I know the sensible explanations. More tourists mean more eyes on the water. Waves can look like humps. Logs float. Seals visit. People see what they expect to see.

Mel Brooks takes extremely negative, frightening, even detestable things and surrounds them with so much absolute absurdity that they become funny. You see it in The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World, Part I—again and again.

Before I learned that it was sitting in the bed of his pickup, I had visions of this man pulling a full-size guillotine around behind him in one of those little red wagons we had as children.

According to a recent news story, a black bear in Colorado climbed into an unlocked SUV. The door closed behind him, trapping him inside. In his understandable desire to escape, he managed to lean on the horn. Repeatedly.

As it turns out, coffee is every bit as complicated as wine. The "bean" is actually the seed of a fruit. Where it grows matters. The soil matters. The elevation matters. Rainfall matters. Apparently coffee beans all have rich origin stories.

The name comes from Philippine mythology. Bakunawa is a giant sea serpent said to swallow the moon, causing eclipses.

From what I've read, kangaroos in the wild don't spend their entire lives standing under one tree. They travel. They explore. They cover a surprising amount of territory.

We spend our mornings drinking coffee, reading headlines on our respective glowing devices, and discussing whatever bizarre thing the Internet has coughed up overnight.

Every automobile manufacturer seems to have its own ideas about where everything should go.

The food appears to be the first shock. Visitors arrive expecting hamburgers. This is understandable. Our reputation abroad appears to consist largely of hamburgers, cowboys, and action movies.

Nothing remarkable about them. They weren't large. They weren't brightly colored. They didn't arrive in a velvet pouch guarded by tiny pharmaceutical elves.

If there is one thing mothers of young children know, it’s this: you do not hand a toddler fine china if you want your heart to continue beating in a normal rhythm. One dropped plate and suddenly you can hear your blood pressure pounding in your ears.

The truck had apparently shuffled off this mortal coil and departed for the Great Parking Lot in the Sky.

Unfortunately, insurance does not simply hand you a machine and say, “Congratulations on your commitment to oxygen. Sleep well.”

I investigated Panama with the same level of enthusiasm one might expect from a hog searching for truffles. To say I did “some research” would be like saying a skunk produces “some odor.”

Going out to eat with Eve is not dining. It is an event. Possibly one requiring permits.

The show doesn’t just tell you that something was off—it shows you the cause and effect. He said this. They felt that. Here’s why. It’s exaggerated, of course. It’s a sitcom. But underneath the humor, there’s a kind of clarity that’s hard to find in real life.

Her frustration was usually there, like living with a volcano; rumblings sometimes, pyroclastic flow sometimes, rocks and ash flying through the air sometimes.

Last summer I would take my coffee out to the porch and watch the sun come up before starting my workday. It felt like getting ahead of things. Quiet, ordered, slightly smug.

We live in the country. Snakes are a fact of life. I appreciate their presence, actually, living under our home, hopefully keeping the wild rodents out of our house. Rodents eat people food and are quite destructive about it. Snakes do not. Snakes eat those pesky rodents.