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The Official Flaming Underpants of the 2020 Covid Olympics
This week our local schools revealed their plans for the fall. There are as many different approaches as there are school districts involved, but the one thing that is fairly consistent is that if...
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Authors Recognition Award
If you follow along with this blog fairly regularly you may have noticed that I have been taking it a little easier this summer than I normally do. 2020 has brought plenty of strangeness and with...
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Shake It Off
On Friday, January 14, 2011 in Times Square in New York, Alastair Galpin and Don Purdon shared a really long handshake. Brothers Rohit and Santosh Timilsina were there shaking hands, too, attempting...
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The Greatest Travel Monkey Ever
It’s finally here—that wonderful time of year when my family’s crazy, busy, fun summer days wind down and my kids head back to school. My sons are in high school and middle school now, so we’ve done...
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So, About King George . . .
1774 was a pretty big year for George Washington. He co-authored a call for the recognition of the fundamental rights of colonial British citizens in the midst of fallout from the Boston tea party. He...
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I Can Can. Can You?
It was the promise of 12,000 francs that first inspired French chef and confectioner Nicolas Appert to experiment with food preservation methods in 1795. Napoleon Bonaparte astutely realized that...
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Hat Smashing Shenanigans
School has begun, Labor Day has come and gone, the pumpkins have ripened too early, and there’s a hint of cool in the air. Despite the calendar’s insistence that there are still eleven more days of...
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A Pretty Good Citizen for an Emperor
Today marks the 161st anniversary of the ascension to power of the first and only emperor of the United States. On September 17, 1859, San Francisco newspapers carried the declaration of Joshua...
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A Not-So-Sticky Post
Forty-three years ago, in 1977, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, known today as 3M, rolled out a new product in four American cities. This, several years after product developer Spencer...
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Socially Distant Zombies
In August of 1905 author Albert Neely Hall published his very helpful handbook, The Boy Craftsman: Practical and Profitable Ideas for a Boy’s Leisure Time. I can’t find a lot of information about Hall...
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
In 1871 Harriet Beecher Stowe used funds from her own substantial fortune to have a Victorian cottage built in Hartford, Connecticut, the state of her birth. The house had twelve rooms, plumbing,...
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Does Superman Have Wisdom Teeth?
Recently I was asked a very serious question: “Knowing, as we do, that Superman is an alien from the planet Krypton who exhibits superpowers when exposed to the yellow sun of Earth, and if the planet...
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Facebook to Ban Benjamin Franklin for Inciting Violence
On October 22 of 1730 The Pennsylvania Gazette ran a truly incendiary story. It was an account of a good old-fashioned witch trial, and it displayed a great deal of unforgivable misjudgment on the...
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No Kooks, Please: A Halloween Séance Adventure
Halloween is just a couple days away and like most holidays in 2020, it might look a little different than usual. In a lot of places trick-or-treating is unsanctioned (though if my Facebook feed is to...
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A Nude Horse is a Rude Horse
It’s been kind of a rough week here in the United States. Anxieties are running high as we wait for the final results of what looks to be an incredibly tight hot mess of a presidential election...
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The Week’s Not Over Yet
Between the years 1350 and 1353, Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a collection of one hundred tales published as The Decameron. I’d never read them, and in the interest of full disclosure, I...
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Let’s Talk Turkey
In 1535, Spanish colonialist and historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés published his General and Natural History of the Indies in which he described for the old world some of the elements of...
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Cookie Problem
I have a cookie problem. Normally, this first weekend of December that’s due to descend upon us would be the time when my family would open up our home for a Christmas party with our wonderful...
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B-boys go down! For Gold
I suspect that when Jamaican deejay Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, started looping together the siq-est beats he could find in New York in the 1960s, he probably wasn’t thinking about...
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You Can Keep the Oysters
Christmas traditions were a big deal in my childhood home, and we had a lot of them. From the homemade cards my mom designed (and still does) every year, to my dad’s special fudge recipe, to carols...
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