It might be the beginning of January, but baseball is never far from my mind. After the Braves' dismal year last season, I'm beginning to feel like I did when I was a kid and first began to follow the Braves and experienced their loss to the Mets in the first-ever league playoff series. But, like the Cubs fans said for decades, there's always next year. But what turned my attention back to baseball this time was two events on this date in history: Stan Musial' s contract in 1952 and Curt...

On this day in 1493, Chris Columbus , who had sailed the ocean blue the year before, was on yet another voyage when he saw what he had heard sailors tell stories of and his imagination apparently had embellished. This is what he thought he was seeing. He thought he saw the legendary mermaids of naval lore. But the reality was quite different than the stories had led him to believe and what his imagination had envisioned. He described the "mermaids"--those half-fish-half-female beauties--as...

I recently read a Pickles cartoon strip that was eerily appropriate for this time of year. The Pickles Opal, the grandmother, looking at herself in front of a full-length mirror, declared to Earl, her husband, something to the effect that in the new year she was going to eat less, exercise more, lose weight, and generally be more health conscious. Earl said, "That sounds hard!" Opal replied, "My motto for the year is 'I can do hard things.'" Earl walked away muttering, "My motto is 'I can...