In the “Cheese Shop” sketch from the old Monty Python comedy series, John Cleese plays a customer trying to buy some cheese from “Ye National Cheese Emporium, purveyor of fine cheese to the gentry (and the poverty-stricken too)”. The cheese shop proprietor, played by Michael Palin, seems to have no cheese in stock, not even

When I was a kid in Maplewood, New Jersey, our next-door neighbor was a feisty Irish widow named Anne Byrne.  (She was related to our former Governor, Brendan Byrne, but I forget how.)  When I would do something stupid, which usually involved putting some kind of ball through one of her windows, she would grab

When my daughter was little, we loved putting jigsaw puzzles together. We would dump the pieces on the floor and spend hours trying to figure out how they fit. Sometimes there would be a “gap” in the puzzle, and we’d eventually get frustrated and assume that we were missing a piece. But somehow, the missing