By Bob Gaydos
Any celestial visitors these days would only have to slow down enough to take a peek at the headlines and decide to come back in another 3600 years when maybe we had our stuff a little better together.

By Bob Gaydos
So what’s the point of living, you ask, if you can’t have a few beers and polish off a half-pound of beef dripping with bacon grease and cheese, topped with salt and ketchup (sugar)? Hey, your choice. But as we neglect our bodies by rejecting science, so do we neglect our minds. As a nation, we become lazy, mentally as well as physically.

By Bob Gaydos
Trump’s disdain for science (for knowledge of any kind, really) and his apparently pathological need to do the opposite of what more knowledgeable people recommend, regardless of the topic, are a dangerous combination. When you’re talking about killer robots, it’s a potentially deadly one.

By Bob Gaydos
This is a time of serious unrest in America, stoked by the divisive language and actions of Donald Trump and those who advise and enable him. There is no other side to that story either. He was elected on a campaign built on lies, bigotry and bullying. The Republican Party allowed it. They continue to allow him to shred the fabric of this nation. They own him even though he is not and never has been one of them. That is the price of silence in the face of fascism.

By Bob Gaydos
As a nation, we have a tendency to try to make things — flag-raisings, presidents — fit our perceptions (our hopes and wishes perhaps), so that we don’t have to face reality. War is brutal. Talk is cheap.

By Bob Gaydos
Forget McCain. In the matter of saving Americans from the cruel reality of the disastrous GOP effort to kill Obamacare, the real mavericks were Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

By Bob Gaydos
The folks at the Botanical Garden said this was the first corpse flower to bloom in Washington, D.C., since 2007. For eight years — from 2008 to 2016 — there was no call to line up for the smell of death in the nation’s capital. This year — bloom!

By Jeffrey Page
It’s hot, and the governor of New Jersey went for a very private swim.

By Bob Gaydos
METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is not to be confused with SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which deals with searching for messages from aliens. To/from. Therein lies the difference as well as a major scientific/philosophical dispute. I say send.

By Bob Gaydos
I’ve been trying to figure out when “mean” became the Republican go-to word in policy. Maybe it was Ronald Reagan’s phony trickle-down spiel. The middle class and poor are still waiting for the first nourishing drops.