Ferris Wheels Also Make The World Go Round

by Kevin Burton    In response to one of my Valentine’s Day posts, a reader let me know that Feb. 14 is also National Ferris Wheel Day in the United States.    Now that’s news I can use! What an apt metaphor for the “love” of love songs that is wrapped in feelings, or perhaps …

Valentines Dirty Dancing With The Burtons

by Kevin Burton    This will teach me, always have a plan, a good plan.    For my wife’s birthday, which also happens to be Valentine’s Day (Are those wedding bells in my head or a cash register?), I wanted to do something special. I want to do two somethings special, every year.     My …

The Healing Science Of Practicing Kindness

By Jocelyn Solis-Moreira CNN    When my father died of bone cancer last year, I received an outpouring of messages from friends and family sharing their condolences.    While I appreciated everyone who reached out, I was especially grateful for two of my former college roommates who surprised my family with a delivery of bagels …

Doctors Perform First Whole Eye Transplant

by Jacqueline Howard CNN    It was a moment Meagan James never expected to witness.    A surgical team at NYU Langone Health in New York had performed the world’s first successful whole-eye transplant in a living person: her husband, Aaron James.    After an accident at work led to the loss of his left …

How Long Is A Jiffy Exactly?

by Kevin Burton    Last month on Page 7 we looked at words such as several and handful that defy exact definition. Here’s another: Jiffy.    How long is a jiffy?    Merriam-Webster says a jiffy is “a very short period of time: moment, instant.” The Cambridge dictionary lists synonyms “flash, heartbeat, instant, split second.” …

A Lunar Light Show Called A ‘Moonbow’

by Kevin Burton    Would you believe? Rainbows by night; moonbows!    They’ve got to be good looking ‘cuz they’re so hard to see. But they do exist. Poets, take note.    Never heard of this, but this week I read about them on interestingfacts.com, then on Wikipedia. I say, there must be a song …

Long Live Caffeine, Death To Bugs

by Kevin Burton    I am late to the great caffeine-vs-decaf debate. But if we take caffeine from our coffee, let’s certainly not throw it out altogether.    Why not?  Because caffeine is a natural insecticide, according to the New York Times and others.    Yesterday I mentioned that I am considering switching to decaf …

A Funny Thing About Technology

by Kevin Burton    Technology is a problem solver. Technology is a problem.    Am I right or wrong?    “Tech-savvy” is a hyphenated adjective that shouldn’t be used to modify certain nouns, such as, for example, “Kevin Burton”    Like it or not we all live in a sea of technology. It’s sink or …

Blind Women Helping Detect Breast Cancer

   In a bare room in a remote government-run primary health center in Vapi, a city in the south-west Indian state of Gujarat, Meenakshi Gupta holds a diagram of a woman’s breast with five Braille-marked orientation tapes pasted on it. Speaking to the woman sitting on the bed, she says: “I’ll paste these skin-friendly tapes on your …

Counting Calories Is Harder Than You Thought

by Kevin Burton    Dieting is tough enough. But did you know that calorie counts on food labels can be wildly inaccurate?     It is permissible for those counts to be up to 20 percent off under Food and Drug Administration guidelines, according to insider.com.    “That means for example, that a serving of Greek …