Bad Luck, but he did live this long:
Only man to be nuked twice and survive dies at 92.
Category: history
Hit it on the head:
My favorite conservative columnist, Daniel Larison, is hitting it on the head and out of the ballpark this morning about the mindless OMG’ing in the Beltway press and elsewhere about political dishonesty on national security issues. He brings up two main directions on this: if Group A is out of office, then Group B (who [...]
2010:
Twenty-ten or two-thousand-ten? Your thoughts.
German History: some selections
Partially for Da, partly for the historians in the audience. Feel free to whale away on it or suggest other things; I was having real problems with a non-scholarly-to-the-point-0f-boredom book on the German Diaspora, especially to America in the 1800s. I also skipped a lot of works on regions within Germany. Yes, I believe that [...]
Night Beat redux:
Some extra notes on the show: The Digital Deli’s excellent posting on the history of the show and its cast; very much worth a read. (PDF version ) Other logs and listening locations: Old-time.com (txt) Otr Network Library (real streaming audio links) Freeotrshows.com (streaming mp3 links) Waybackradio (mp3links to various shows up on the Internet [...]
Mystery…tadadadadadah!
I’ve been a great fan of radio drama for a long time, and if you were to look through my MP3 player and the burnt CDs in my car, you’d see BBC drama, old time radio and the like. I got a real love for it as a kid, and as it’s drifted in and [...]
AH: Zheng He away!
Just a followup note here from me on a topic broached earlier in my LJ version of the journal about the Chinese explorer Zheng He. I was gassing on about ‘we need fresher AH situations’ and Steve Silver brought up the idea of Zheng He’s expeditions finding Australia and colonizing it (as it would have [...]
Reading list:
The family has taken up a new and very nice practice; having family reading times – not scheduled as such, but so everyone has something good to read and is in the living room together reading. It works pretty well, I think, and is an improvement over endless oh-I-can’t-watch-that debates about TV stuff. Tastes run [...]
History Bites #4: Leprosy and TB
The last leper colony in Europe, the Tichilesti (founded in 1928) is still going in Romania. Sadly enough, the disease isn’t done for quite yet. Elements in its rise and fall may be found in the slave trade and in the spread of tuberculosis. (See here for TB’s history.) Leprosy appears to have originated in [...]
History bites #3: Search the Book of Armaments
Online search references for the Quran and the Bible; the Quran part has both the Arabic and three English translations, and the Bible one has a BUNCH of different translations, most NOT English (which has around 20 different versions). Note that the authoritative version of the Quran is the Arabic one, of course. And this [...]
History Bites #2: The corner of Poor Jewry and Aldgate
An online, detailed map of Henry VIII’s London and Westminster. (pre 1530s) Add in an 1801 map of the area, with some country detail. Also, an 1801 London map, and a 1799 one.
History bites #1: some real Bozos
The lives and times of the Bosonid Dynasty in France, founded by the great Boso himself, with Bivin of Gorze, the fighting abbot Hucbert, Liegardis and Hugh the Black. They married into the Carolingians, and did VERY well for themselves as small-time local nobles who went right up the ladder through their connections (mostly through [...]
Signs: History Lesson
(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend) Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist. Really. Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in [...]
Let me get this straight:
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
The White Cliffs of Dover:
Dame Vera Lynn, still around and reminiscing. Great stuff, especially for those who follow the period. She’s got a autobiography coming out… “It did remind me what things were like, though. I was living in a grass hut some of the time, with two buckets outside the door. On one occasion I had to sleep [...]