Diana Gainer

Was the Sphinx once a lion?

The consensus among Egyptologists is that the pharaoh Khephren had the famous Sphinx built during the days of the Old Kingdom, and it always had this pharaoh’s head on the body of the lion. Long ago it...

Review of 'Stylized' for Strunk and White's 'Elements of Style' on their silver anniversary

Back in 1959, half a century ago, a slim volume came out of the press of Macmillan, called The Elements of Style. Most of it had circulated earlier as a set of rules for writing English papers, written up by...

Finds in the Valley of the Kings

On a recent archeology blog (Archaeorama), Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s premier archeologist discusses a few finds in the Valley of the Kings. One of these is a limestone slab bearing an inscription showing a small bird rather like...

The origin of Halloween

In archaic English, the name for the Christian holiday of November 1st was All Hallows Day or All Hallow Mass. It meant the same thing as the modern All Saints’ Day. For those who don’t know, in...

Was Biblical Joseph bought with coins?

According to an article in the Middle East Media Research Institute, following a report in the Egyptian daily, Al-Ahram, some Egyptian archeologists supposedly found some coins dating to the time of the Biblical Joseph. No, really! Not...

What is a Goth?

Gothenburg is a city in Sweden and an internet service provider in that city has decided to call itself GothNet. This choice of a name has caused a few giggles among those Swedes who know a bit of idiomatic...

Education 101: What is Ramadan?

Among Muslims in the United States (and many other countries), there are two calendars, the secular one and the religious one. The secular calendar is the same one that everybody else follows, with the months and years that we all...

September and the fall of apples

Autumn is coming and with it, a new crop of apples. Readers who are interested in learning about the differences among types of apples can read about them at the wiseGEEK blog, “What Are the Different Types of...

A mysterious, old inscription

This particular mystery comes from an old graveyard (and notice that, in the latest writing style, this paragraph has only one sentence, formerly a big "no-no").On Ancestry.com there is a picture of a gravestone...

A proposal for Labor Day

What’s the point of Labor Day? Have you ever wondered? It’s supposed to celebrate the great American worker, the one whose labor creates most of the wealth of this nation, the one who builds all the...

Currently in Los Angeles