Wes Phillips

I'm fascinated by how tiny little things affect world history—take the malaria parasite for instance. Forget the Black Death or the Influenza outbreak of 1917, Malaria has had a bigger impact on humanity than any other rampaging pathogen—yet, we still don't completely understand how it works.

As a fan of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin romances and Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles novels, I'm a sucker for this type of collection.

Need I say more? And, unlike many parodies, these are ha-ha funny, not simply funny strange.

If you're like me, it might seem in retrospect that you spent longer laboring over Thucydides than it took Athens and Sparta to fight the dang thing.

One misplaced comma can cost you $2.13 million. Granted, those are Canadian dollars, but that still makes my hourly rates pretty fargin' cheap.

A medical mystery solved?

Given its ubiquity, strength, and lightness, why don't they build bikes out of bamboo?