Six feet. This is one of the new unsought mantras of this particular time. It is spoken aloud and internally in our few meanders outside. The image above was sent to me and I laughed and I started to wonder about it. Six feet. The measurement known as ‘a foot’ has ranged in size from…

  My friend Dr. Martin Shaw is one of finest storytellers we have in the English language. In the last few days wrote this: In Siberian myth, when you want to hurt someone, you crawl into their tent and close the smoke hole. That way the gods can’t see them. Close the smoke hole and you break…

This image above are the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, as seen from one vantage point in space. That crown, that rim of green-blue light is a kind of corona. And that word has, properly, been on our lips. What are we being crowned by now? What mysteries are we being initiated into? I don’t…

As The New York Postreported a few weeks ago “A vandal stole a cherry picker and tagged Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza arch with a massive piece of graffiti Sunday that read “Bird God.”  Videos and photos from social media show cars driving around the arch in Prospect Park as onlookers watched and cops tried to…

While some say the wheel and others say agriculture and yet others say metal work, I think it is hard to say that the capacity of human beings to make fire on demand isn’t the most consequential invention or discovery by human beings. I’d even go further to say that fire made humans beings in the…

  Certainly the very word ‘trigonometry’ might bring up a wince in you. Horrible memories from high school or college with sine, cosine, or secant charts. Or maybe you just avoided it because it just sounded terrible. If you heard of it at all. Let’s make it really easy, though. Trigonometry simply means ‘measuring triangles’ and…

  Many years ago I was at a lecture about the artistic approach of Leonardo DaVinci and the speaker said that one of the things that Leonardo was passionate about was doing portraits when the sky was overcast and bordering on mist if at all possible. The speaker said that Leonardo wrote that it was…

  The research on playing music or singing to in utero fetus is wide ranging. The so-called ‘Mozart Effect’ seemed to point to the nearly-born as responding with bodily or tongue movement to classical music but less so with pop music. Anecdotally many tell stories of newborns falling asleep or becoming more easy to handle…

The earliest examples of art we have in the world are either simple human figures, simple geometric patterns, hand prints, and human/animal hybrid sculptures. Or animals. The oldest painted art we have found in Europe comes from Southwestern France. The famed cave art from Lascaux and other caves are a wonder and about 20,000 years…