Best of Perl - Plain English if Statements

I worked with Perl for a couple of years and I miss being able to write code that feels like plain English.  I've managed to capture a bit of this into plain old Java by using self-documenting booleans instead of actual statements in if statements, as in the following:

final boolean fooExists = foo == null;
if (fooExists) {
  // code here
}

Hater's Gonna Hate at Zoitz.com

This seems almost too simple to deserve the declaration, but you can also write more complex statements like "if (fileIsOpened)" or "if (stringHasContents)" (i.e. not null and not empty / blank).  In particular, it helps when re-factoring someone elses code to understand what an if block actually does or MEANS.