&
Interestingly, the ampersand— & – was once a letter – the 27th – in the alphabet. The ampersand dates back to the Roman Republic when scribes used the letters “et” for the word “and.” After centuries of writing, the “e” and “t” were combined into the ampersand. Well into the 1800s students were reciting the alphabet and after the letter Z they would say “and per se and.” Per se was Latin for “by itself” and over the years the four words slurred until we ended up with ampersand. The ampersand was abandoned as a letter in the alphabet in the 19th Century. https://www.authormasterminds.com/steve-levi
Next time you complain about how s-l-o-w your computer is, be happy you HAVE an internet connection!! 
If you are older than 50, you will have no problem reading this license plate holder. If you are a millennial, ask your parents for a translation. The point? Every generation has terms and acronyms unique to that generation. If you grew up in the 1920s, you did NOT call someone a cowboy. In the 1930s, there was the real meaning of jazz. You had to be alive in the 1940s to know what a 52/20 was. In the 1950s there were zoot suits and in the 1960s, if you were going as fast as you could, you were TEF. So LOL, millennials, don’t think you’ve ‘invented’ anytime; you’re just the next generation of wordmongers.
Huh? What’s that? Ugly, eh? Yeah, but it is the start of a new scientific reality. It is so important it will CHANGE what we have always believed to be true. Bear with me now. According to prevailing scientific theory, all that “is” was created at the Big Bang. About 14 billion years ago, all that “was” was consolidated in one mass and it ‘exploded.’ The explosion sent shards of all that ‘was’ out into what we now call the universe. (Here’s where it gets tricky.) Since all that ‘was’ still ‘is,’ everything that ‘was’ and ‘is,’ is universal. That is, since all matter came from one source, all planet and stars will have the same matter – just in different concentrations. Woops! Within the last year Caltech has discovered a “mineral never seen in nature” in the core of a meteorite, pictured here. So, what does that do to the theory of the Big Bang? Good question. Stay tuned! And remember, in both writing and nature, “truth is stranger than fiction.
When you make something illegal, all you do is raise its price. Marijuana smokers in states where it is illegal are still smoking marijuana. All those states are doing is running up their own legal bills prosecuting people for something that is legal across the state line. You solve problems by using the problem to solve itself. In Alaska, this is known as ‘eating a bear with its own teeth.’ The expression comes from a sourdough in Eagle, Alaska, Erwin Robertson, who shot a bear that was raiding his food cache. He was not strong enough to haul the bear away, could not butcher it because no one bought bear meat and could not leave the carcass because it would attract wolves. He had no teeth so he made dentures from the bear’s teeth and then ‘ate the bear with its own teeth.’ Keep that Alaskan adage in mind next time you have an ‘unsolvable’ problem. 
Every generation of Americans has a boogeyman. The ‘evil immigrants’ have included the French, English, Irish, Jews, Quakers, Baptists, Chinese, Japanese, Russians and now, the Muslims and anyone from Central America at our southern border. America is a land of immigrants. Even the Indians came from ‘somewhere else.’ In 1910, it was “No Irish Need Apply” but in 1960 we elected the descendant of Irish immigrants to the White House. Blacks were slaves until 1865 and less than a century later, a black man was in the White House. In America, our revolutions are in the marketplace of ideas and no one, not a single person in America, knows what tomorrow is going to bring.
Yup, that’s right. Those books are chained to a library shelf. That’s how valuable these books are. These books, still chained, are part of the first public library in England, the Francis Trigge Library. Founded in 1598 by a local clergyman, in his words, for “the better encreasinge of learnings and knowledge in divinitie & other liberall sciences & learning by such of the cleargie & others as well as beinge inhabitantes in or near Grantham & the soake thereof as in other places in the said Countie.” The works are primarily religious – (religious people would steal books?!)—with very few secular volumes. Why is this important? Because today there are no chains on books. We can read what we want, ink-and-paper, electronic, documentary film or online, where we want – even in a library! The problem now is not IF we can find something to read but finding something INTERESTING to read. As a writer I strive to produce work that is interesting, educational (even if it is historical), and unique. Readers! Choose your books wisely! If you are willing to put in the time to read a book, make sure it is a book worth reading.
I’ll bet you are thinking what I was thinking when I first saw this children’s slide. Seriously?! Forget the artist! Think of the bureaucrats who approved the idea! One of the most important lessons of history can be summed up in four letters: DDDD. “Don’t Double-Down on Dumb.” When something is stupid and you know it is stupid, don’t do it. And when you make a stupid decision, admit it was dumb and reroute you thinking. Right now, as you are reading this blog, we have United States Senators DDD, doubling down on dumb. 90% of the voters in America – Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Jews, Christians, Muslims, White, Black, Hispanic, Native American and whatever other groups there are, want gun reform. And they want it now. But when it comes to the United States Senate, well, nothing. Or a promise to consider something, sometime in a few weeks. Maybe. Seriously?! Next time you talk to a United States Senator, advise him or her to learn from history: DDDD.