It is the bane of high school mathematics students and a fixture in sidebars illustrating data discussed in a newspaper, magazine or website article: the basic X-Y coordinate graph. And two coordinates come into play when financially justifying an amount of life insurance coverage applied for.  (The...

Why is it that the most important item on an insurance application is allocated so little space?  Why is it that the second most important item gets equally parsimonious treatment? All that other stuff is necessary from either a practical or a legal standpoint, but when the dust of policy issue and underwriting...

A simple coin toss is the most popular form of settling disputes or making decisions.  Subterfuge is often used to improve a participant’s odds.  If the caller sees through the “heads-I-win/tails-you-lose” ploy then the flipper can introduce a GMO known as a two-headed coin, usually a Washington...

A bidder at an auction purchased a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt for what he felt was an unbelievably low price.  He took them to an appraiser to see if they were authentic.  The appraiser informed him, “Yes, they are authentic. It’s just a shame that Stradivarius couldn’t paint and that Rembrandt...

The 24-year old actor James Dean was the iconic Rebel Without a Cause, the image of teenage angst, who already had three blockbuster movies under his belt before a misplaced 1950 Ford Tudor blocked the intersection on US Route 466 that would serve as a premature end to the meteoric rise of the young...

Comedian Steven Wright tells of the time a burglar broke into his apartment while he was asleep, stole everything, and replaced it all with exact replicas.  Later his best friend walked in, looked at Steve and said, “Do I know you?” Americans have never been averse to imitations when the original...

If you wanna feel better about yourself just do an Internet search on something like Celebrities Without Makeup, or Un-photo-shopped VIPs.  It will do your heart good to see how plain looking or, in some cases, how down-right ugly-wuggly many icons among the “beautiful people” really are in their...

Real old-timers remember the days of one of comedy’s iconic duos, the husband and wife team of George Burns and Gracie Allen.  Any younger connoisseurs of good humor would do well to spend some online-time calling up at least some of their radio, television, and cinema work-product on YouTube or some...

In 1826 the German author Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (Jo-Eich for short) published a novella titled (in English) Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing.  Both he and it are unimportant except for a Latin phrase from the book: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi, translated, “What is permissible for Jove,...

Nobody gets help with college costs nowadays unless they first fill out a lengthy and bothersome form known as the FAFSA (the acronym stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, just in case it ever pops up when you choose the Governmental Financial Assistance category on Double Jeopardy). ...