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Recent Posts: M Thomas Apple Author Page
Uranus and Neptune may be rocky…but who cares?
The evidence that Uranus and Neptune must be icy is “all indirect, it’s all circumstantial,” says Jonathan Fortney, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz. “This was always in the back of people’s minds: that the planets could be more complicated.” https://www.science.org/content/article/uranus-and-neptune-may-not-be-ice-giants-after-all But all the claims are based on computer models, […]
The Broken Valley: The Hidden German Civil War of the American Revolution
This is the third of a series of posts introducing the five-part historical fiction novel Unbowed, which will be published in November 2026. All five parts are based on true events and real people – my ancestors. The first post described the outcome of the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and one of its survivors, […]
Mind your own business!
If you had to sum up your life philosophy in one sentence, what would it be? As my Anglo-Irish immigrant ancestor Thomas Bushell wrote in his Will and Testament: “Live and let live.” Far too many people want to know what’s happening in other people’s bedrooms. You do want you want to do, and leave […]
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© Matthew Apple and Taking Leave, 2009-2020. Duplication of this material without express and written permission is strictly prohibited. If you would like to post or copy brief excerpts from the blog, please provide a link to the original URL along with an author’s credit.
Category Archives: trips
Home for the holidays (Part 1)
After a series of fairly serious blog posts related to an ongoing complaint against Amazon (which was somewhat, but not entirely, resolved), I thought it was about time to post about a slightly more innocuous topic: Making pottery at the … Continue reading
Usagi and the Bear
Since my daughter was a baby, she’s been obsessed with rabbits (usagi, in Japanese). We first had a stuffed sheep doll for her, but she quickly became enamoured of a musical pink bunny whose cord she could pull to start … Continue reading
On the Pond
This past Sunday, my wife, daughter, and I joined in an outdoor barbecue at a prefectural park originally built for a Japanese emperor. Sounds impressive, I guess…Taisho Tenno wasn’t a particularly long-lived emperor by modern standards, and was in poor … Continue reading
