The Daily Apple

SPYWARE II Days later, I look back at the previous entry and think, "Oh, innocent fool." I was not, in fact, a day away from recov...

SORRY, FOLKS For the past few days, I've been battling a nasty case of spyware. I downloaded something that I thought would allow me to...

CUMBERLAND GAP During the trip I mentioned in the previous entry, we passed signs for the Cumberland Gap. There was some debate among us in ...

KUDZU I just got back from a trip which involved driving through Kentucky. During this drive, I saw entire hillsides covered with a grayish ...

BARRY MANILOW I just learned today that Barry Manilow was behind a ton of songs for commercials back in the day. As the composer or the voic...

STORK BITES or, the red patches on the back of a lot of people's necks The other day, somebody bent down to get something off the floor ...

THE PIXIES For those who don't know, the Pixies was a four-person band in the late 1980s and early 1990s which is often credited with la...

THE ALPHABET SONG Here's the burning question: where did the alphabet song come from? I thought maybe Sesame Street, but it's way ol...

V.C. ANDREWS Somebody told me today that V.C. Andrews, the woman who wrote THE gothic-horror novels about super-sick-messed-up families, d...

I've been sick for the past few days, and I've been gorging myself on soap operas. Greenlee on All My Children is one of my new fav...

Recently I've started buying organic, cage-free eggs. The eggs in these boxes are always brown, while the eggs in the regular boxes are ...

GIANT SQUID The story goes that there are enormous squid who live in deep, deep waters. They've never been seen in their habitat, or the...

ROBINS, part II Since we just had our first official day of Spring the other day, I thought it might be appropriate to re-visit the robins ....

I'm reading one of Dostoevsky's novels, The Idiot , and one of the characters in the book is running around with tuberculosis. It st...

Since the last few entries have been quite long, I thought I'd do a few short ones. HAIR Hair goes through three stages: it grows,...

I got into a discussion today about how bananas ripen. In my experience, the peel of an unripe banana is very thick and the fruit is skinny....

COVERED BRIDGES Recently, I went for a drive through the countryside and passed a covered bridge. I don't think I'd ever seen one of...

SOAP So I was about to wash the dishes, and I thought, "How does soap work, anyway?" I have a dim idea that it somehow traps dirt ...

VENUS de MILO I saw the Venus de Milo once, when I was in Paris several years ago. I went to the Louvre, which is massive, got a map, and ...