Jeff Winger claims that what separates humans from animals is that we are the only ones who observe Shark Week. This is partially true. Animals do not observe special weeks in which they stare at other animals. No shark is going to have Human Week. But it’s not the whole truth.

This is what that idea gets correct: human beings celebrate things, and no other animal does. When a baby bird first flies, the parents don’t pull out the bird camcorder to preserve that moment for their nest movies. The parents just acknowledge that this is essential for their survival.

When a baby human first walks, however, parents act like their child has discovered the cure for cancer. It doesn’t occur to them that most every other person on the planet can accomplish this same feat. It never occurs that this actions is simply essential for survival.

And that is what separates humans from animals: humans celebrate not dying yet.

Continue reading “Birthdays”

Mankind has always sought to have mastery over time. We have always desired such great and wonderful things as the ability stop aging, or to go back in time and correct huge mistakes. Whether it is by searching for an illusive Fountain of Youth or by driving an awkward looking Irish sports car from the 80’s at exactly 88 miles per hour, man has always been fascinated with the idea of controlling time.

Yet with all the great scientific advances, time has always been the kid in grade school who was considerably more agile than anyone else in your class and was just impossible to catch in freeze tag.

Continue reading “Leap Day”

English speakers have to thank Billy Shakespeare for a lot of stuff. He gave countless amounts of quotes for literary scholars to needless debate for hundreds of years, and was important enough to force himself into many a classroom curriculum. On top of all of that, many spellings and terminologies come from the works of Shakespeare.

During the time Billy was writing, the English language in written form was still very raw, trying to become more like the common Latin-based languages. Those languages were steady in their structure and vocabulary, whereas English was in a wide state of flux. The English speaking world was expanding, and the English speaking people had no idea how to write anything down.

Therefore, Billy and other notable writers during 1500-1699 took matters into their own hands. They either wrote words the way they assumed they would be written, or took them entirely from other languages. Because they did it all without the help of dictionaries, their attempts were just accepted and put into common practice.

They paved the way for the red squiggly Spellcheck line.

Continue reading “Hamlet”