“Return that gift before you get it.” Leave it to Amazon.com to “solve” our gift-receiving woes! The mega online mail-order giant reportedly has come up with a solution to those gifts from “Aunt Mildred” you’ve never known what to do with—from “The Stallion Stable Music Box” that must have been a beauty on the computer screen but turned out to be a White Elephant under the Christmas tree, to “The Thread and Bobbin Sewing Kit” that, truth be known, will never see the light of day.

Some time ago Charles Schultz’s syndicated Peanuts cartoon went apocalyptic. Frame 1: Lucy to Charlie Brown, “I don’t worry about the world coming to an end anymore.” Frame 2: She continues, “The way I figure it, the world can’t come to an end today because it is already tomorrow in some other part of the world.” Frame 3: Lucy turns and asks Charlie Brown, “Isn’t that a comforting theory?” Final frame: Lucy smiling but Charlie Brown muttering, “I’ve never felt so comforted in all my life!”

The two young women, sisters, were out for a late afternoon stroll along the popular walking path in Compton, south LA. “Do you hear that cat?” one of them stopped. Both listened. Sure enough—from somewhere not so far away came a faint whimper. “Gotta be a cat.” They strained to listen. “Sounds more like a baby to me.” Impossible. Nothing there but the asphalt bike path and a chain linked fence. But they heard it again. “It’s gotta be.” They dialed 911.

Nathaniel Philbrick, in Mayflower, his acclaimed history of the Pilgrims, recounts how William Bradford, the intrepid leader of that courageous band of Puritans, years later described “that first morning in America.” Recalling with wonder their landing on the salty, windswept shores of Cape Cod Bay on November 15, 1620, Bradford wrote: “But here I cannot stay and make a pause and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition. . . .

Can you believe some individuals are actually paid to take pictures of angels? In fact there are five photographers who have been granted three-year stints to take as many pictures of angels in the air as they possibly can! I’m not kidding.

On Tuesday the Pew Research Center released its 2014 Religious Landscape Study, a survey of over 35,000 Americans. Coming seven years after Pew’s previous such study, the new survey offers some intriguing comparisons.

Talking about adding insult to injury—figures released this week indicate that the top 100 CEO retirement packages here in the United States now equal the retirement account savings of 41% of all American households with the lowest retirement wealth. Go figure! So let’s do. The accumulated wealth in the retirement packages of these top 100 American executives is $4.9 billion.

Let’s see—at the time of this writing the Cubs are down 0-3, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama have flying aces bumping into each other over Syria, down on the ground Palestinians and Israelis are at it once again, half a world away North and South Korean families are reunited after being separated for 65 years since the Korean War, Wall Street is keeping its fingers crossed about any significant upsurge in the stock market before the end of the year, the latest rumor for the Vatican to squash is about the Pope having a small brain tumor, though the press has tired of reporting the immigratio

Since we’re a generation huge on sound-bite success formulas, here’s one more—a short, punchy guarantee for success. Its genius is its simplicity—you can memorize it in twenty seconds.

After a week of headline heartaches from the mass shooting in Roseburg to the biblical proportion flooding in South Carolina, here’s a headline hardly as ponderous. According to USA TODAY the grammar-checking app Grammarly has run some numbers on the presidential candidates from both parties and their supporters who comment on the candidate’s Facebook page. In short Grammarly set out to find out which candidate’s supporters were the most grammatically correct. I.e., how many spelling and/or grammatical errors appear in the online postings of the various candidates’ supporters.