fridge, you'll notice that the prices of "fowl" have also jumped substantially, in some cases doubling or tripling in price.  The issue is the culling of entire flocks of chickens due to the spread of bird flu, which for many commercial producers, can amount to millions of birds per farm.  But first, a few basics of the flu in general.  Here's a quick summary from UCLA Health on the difference between a cold and the flu:  The common cold is caused by a virus, usually rhinovirus and sometimes coronavirus.  An identifying characteristic of a plain old cold is that the symptoms it causes occur from the neck up.  These include a sore throat, clogged sinuses, a runny nose, sneezing, the production of thick (and seeming...
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The Ugly Duckling,...er, American

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      It was difficult to watch the verbal beating of a country's leader , something most historians say was unprecedented.  From what I saw (and the response by the Ukranian president on Fox ), it marked an embarrassing end to civility and humility by our  head of government (but one that was praised by the Russian media).  Breaking down that word --civility-- one can discover "civil" in there, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as: ... relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, as distinct from military or ecesiastical matters ("civil aviation" ).  With the massive firing of so many "civil" servants, it would appear that the current administration wants to drop the word entirely and just leave the word "servants."  So what the heck is happening?    Photo: Alexey Nikolsky / AFP / Getty      There was a time not long ago when the term "ugly American" simply described the drunk US tourist in another co...
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Spare. Change...

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Photo:  Adobe stock      Here are two words not heard very often, at least not in the old sense, spare & change.  T'was a time when you'd be approached by someone looking for a handout and the phrase would be, "spare some change?"  But so many people these days simply don't carry cash at all, not even a few dollars, much less "pocket" change (another phrase pretty much gone, as if pockets themselves may be the next thing to disappear).  That was also a time when a flat tire meant that you had to dig into your trunk and grab your "spare" tire, except most new cars today don't carry a spare tire, even if equipped to do so (my friend told me this after he returned home with his new car and found that a spare tire was included only as "an option").  This all came up when I peeked in my garage one morning and discovered that our car had a flat tire, as in flat, flat and not at all drivable.   Out came the repair van and he was old ...
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Other World/s

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     In these chaotic (or quixotic, depending on your point of view) times, it may be good to step back a bit and try and see the big picture, in this case, the view from satellites.  In the book Overview*, authors Benjamin Grant and Sandra Markle relied on Maxar Technologies and their four satellites whose cameras have lenses 4 feet  wide, sharp enough to detail a basketball while circling Earth at nearly 18,000 mph, a speed fast enough to circle our planet 15 times per day.  And with all that is happening, at an almost equally fast pace, reading this book can be a mixed bag to see both the beauty of our "home" side-by-side with the evidence of our destruction and our virus-like growth.  As one author wrote, aliens looking down at the same sights might tend to wonder, "what are they doing down there?"                       Deforestation in the Amazon.  Photo:  NASA     ...
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Read Or Read?

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     Those two words are an odd pairing, aren't they?  It's not as if they are words that sound the same but mean something completely different: heard and herd, or stayed and staid.  Such pairings are called homophones, or homonyms, or homographs, explained Grammerly .  Wait, what?  But when you think of most other words, especially when it comes to describing our senses, there are separate words used to describe something in the present tense vs. something in the past tense: hear and heard, or see and saw, or feel and felt, or smell and smelled.  But when you read something, you may find that you had already read it.  Huh?  Dang English language* (a good online "test" of this sort is the daily game from the NY Times, Connections ).       But reading.  I tend to do a lot of it and as many of you readers may know, my preference for reading is heavily slanted towards non-fiction. That said, I do try to pick up a book ...
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