Archive | December 2014
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Walking through History
The image of Mary riding on a donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem while pregnant with Jesus is a beautiful picture. But historically very unlikely. We think that before cars, everyone rode horses or other animals. This is not true. Horses and donkeys, like cars, are expensive and were reserved for the wealthy. The most common […]
Want to Feel Smarter?
I have discovered a TV program that makes me more intelligent. Well, at least feel more intelligent. It is The Science of Stupid on the National Geographic channel. The show consists of home movies of people doing stupid things and then the host (Seth Herzog, later replaced by Manish Paul) explaining the laws of physics […]
Character is King
“I was arrested in Eno’s diner.” Good novelists know that one of the important “rules” of writing is to produce an opening sentence that grabs the attention of readers. The above sentence is a good example. It is the first sentence of Killing Floor, the first of Lee Childs’s Jack Reacher novels. That sentence is […]
James R. Coggins 