The latest headlines got you feeling blue? Well, I’ve got a very small bit of good news. It’s astronomical, political, etymological and cultural. Ready? You may recall from a previous post the tortured history of what today we call a “Blue Moon,” and it involves at least two definitions of…

On May 8, 1776, two massive vessels of the British Royal Navy, the HMS Roebuck and HMS Liverpool, entered the Delaware Bay. Between the two ships, they carried a total of 72 guns.   They also carried a lot of men. And those men needed a lot of water. Which…

I always knew my stepfather Tony was a bit nuts. He entered our lives in 1972, when he married my mother and took responsibility for raising six school-aged children and paying two expensive mortgages in Westchester County. But just two years into this arrangement, he bailed on his high-paying Manhattan…

Back in 1775, America was at the other side of a stormy world. Which meant that, for government folks in London trying to put down a rebellion, if they needed to resupply some 8,000 British troops stationed in Boston, they’d have to contract with a shipping company for lots of…

250 years ago this month, some difficult choices had to be made. In November of 1775, the rather wealthy colony of New Jersey contained about 150,000 people, and most had presumably learned of the news from Boston, the King’s rejection of the Olive Branch Petition, and the establishment of two…

Why did the woolly bear cross the road? This time of year there seem to be armies of black-and-brown-banded fuzzy caterpillars crawling across streets and sidewalks everywhere. They are nature’s fastest caterpillars, capable of traveling over a mile a day. So you’ve probably wondered, where are they all headed in…

In New Jersey, a soldier’s blood runs blue. Back in 1673, the little town of Piscataway was at the bleeding edge of the British-American frontier. The Raritan River runs west from there up into the Jersey high ground, and in the summertime the natives would commonly come down it to…

So there was this guy from New Hampshire. He moved to Seattle. Then, during the Yukon Gold Rush, he went north in search of riches. In 1897, his exploits were featured in an article in the New York Sun that included his comment that he had named a prominent mountain…

I wrote the below way back in 2014. Since then, this little brand has exploded, and today is the sponsor of the Mayo Bowl, in which the coach of the winning team in the SEC/ACC tilt in Charlotte gets a 5-gallon bucket of condiment dumped on his head. So, yeah,…

In the month of July, Thomas Jefferson wrote a Declaration. But it wasn’t in 1776, and it wasn’t about Independence. It was a year earlier, on July 6, 1775, when Jefferson and John Dickenson wrote, “The Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,” explaining the position of the Second Continental…