Aztec Cocoa and 13 Spicier Ways to Live.
The ancient Maya lived in the region of Mesoamerica, which today includes southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, parts of Honduras, and El Salvador. By around 500 BC, they were already crafting a bitter, frothy beverage from ground cacao, water, cornmeal, and chili peppers — what we now think of as an early version of “xocolātl” (pronounced show-co-LAH-tul). […]
A public legacy and a private gift.
Robert Redford died this last week at age 89. Here in Utah, that news landed a little closer to home. Literally. All week, the tributes I’ve heard have circled around the same idea: Legacy. And in hearing about that legacy, three things stood out to me. 1) He was a legendary actor.I loved Robert Redford […]
Capital “S” Stuck.
I’m going to start this post with a little lesson I learned from Marty, my brother, who has spent most of his career in city planning. There are different types of roads. Arterial roads are like the main highways or big streets in a city. Everybody goes on them. They carry lots of people going […]
From Word One to Level Eight.
I grew up in a very large family, surrounded by siblings. A LOT of them. There was a gaggle of us – to say the least. Everywhere we went, even in the 60s, 70s and 80s (when it was much more common to have larger families), we caused a bit of a spectacle. My dad […]
Giving 17 its moment.
In psychological experiments where people are asked to pick a random number between 1 and 20, 17 is chosen far more than any other number. This happens so much that 17 has come to be known as the least random number. A valid Sudoku puzzle cannot be made with fewer than 17 clues. A traditional […]
Spaghetti Sauce – and Borrowed Capacity.
When I was a junior in high school, I had a job as an afterschool ‘nanny’ for a well-to-do family across town with 3 children – ages 11, 9, and 6. My job entailed running family errands, getting the kids from school, helping them finish their homework, doing some light housework, and starting dinner. At […]
Samuel Langley – and getting in our own way.
In the early 1900s, Samuel Pierpont Langley — the namesake of Langley Air Force Base — was one of the most respected scientific minds in the United States. As the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a pioneer in aviation, he had funding from the U.S. War Department ($50,000 according to Wikipedia), access to leading […]
4 Questions from Fiskars.
I grew up in a house of scissors. We had little kid scissors, dad’s big metal office scissors, huge shears in the garage, craft scissor, junk drawer scissors, kitchen scissors, mom’s hair cutting scissors, and the orange handled Fiskars – both straight and ‘pinking’ style. And we knew better than to use the orange ‘sewing […]
The Kindest Thing We Can Do.
Investor Rick Buhrman was once asked “What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?”This was his response: “… our oldest son, Theo, spent the first six months of his life in several NICUs. He was eventually helicoptered to Indianapolis at Riley Hospital for Children. And while we were living in that NICU […]
In Defense of Bridges.
I don’t think I really knew what a bridge was until I was learning the guitar and my friend Mike would give me the lyrics to songs he was teaching me in long hand with his very neatly written “Verse” and “Chorus” and “Bridge.” In a song, a bridge is usually a section that provides […]
