Despite their frequent presence in all kinds of media, many people still don’t seem to understand how surnames (last names) “work” in Spanish. The concept itself is easy: a child is born and given a first name, perhaps (but not always) a second or “middle” name, and TWO last names: the father’s first and then…

“The distance to the building shall be 29′-6 11/32″.” “Classrooms shall have an area of 116,250 ¼ square inches.” “And God said to Noah … the length of the ark shall be 137,100 mm …”  A bit ridiculous, right? When building codes insert the (mathematically accurate) conversion to millimeters, it sounds just as absurd. One millimeter may…

Father Jesús Orbegozo, S.J., is now the Rector of the Jesuit school I attended in Caracas. But back in the early 70s, he was my Physics professor. In those days, hand-held calculators were a new thing (we were taught to use slide rulers) but my father had one. We had to write a lab report…

Everybody’s doing it! Or so it seems. I am told you MUST blog if you want your website and social media to show up in Google and other search engines (that SEO thing), so that’s one reason I am doing it. But I also want you, the reader, to understand what makes me tick. When…