I have a small website where I try to sell custom-made lapel buttons. In addition to these made-to-order buttons I also offer several specialty lines of off-the-shelf items and at this time of year I'm usually concerned with one of those lines in particular: Irish heraldic buttons. St. Patrick's Day approaches.

They were fierce hill tribes in what is now Scotland, and we called them Picts. The name seems to mean "The Painted People" for they were known to love bright body art and multi-coloured clothing. They were artists, prolific carvers of stone and from the carved standing stones still found in the region around Loch Ness, we can see that the Picts were fascinated by animals, carefully etching their likeness into the surface of the stone. And they left us a mystery.

Folklore includes a traditional trickster figure, the subject of many stories in a cycle. Trickster tales are in the animal tales genre, with the trickster himself -- he seems always to be male -- identified with a particular animal. These include the fox in Japan, mouse deer in Southeast Asia, the coyote and the spider among the Native Americans, the tortoise and spider in West Africa, and the mantis in Southern Africa.

The Rooster is traditionally considered to be a favourable sign. His crow signals the break of dawn and the beginning of a fresh start, driving away the ghosts and evil spirits of the night. He is the only creature of the Chinese zodiac with wings and, as such, is regarded as the messenger that connects the two worlds of heaven and earth.

During the third week of August 2005 the Trafalgar Way was officially inaugurated in Devon to commemorate the bi-centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. The Lorna Doone, an original North Devon stagecoach visited inns and hostels along the full length of what is now know as the Trafalgar Way in Devon.

Original Tribal masks are often seen by unknowing eyes as art objects in themselves. That is not the case, unless of course they are modern copies. A tribal mask has embued power and is alive during the ceremony for which it is used. An African visitor to a London museum stated, "This mask is dead." He was seeing the mask out of context, it had lost its power for the people who created it and the the magic had died.

"Babe" Didrickson Zaharias was a phenomenal athlete. This Texan ran, jumped, rode horses, and played basketball and baseball-with tremendous flair. In the Olympic tryouts in 1932, she won five first places in track and field events. In the games of that year in Los Angeles, she won a gold medal in the women's 80 meter hurdles, a gold medal in the javelin throw, and a silver medal in the high jump.

Over thiry-five years ago, I picked up a book on numerology and began to have a hard time believing that numbers had anything to do with my life. Shortly thereafter, I was awakened from a deep sleep by a loud voice that seemed to scream into my ears, "Numbers are real!" Since that time, I have found out that numbers really are real.