Month: January 2012

Wow! That’s all I could say Jan. 18 when Wikipedia went black to protest proposed, anti-piracy legislation in the federal government. At midnight, Wikipedia switched off ready access to nearly 4 million web pages and gave searchers a dignified explanation in shades of dark gray. Wow! It really happened. The world’s fifth most popular website…

Researching and writing this week’s column took me time and again to the fifth most popular website, Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia which started in 2001 with 3,848,878 articles in English. Wikipedia attracts 25 million visitors daily, according to ComScore. “Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with…

Birthdays provide convenient markers of progress and changes in life. A few reflections on the eve of leaving middle age. At 10, kindly adults would enter conversations with me by asking, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” At 60, folks wonder, “When are you going to retire?” At 16, my parents…

At the time “Octo-Mom,” a single woman, announced her artificially-induced pregnancy of eight children, she said she did it because she “needed to have children.” Reflecting on that statement, my son Mark commented, “I would counsel any woman who thinks she doesn’t ‘need’ a man but she ‘needs’ to have children, to think, instead, of…

Yeah, yeah, the kids hated it, but I loved my rule when we had perfectly healthy, minor children around the house: “First you work, then you play makes my life easier any day.” I’d like to say I initiated the rule, but in all reality I lived under the same mandate as a child. First,…