Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.