I was a youngster when the first funeral I ever attended was a schoolmate who’d died in a grain storage bin, where he’d slipped and suffocated. I went to the open-casket services with buddies, and we were shocked and silenced by the appearance of a kid like us who’d essentially drowned in corn.
In their 2004 article in the journal Nature, Bramble and Lieberman write “Striding bipedalism is a key behavior of hominids that possibly originated soon after the divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineages .” Dr. Daniel Leiberman, a biology professor from Harvard also known as “The Barefoot Professor” suggests that a massive environmental change that took place on the African continent coinciding with the rise of running among humans.
U.S. employers in March hired at the slowest rate since last June, adding just 88,000 jobs to non-farm payrolls, with steep job cuts in retail and government sectors, including 12,000 at the U.S. Postal Service, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s monthly report released April 5.
Economists had forecast the month’s gain to be about 190,000.
A year ago this week, I’d already partially tore an Achilles tendon playing softball, but this spring has been so wintry my back still aches from shoveling wet snow off the driveway and sidewalk.
So, I’m still coping with the delayed change of seasons by retreating to springs of my youth:
Do 21st century kids still have wonderful crap marketed to them when the weather warms?
Days after April Fools Day, we still look over our shoulders, and one political prank breathing down our necks is the “new” GOP.
President Obama’s 5-million vote victory over Republican Mitt Romney showed the country’s shifting demographics – more voters who are younger, better educated, more likely to be women, and more diverse in religion and race. That supposedly signaled to some GOP leaders that they should be less extremist and more open to the actual makeup of the nation.
A couple of weeks ago a couple of harbingers of Spring came and went, and each acknowledges how we depend on sunshine.
One was Daylight Savings Time, letting us think about spring and more sunlight, and the other was “Sunshine Week,” a time to promote and praise transparency in government: open government.
Effective representative government depends on transparency through open meetings, open records and public notices. If any of those three is absent, government collapses into secrecy and darkness.
As a history professor, I often look for ways in which the past can inform the present. One belief that led me to my profession is that history imparts crucial lessons that can help us make sense of events unfolding in the here-and-now.
