Hundreds of years ago, purple-colored clothing was tough to come by. The dye used on fabric came from the Phoenician city of Tyre (now in Lebanon) and was acquired from either Mediterranean snails or mollusks (wait, is a snail a mollusk?). Thousands of these poor mollusks were required to produce a small amount of dye,…
It’s summer, the season of sun, more daylight hours, vacations, cookouts and fireworks. It’s also the season of disrupted daily schedules, ignored diets, and excuses for overindulgence. However, with just a bit of forethought and determination it is possible to maintain and meet your fitness and health goals. These six tips, as usually happens with…
Last week I wrote about stress, its origins, and how our body negatively reacts to it, so it only seems logical to discuss how best to deal with stress in our increasingly stressful lives. Obviously, the best way to avoid stress is to eliminate its causes, but that is next to impossible. Hell, just watching…
You start your day running late for work and then the egg from your fast food egg sandwich slides from between the sausage and bun and lands squarely in your lap. When you arrive at work you discover your so-called co-worker has not completed his co-share of the workload and it falls upon you to…
So, if you “put that s–t on everything” (slogan from a hot sauce manufacturer, not my obscenity) research has shown that, so long as it has a low sodium content, it has positive health effects. And apparently, more Americans are putting it on everything .as sales of hot sauce have increased by five percent every…
Still round the corner there may wait A new road or a secret gate, And though we pass them by today, Tomorrow we may come this way And take the hidden paths that run Towards the Moon or to the Sun. I thought I’d regale you with a bit of J.R.R. Tolkien poetry from The…
“Use it or lose it” is a popular maxim that can apply to a lot of things, especially things related to your body and aging such as various muscles, libido, and, in this case, mental acuity, cognitive ability, brain function or whatever they’re calling it today. For centuries, a decline in cognitive function related to…
Your heart works its a$$ off every minute of every day that you’re alive. It beats, on average, 100,000 times every day, pumping 2,000 gallons of blood through 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries. And what do we offer in return? Fast food burgers and fries, soda, and processed snacks like potato chips, cookies,…
Before I begin the list, let’s start with the definition of a “life hack.” Near as anyone can tell, the term was coined in 2004 at a tech conference (duh!) in San Diego in reference to things which solve problems in a programmer’s life, unrelated to their jobs, such as an event reminder or email…
Yes, I went there. Where, you ask? To the famous anti-drug Public Service Announcement ad campaign from 1987 in which John Roselius compares your brain to an egg, drugs to a hot frying pan, and the frying egg to your brain on drugs. The ad returned for its ten-year anniversary in 1997 with actress Rachael…