"The universe is a bar," Buck says between swigs of beer, in one of those lines that led the late poet William Stafford to observe, "Everyone wanders into poetry sometimes." If Buck hadn’t just told ...

To: Matmail: The City of San Diego owns how many golf balls? — A. Pismo Clam, La Jolla Okay, I’ll bite. My answer is zero, but something tells me Senor Clam is already preparing his ...

Dear Mat: Since even a minute quantity of somebody’s blood can be analyzed to determine the person’s DNA, what happens when somebody’s entire blood has been replaced by someone else’s blood during a transfusion? — ...

Dear Matthew Alice: I lived in Pennsylvania in the 1960s. One of the things that I remember about the place is that there were underground coal fires that had been burning for years. Have they ...

Dear Matthew: A cocktail waitress at Milligan’s told me that a maraschino cherry will stay in your stomach for four years. Something to do with the preservatives. This seems unlikely, at best, but it raises ...