Were you injured by the recent solar eclipse? Do you live along the path of the eclipse between Texas and Maine? Did you look up at the eclipse without any sort of eye protection despite repeatedly being warned not to? If so, you may be entitled to monetary damages for your injuries. At the law offices of Janssen & Lockyer, we're committed to helping everyone receive justice for their injuries, no matter who was actually responsible. So if you looked up at the eclipse despite being told numerous times by astronomers, medical professionals, your teachers, and well-meaning strangers, you'r ..read more

There's a list that went viral recently called "The Diseases and Casualties this year being 1632," and it is, for the most part, fairly hilarious. The list purports to be the causes of death in the city of London 392 years ago. It shows that while the American healthcare system may be a dumpster fire, at least we didn't live in the early part of the 17th century when you could die from some of the worst or dumbest ways imaginable. It also shows the terms they used for modern diseases, and how they tried to understand diseases of the body that actually make no sense today. Like Purples, which ..read more

I am not mechanically inclined. At all. If it involves turning a wrench or working with metal in any way, I'm terrible. I've often thought of tackling a mechanical project like restoring an old lawn mower, but I've never actually taken the steps to undertake such a project. The actual thought of it sends me into an apoplectic fit. It goes back to my 8th-grade metal shop class at McKinley Middle School in 19-none-of-your-business. I was scared to death that working on anything metal would cause flying steel shavings to make a beeline right for my eyes. That's because I had been frightened in ..read more

In June 2014, a rather impressive male impregnated 100 females in just a few short weeks. Randy the guinea pig was a resident at Hatton Country World in Warwickshire, England when he somehow found his way into a females-only pen filled with 100 female guinea pigs. He lived there undetected for a few weeks until Hatton staff discovered that all 100 female guinea pigs were pregnant. And in the corner, wearing a smug grin was one very exhausted male guinea pig chugging a Gatorade. I had a chance to catch up with Randy, a few weeks before the ten-year anniversary of his astounding —  some ..read more

When the automotive industry first introduced robots to their factories, factory workers yelled about robots taking their jobs.  And when artificial intelligence exploded onto the scene a year ago — after several years of operating without notice — creative professionals screamed about robots taking their jobs. Now a Spanish artist living in the Netherlands, Alicia Framis, wants to marry an AI hologram and no one is saying a word. Of course, there are people who complain that robots are taking their jobs, but what about taking their relationships? Some people are already in relationshi ..read more

One of my great shames as a Hoosier is that I have never had a vegetable garden of my own. We had one every year when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, but I have fallen short as an adult. Nearly every family in my neighborhood had a backyard garden filled with tomatoes, green beans, and squash. One year, my parents even planted a few stalks of corn. Every spring, we dreamed of eating garden-fresh tomatoes as big as a baby's head and barrels of green beans. We told stories about tomato sandwiches of years past and zucchinis you could carve into a canoe. But by the middle of August, we w ..read more

When it comes to experts who teach us how to improve our lives, they should have real-world experience in the things they're teaching us. The guy teaching your kid how to hit a baseball needs to be a former player who could turn on a 90-mph sinker and send it into the left-field bleachers.  Your marriage counselor should be happily married. And your financial advisor had certainly better be rich. These people not only need a lot of knowledge, they need a wide variety of experiences with plenty of screwups and recoveries. They should have a long trail of mistakes behind them because th ..read more

You almost didn't get this column this week. That would have been a shame because this is my 1,500th newspaper column. One thousand and five hundred weeks ago, I started writing a newspaper humor column, and my streak was nearly broken by a faulty computer. This morning, my computer wouldn't connect to the wifi. Not a problem; that happens once in a while, but it's easy to fix. Usually. I did everything you're supposed to: Turn your computer's wifi off and on. Reboot your router. Swear at the cable company. Make sure your bill is paid. Make sure there's not an outage. Swear some more. Reboo ..read more

Most people don't realize a lot of words and phrases we use come from William Shakespeare. According to the nerds who study this sort of thing, Shakespeare created 1,700 new words compared to the 265 that Charles Dickens invented. Some of the words ol' Bill just outright invented, others he created just by adding a prefix or suffix to an existing word. Many of them never caught on, but hundreds more still live on, and we use them today in the 21st century. For example, Shakespeare was the first to use the word "alligator" in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo said, "And in his needy shop a tortoise ..read more

"Hey, Kid, do you have any love letters?" asked my friend Karl. Why, are you lonely? I asked. Do you want me to write you a mash note? "Don't flatter yourself. They're not for me," he said. Karl and I were at First Editions, our favorite literary-themed bar, for lunch — cheeseburgers and Cokes, because my wife and his daughter weren't around. But if they ask, we had salads and mineral water. Do you mean real love letters? Like the notes we passed around in grade school? I said with a laugh. I remember those things. God, we were so dumb back then. "No, not those. I mean—" I remember tryi ..read more