When ripe, the tropical fruit noni turns the kind of yellow-green most people associate with nasal congestion -- and gives off an odor pungent enough to clear that congestion away. Accordingly, noni's profile has long been low compared with that of more popular Pacific ...
If you're like me, one thing you do not need is more stress. At least I thought so until a recent encounter with a Japanese English instructor. "Your stress is all wrong," she barked. "Step it up, please!" I had just agreed to make a video of ...
At least I have a decent excuse. Sure, it is not one of the classic, all-time great excuses, like: "Not tonight. I have a headache." Or . . . "My dog ate my homework." Or . . . "No, no, I love raw fish. I'm just not hungry." Yet ...
My older son now has what I do not. No, I do not mean hair. Nor a future. Nor a draft card. I mean he has what I have never had. A tattoo. Actually, he has multiple tattoos. He is, in fact, his own mobile picture show, an ...
Late this past summer, I officially became a "half." No, not a "half" in the sense the Japanese use the word, that being for children of international marriages. (In other words, those kids who are half Japanese.) Rather, I have become a "half" time-wise. For ...
On the morning of his son's wedding, Frank Gibbs, the neighborly physician in Thorton Wilder's "Our Town," confesses to his wife that his chief concern in the early days of their own marriage was how to make small talk with his bride. "I was afraid," ...
"Just what is good health," a wise man once told me, "other than the slowest way to die?" Viewed from that rather "unhealthy" perspective, longevity may not be the living end many people think it is. Japan as a nation is squinting this idea in the ...
This is it: the one-hundredth edition of "When East Marries West." At least by my count, and, as my wife says, "You should know -- you're the only one who reads it." To prove how wrong a woman can be, I now offer but a ...
Here's how my mind works . . . The other day upon emerging dripping from the shower, I stared at my shape in the mirror and reached a fairly quick conclusion: "My, I'm sort of fat and funny-looking." To be immediately struck by the notion, "What does ...
A news item earlier this year cited the upcoming extinction of the banana, giving the slippery fruit a life expectancy of but 10 more years. A few days later, another news item announced similar doom for the shark, especially in the waters of the northeast ...
