• Who makes up the names of groups of animals? Is there some organization that decides what a group of this or that is called? I say that a group of penguins should be called a penitentiary, a group of bats should be called a battery and a group of sharks should be called a charcuterie.

• I think it is only fitting here to share a recipe. The recipe is not my own but one that I stumbled across at caudata.org. Let’s start with the ingredients:

85 large crickets (place in freezer 1 hr before blending)
25 wax worms
10 butter worms
2 dozen night crawlers
2 dozen red wigglers
1 package frozen blood worms (defrosted)
1 package frozen tubifex worms (defrosted)
2 cups frozen “salad shrimp” (defrosted, rinsed and soaked in dechlorinated water for about 2 hours)
1 tbsp calcium powder
2 unflavoured gelatin packets (dissolved in 2 cups of dechlorinated water, and heated to a boil)

Next, said the recipe, one should “blend all ingredients in electric blender until mixture has the consistency of thick gravy.” This was where I pulled the cord and got off the bus.

• When a player or team wins an important game and credits the victory to God, wouldn’t it be good journalism for reporters to turn to the losing team and question them about the inadequacy of their prayers? I would like to hear how the losers would respond but, sadly, it seems that we cannot count on the news media to do their jobs.

• “No man is without honor save in his own country,” so supposedly said Jesus. I offer the obverse observation: “Everyone’s dog is sweet before it bites the neighbor.”

• My wife was making a grocery run, so I asked her to pick up a box of cereal. What kind? Well, since I no longer eat Cheerios (or any oat cereal), I suggested Crispix (corn and rice) or the generic version if available. So she returned with a box of Laura Lynn Hexa Crisp. Hexa Crisp sounds like the kind of foodstuff one would stock in your family fallout shelter. But I am eating it anyway and hoping that I don’t have to build one before Trump is gone.

• Whenever I see a little child being scolded (or worse) by an out-of-control parent, I want to go over and hug the child and give her a kiss and tell her it is not her fault — mommy is just having a bad life.

• And what I really want to do is go over and lecture the parent about being mean. But I know that this would be unproductive and possibly counterproductive. Fred Rogers must have witnessed such scenes many times — I wonder how he reacted and acted.

• What is it that Libertarians want? What kind of country would this be if Libertarians were granted their wishes and had the freedom to revoke our laws and reshape our society? Give me the liberty to speculate: life would be near-idyllic for a man absorbed by principle, whose happiness is “the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” (Or so said Ayn Rand.) Libertarians figure the world would be a better place — and humans a better race — if everyone had to fend for themselves. Actually, Libertarians are lucky to live in a nation where this isn’t true. It isn’t Fred Rogers’ world that is the Neighborhood of Make-Believe — it’s Rand’s.

• If physical items such as telephones, microphones, typewriters, magnifying glasses, maps and paintbrushes had never existed, what images would software applications use as icons to represent the corresponding functions? In this way, iPhones are still 1890’s tech.

• Old liberals begin to realize that they have lost their edge when they gather ’round to sing protest songs, and they find they have forgotten the tune to “This Land is Your Land” and so they just hum the theme from “Antiques Road Show” instead.