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Jan 22, 2025 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
When the term global warming first popped up on my radar in the 1980s, it didn’t sound so bad. In the northern part of the country where I was born and raised, winters were a five-month season of high heating bills, treacherous roads, cold fingers, and tons of snow to shovel. If global warming meant a break from some of that, I thought, bring it on.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
Dust-bunnies are those little clumps of dust and lint that mysteriously form beneath beds, couches, and appliances. Maybe they’re called that because they seem to reproduce as fast as rabbits. But no one who uses the dust-bunny moniker thinks the fuzz-balls under their fridge are really alive.
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Dec 25, 2024 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
In her poem “It Sifts from Leaden Sieves,” Emily Dickinson lauds the sublime splendor of new snow that fills nooks and crannies in the yard and leaves wind-sculpted ringlets around trees and fence posts.
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Dec 8, 2024 | 
adirondackalmanack.com | Paul Hetzler
The idea that plants benefit from kind words, or from speech in general, has roots that go back at least to Charles Darwin, who supported the concept. Sound evidence that speaking to plants makes them healthier came to light several years ago – it turns out the “silly” folks who talk to their gardens and hoe plants have been right all along. And this effect is not due to the carbon dioxide we exhale, which plants need, since audio recordings produce the same result.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
Those who are familiar with the term Yule log might think of the scrumptious log-shaped cake served at Christmas time. Also known as Bûche de Noël, owing to its French origin, this kind of log is a rolled sponge cake filled with buttercream and covered in chocolate icing textured to look like tree bark. In the distant past, however, folks happily burned Yule logs until ashes and charcoal were all that remained, because the Yule log was an actual log.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
If the Pilgrims had known what a big deal Thanksgiving was going to become in America, I’m sure they would have taken pictures. There’s no question that food provided by the Wampanoags throughout the winter of 1620-21 saved the Pilgrims from certain death. So, they had a great deal to be thankful for at their 1621 harvest feast, even if the term “Thanksgiving” was not used that first year.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
According to legend, a small group of individuals have kept the Tower of London, as well as the British government, from falling since the mid-1600s. That’s pretty good for a bunch of bird-brains. And I’m not talking about politicians – these are ravens. Native to most of the northern hemisphere, common ravens are anything but ordinary. They have an intellect on par with that of chimps and apes, and are able to plan for the future better than four-year-old humans can.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
Spiders can sometimes be dangerous in weird ways. At a Michigan gas station in 2015, a man tried to kill one with a lighter and accidently torched a pump island instead, and in 2014, a guy in Seattle burned his house down trying to kill spiders with a blowtorch. But fire isn’t typically why we fear spiders. Some experts think our aversion to spiders may be an evolutionary response, woven into the very strands of our DNA.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
saturdayeveningpost.com | Paul Hetzler
Linus, the precocious, blanket-toting character from the Peanuts franchise, waited faithfully for “The Great Pumpkin” each Halloween night from 1950 to 1999. If anyone else had been stood-up that many times by the same character, they’d have thrown in the towel (or blanket) for sure.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
northcountrynow.com | Paul Hetzler
BY PAUL HETZLERResidents of New England and southeastern Canada are dismayed by this year’s drab fall color display, an unfortunate result of funding cuts at USDA’s Plant-Pigmentation Program. Or at least I assume that’s what happened. Actually, it’s largely due to the abnormally wet season we’ve had. Frequent rains kept foliage damp for long periods, which set the stage for normally weak, opportunistic fungal pathogens to cop an attitude, and set up housekeeping inside leaves.
