On an average day, my daughter’s question-to-declarative sentence ratio clocks in at a healthy 5:1. In this section of the blog, I explore what happens when instead of saying “I don’t know,” I say “Let’s find out!”
News broke this week of particular interest to us here at Caterpickles Central because it touches on a 10-year-old question of ours: Did dinosaurs have belly buttons? Y’all, I think we may finally have our answer.
A Jonathan Swift poem? Norse mythology? A mistranslation from the Greek? Shoddy thatched roof craftsmanship? Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway? (Part 2 of our 2-post investigation)
Thatched roofs? Unsavory Elizabethan street sanitation practices? A 1652 Richard Brome play? Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway?
While I was busy not blogging this month, it came to my attention that this blog is ten years old. Goodness. I thought it would be fun to mark its decade-aversary by revisiting a question post from the early days of the blog to see how well my answer has held up. Spoiler alert: Not well.
I grew up watching the Muppets. For years I wandered through life, filled with the happy conviction that I knew everything I needed to know about Sam the Eagle. This happy state continued until I saw a video of the African shoebill stork on Twitter. It bore a disconcerting resemblance to old Sam. To make matters worse, while researching shoebills, I discovered that some think that the harpy eagle is actually the model for Sam the Eagle. There’s only one thing to do when your world has been rocked by this sort of question: compare and contrast.
About 20 years ago, my grandparents gave me a set of old family journals from 1871-1952. Mixed in with all sheep, pig, apple, and pork accounts are surprisingly interesting narratives of daily life in upstate New York in the late 1800s. This week, my great-great-grandfather goes to Rochester for a second mortgage, and comes away feeling a bit… swindled.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it came to my attention that while Amazon continues to be fine, independent booksellers are suffering. That’s why I decided to become a Bookshop.org affiliate. Starting today, my book reviews may contain affiliate links to Bookshop.org, an online bookstore that provides financial support to independent bookstores nationwide. I’ve also added a new Caterpickles Bookstore Learn more about Bookshop.org, affiliate links on Caterpickles, and the new Caterpickles Bookstore.
Last week our local public health office released official guidance for how to mitigate the risk of spreading COVID-19 during Halloween and Día de Los Muertos celebrations. I wanted to share it with you here, in case your family is also trying to figure out what those celebrations will look like this year.
One of the side effects of having wildfires reach within a dozen miles of your home is that it tends to focus your mind on completing…
I promise not to make political posts a regular event on this blog, but voting is a civic duty, not simply a political one. In this post, I’ll tell you about some resources that can help you make voting as easy as possible for you and the other voters in your family.
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