POSTED // Jul 30,2012 - Why is the letter Z, specifically, associated with sleeping? It seems silly to have a letter correspond with sleep at all, but even sillier that we don’t do this with any other action.

POSTED // Jul 21,2012 - My mother is prone to kidney stones—no problems in a while, but lately she’s had symptoms that made her think perhaps she was cooking up a new stone or two.

POSTED // Jul 16,2012 - In a column a while back, you told your assistant Una to “quit with the Wikipedia” because “from the standpoint of reliability, Wikipedia might as well be written by gorillas.”

POSTED // Jul 9,2012 - Is it true an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would stop cars and trucks, and they would not run until fixed? Would our stores be empty of food because trucks could not move food to them?

POSTED // Jul 2,2012 - In a recent debate about monogamy, I observed that college students, and young people in general, tended to be more promiscuous early in life and settled down later.

POSTED // Jun 25,2012 - ETV programs about space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) often say our broadcast signals are traveling into space and will someday be seen by intelligent beings many light years

POSTED // Jun 4,2012 - Just when I get the TV volume adjusted to the optimum level, a commercial comes on and rattles the house like a sonic boom. Who’s the Einstein who decided I should listen to commercials at a level loud enough to rupture my eardrums? —Rick Gray

POSTED // May 28,2012 - I first heard the claim that Jesus was a copycat of the Egyptian god Horus when I watched the so-called documentary Religulous.

POSTED // May 21,2012 - I’d like your opinion on which is most likely in our lifetime: 1. The sun explodes. 2. Earth shatters, like that planet in the asteroid belt. 3. We get the Big Rip, where everything dissolves as Shakespeare predicted

POSTED // May 14,2012 - I was reading on Cracked.com about the tarantula hawk, a giant wasp that hunts tarantulas and has one of the most painful stings on Earth.