Paul A. Merkley
Bio
Mental traveller. Idealist. Try to be low-key but sometimes hothead. Curious George. "Ardent desire is the squire of the heart." Love Tolkien, Cinephile. Awards ASCAP, Royal Society. Music as Brain Fitness: www.musicandmemoryjunction.com
Achievements (1)
Stories (106)
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To Run or to Pass?
It is that time of year when thoughts turn to aspirations on the gridiron. I live on the north shore of Lake Ontario, so in some respects college football is on a much smaller scale here. There are no television revenues to speak of, no paid college players, smaller stadiums and so on.
By Paul A. Merkley6 months ago in Cleats
On-Court Discourtesy
It's clear to me that I don't have the expertise to write about psychology or sports psychology in a clinical way, but I think if these disciplines are to be valuable, it's important that they make sense to everyone. A few years ago there was a movement in the Law to make legal writing comprehensible for a broad population whom it affected, and I felt that was a big step forward. So here goes.
By Paul A. Merkley7 months ago in Psyche
In my village, second time around
Very few doctors pay close enough attention to fingernails. Medically they are a treasure of trove of information, especially of past medical history. I think your great author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the medical doctor who delighted the world with his detective fiction, must have understood this. His character, Sherlock Holmes, deduced many important things from a woman's fingernails.
By Paul A. Merkley8 months ago in Fiction
A Lincoln Penny
Coins are interesting to me because they change hands so many times. I'm not a collector, but I have bought inexpensive coins from Ancient Egypt (think whose hands might have touched those) and coins from the Roman colony of Marcianopolis that lay at the dead bottom of the Black Sea for centuries, but must have bought food, wine, maybe scrolls, maybe animals as they changed hands back and forth, maybe sometimes owned by the conquering Latin speakers, at other times from those who spoke Greek, maybe paid for music lessons or theater tickets. This story is about a particular coin.
By Paul A. Merkley11 months ago in Psyche
Time
July 2022, celebrations on the 8th, 75th anniversary of the arrival of The Friends, benign, extraterrestrial technocrats. With their nuclear fusion energy, cancer cure, and robotics, mankind doesn't have to do much. We've mostly dropped reading and writing because literature was disruptive. No meat. Reproduction is strictly controlled. The Friends and their cameras are everywhere to keep us safe.
By Paul A. Merkley12 months ago in Fiction
