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Didn't see that coming...

The older you get, the more likely you will have experienced the death of a loved one. It's a brutal fact of life which is impossible to avoid, and if you have not experienced it... you will if you live long enough. I have been a widower for 20 years this month. I was born in 1964 which makes me the very last boomer, and I have been married twice. First time was a high school sweetheart and we were married when I was 19... seems crazy today, but back then it was just what people did. Of course we also smoked like chimneys, and we did it everywhere. Movie theaters, airplanes and buses, restaurants... everywhere. One of my early memories was the smell of my dad's Tareytons blowing into the back seat of our Buick Le Sabre. So needless to say, we were incredibly stupid by today's standards. As it ever was... That marriage fell apart after 7 years for exactly the reason you already think it did. Monkey branching... ie. hypergamy. We had a son... so of course it was ch
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Mueller and the Celestial Teapot

It is impossible to disprove a negative assertion. Kudos to British mathematician Bertrand Russell for the excellent illustration of this principal. "Bertrand Russell proposed his teapot analogy as a way of explaining where the burden of proof lies, particularly in debates about religion."  " In the teapot analogy, Russell asks to us to imagine a man claiming that there is a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. The teapot is too small for us to see, and, since we can’t journey out into space (Russell wrote this in the 1950s), there’s no way to show that the teapot isn’t actually there. “Ah,” says Russell’s hypothetical man, “since you can’t prove the teapot isn’t there, you must assume that it is there.” Of course, it’s patently ridiculous to claim that that we must believe in a teapot orbiting the sun simply because we have no means to prove it isn’t there. The burden of proof, Russell argues, is on the person claiming the teapot is there, since the
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