Have you heard the story of Donald Herbert, the New York firefighter who very suddenly — after almost ten years without speaking — sat up and said, “I want to talk to my wife”?

Donald had been very seriously injured in December, 1995, when the roof of a burning building collapsed and pinned him underneath. Experts estimated he was without oxygen for six minutes. Over the past ten years, Donald has been almost completely blind and struggling with rehabilitation. His memory was nearly completely gone; he was unable to recognize family and friends, and he had very little ability to communicate. In fact, simple monosyllable responses were all he could muster, and those were exceedingly infrequent. Until Saturday.

On Saturday, Donald suddenly came to life. He sat up and told a member of the nursing staff that he wanted to talk to his wife. When they called his house for him, his 13-year-old son answered the phone. “Impossible,” thought Donald, “he’s not old enough to talk.” Donald spent the next 14 hours talking almost incessantly and was up most of the night visiting with his family and friends with whom he had been suddenly reacquainted. Some of them he recognized by their voices, even though he hadn’t remembered hearing them for a decade.

Doctors are a little baffled. Though these cases are extremely rare, they do happen, often without any known impetus. People do sometimes emerge from the most remarkable situations and, in some cases like Donald, show little signs that anything was ever wrong.

Welcome back, Donald. I’m thrilled for you and your family. May God continue to bless and keep you.

We’ve been playing “the guessing game” quite a lot around the house recently. Since I first introduced this little gem to Lily, she can’t seem to get enough. Here’s how it works: Someone thinks of something and offers clues to the rest of us. “I’m thinking of something purple” or “I’m thinking of a food that is yellow” or “I’m thinking of something white and cold inside.”

If Lily is offering the clues, they generally run along the lines of “this girl with long blond hair pricked her finger on a spinning wheel”, or “this girl went into the woods and found a cabin”, or “this girl has red hair and swims in the ocean.” Essentially, all of her clues are about girls from stories, most often a princess of some sort.

For Jack, though, things are different.

“It flies” is the only clue that Jack provides. From this clue, the answers are usually Buzz Lightyear, a kite, a duck, or an archaepteryx, which everyone knows is a flying dinosaur. When you guess right he says, “That’s right! It is an archaepteryx! Good job, Lily!”

I received an e-mail this morning with pictures of a sandstorm in Al Asad, Irag, on April 26, 2005. If you haven’t seen these yet, be sure you do… they’re truly amazing.

A Marine Corps News article said:

A dust storm similar to special effects on the big screen bellowed across the western desert of Iraq on April 26. The storm was spawned near the border of Syria and Jordan. Forward Operating Base Korean Village experienced tornadoes around 2 p.m. The storm moved in a northeasterly direction until it reached Al Asad, around 6:45.

As the storm moved closer the sky changed to a shade of orange until total darkness blanketed the ground. The storm passed over in about 45 minutes, leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. Forecaster say the wall of dust may have reached 4,000 to 5,000 feet.

This dust storm was a spectacular sight and may look worse than it actually was. No one was injured and no equipment was damaged here.

[See additional photos of this sandstorm]

The other day, as I was leaving home for work, I gave my wife a hug and kiss, and patted her on the hind end to say goodbye. She immediately replied, “Oh! I just remembered that the painter is coming this morning at nine o’clock.”

The article starts:

“If you’ve ever longed for a way to monitor your dog’s social life, map out its buddy network and sense who its true friends really are, you might have been waiting for SNIF.”

And I’m thinking to myself, “If you’ve ever longed for a way to monitor your dog’s social life, map out its buddy network and sense who its true friends really are, you really need to get a new hobby.”

Alas, SNIF is real:

[Collar Cultivates Canine Cliques]