POSTED // Oct 24,2007 - Just read one of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman volumes entitled The Kindly Ones. I was taken aback when one character relates a disturbing variant of “Sleeping Beauty” described as the original version of the tale, from back before it got watered...

POSTED // Oct 17,2007 - ARIES (March 21-April 19) In his book The Primary Colors, Alexander Theroux writes that yellow is the color of “early bruises, forbidding skies, dead leaves, dental plaque, foul curtains, speed bumps, and callused feet.” And yet, he muses,...

POSTED // Oct 17,2007 - Curses, Foiled Again A cashier at a convenience store in Westminster, Md., reported she was robbed by a man wearing an orange bandana but told police she could tell the robber was her boyfriend, Brendon Marshall, 50, by the way he ran from the store....

POSTED // Oct 17,2007 - Dear Mexican: What is it with the Mexican hang-up on body parts? When General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was struck by a cannon ball at the knee in one of his 8,000 wars, his right leg was removed from the knee down. When he returned to Mexico City,...

POSTED // Oct 17,2007 - I just read in an academic paper (Macintyre and Sooman, Lancet, 1991) that in modern populations, the cuckoldry rate—i.e., the rate at which men are deceived into raising offspring that are genetically not their own—is 10 to 15 percent. This...

POSTED // Oct 10,2007 - Curses, Foiled Again After robbing a bank in Marietta, Ga., Garrett Lee Ledbetter, 27, stuffed the money under his T-shirt and dashed across the street to the Mount Zion Baptist Church, hoping, police Officer Gwen Lewis said, to blend into a crowd of...

POSTED // Oct 10,2007 - ARIES (March 21-April 19) I’m not necessarily recommending that you read Stanely Seigel’s book The Patient Who Cured His Therapist. But I do think you should regard the title as a suggestive metaphor for your immediate future. It’s...

POSTED // Oct 10,2007 - Ahoy, matey. Pirates are often depicted with a parrot on their shoulder. What’s the basis for this? Was there a specific pirate from history or literature who had a feathered friend?  —Craig, Phoenix What were the origins of the skull...

POSTED // Oct 10,2007 - Dear Mexican: We were in a restaurant the other day eating some refried beans and green chili, when I overheard some gringos in the next booth making fun of Mexicans. One thing they said which really made me mad was, “Why do Mexicans refry their...

POSTED // Oct 3,2007 - Curses, Foiled Again Mario Orlikoff, 49, was sitting in a car outside a bank, police in Gloucester, Va., said, when Christina Finney drove by with her family and thought he looked suspicious. “He had on a hat, a tweed jacket and big sunglasses....