Consider this nugget from 1703’s Athenian Mercury, a British periodical: "If I am thinking of committing any great and enormous crime and sin (as adultery), but do not personally and actually commit it, am I guilty of the crime and sin?" You will have to wait until the end of our little say to hear the sage advice from 314 ...
A zeptosecond is a fantastically short time. It is a sextillionth of a second. We don’t really care how long it is though; we just love the name. Zeptosecond. You will need a whole lotta zeptoseconds to wait for an uncontested divorce to be final in Virginia. We are not being coy, either, because the exact timing of a Virginia ...
A chasm is not a canyon. Consider the Grand Canyon, very deep but also very wide. Seeing it is awe-inspiring and humbling. Consider, though, a deep, narrow fissure, so deep you cannot see the bottom. It is far more terrifying than awesome. Couples facing marital separation may feel a wide canyon separates them, but the fear they feel really means ...
Without a doubt, being a single parent is one of the hardest jobs around. Not only do you have to be the financial provider holding down a regular job or two – but you must also provide emotional support for your children on a daily basis. The most successful single parents—mothers and fathers alike—develop strategies that allow them to accomplish ...
Mark your calendars now: July 28, 2061 will be the perihelion of Halley’s Comet. No, don’t scratch your head; it’s when Halley’s Comet returns; its perihelion is the comet’s closest approach to the sun. Science is a marvel: we can know to the day when an important astronomical event like Halley’s Comet will be on us. Law is sometimes a ...
Audi's four-wheel drive system, the Quattro®, is a great automotive innovation, but it's no QDRO. They are both nearly identical in pronunciation, but a QDRO has legal muscle, whereas a Quattro®, which admittedly handles great in the snow, is ineffective in court. A QDRO is, in the memorably bureaucratic words of the U.S. Department of Labor, “a domestic relations order ...
The world’s oldest recovered message in a bottle1 was awash in the sea for more than a century. It was (eventually) safely delivered to the sender’s 62-year-old granddaughter 101 years after her grandfather tossed it into the surf. Most of us do not attempt our own mailing system, since more efficient, timely and reliable means already exist. Similarly, most of ...
For anyone in our nation’s military services, acronyms are a fact of life. From Weapon Of Magnesium, Battalion, Anti-Tank — aka WOMBAT — to Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADS), weird clusters of letters invariably mean something important. The USFSPA, or Uniformed Services Former Spouse Protection Act, is an important acronym that could be a path to a comfortable retirement in later ...
The original G.I. Joe doll — sorry, action figure — came on the scene in 1964, and has been a hit ever since. G.I. Joe is immortal, but real GIs not only leave the service, they go on to other, great things, like college. The Post-9/11 GI Bill is an enormously valuable asset earned through military service. The benefits from ...