Ecclesiastes

Uncle Ken seems to have confused the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes with "The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran.  In my old RSV Bible, the subtitle of Ecclesiastes is "Or The Preacher".  Indeed, the author identifies himself in the first verse: "The words of the Preacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem."  Of course King David must have had more than one son, seeing as he had I don't know how many wives and concubines, but Solomon was his most famous son and his successor to the throne.  The preceding book of Proverbs and the following book titled "The Song of Solomon" are also traditionally attributed to him, although I suppose it's possible that any or all of them might have been ghost written.  Solomon lived around 1,000 BC, so that would make his books closer to 3,000 years old than 2,000.  While it's true that God is scarcely mentioned in Ecclesiastes, I don't think He's mentioned at all in The Song of Solomon.  That one is basically a love letter to the author's girlfriend which gets pretty racy in places.  It's generally believed that the girlfriend in question was the Queen of Sheba, but Solomon was even more of a ladies' man than his father, so there's no way to know for sure.  Now that's the one that probably shouldn't have been included in the Bible.

It always made sense to me that, when you multiply a negative number by another negative number, you get a positive number.  When you multiply a number by a negative, you are essentially un-multiplying it. Two times negative two has to be negative four because you are un-multiplying it twice.  Ergo, if you multiply a negative by another negative, the second negative cancels out the first negative by un-multiplying it, or something like that.

While it is possible to scale fish with a knife, they make a special tool for that job called a fish scaler which works better in my opinion.  You can prevent most of the scales from flying all over the place by scaling your fish under water, or you can eliminate the problem altogether by filleting and skinning instead of scaling.  I prefer to scale my smaller fish, anything under about 12 inches, because the skin is usually good eating when coated and deep fried, but some people fillet everything.