Loose Ends

I heard from an awful lot of folks about the definition of a decade. Quite a few of you asserted, and I don't think you're wrong, that a decade can be any ten consecutive years. True…but when someone writes that we're starting a new decade or they speak of the end of an old decade, that's not the definition they're using. That news story about twins who were born in separate decades was presuming that decades were rigidly-defined groupings. If you're going to speak of a time as a series of ten-year units, there seems to be a lot of wiggle room as to whether we just ended the 2000-2009 decade or if we're in the last year of the 2001-2010 decade.

And a pretty large number of e-mails arrived telling me that one can hear Esperanto in the movie Incubus (1965) starring William Shatner. There you have two very good reasons not to seek out the movie Incubus.