The World At My Birth
I was born March 1, 1965, so let's see what made the New York Times the following day, March 2, 1965: Australia Punishes Dawn Fraser For Capers as Olympic Swimmer…
Random Learnings #69
Growing up in Iowa, all I knew of Kossuth County was its unusual size: essentially double the size of other counties in the state, it's the reason Iowa has 99…
Random Learnings #68
The Literary Digest Vol. 50, No. 2 (9 January 1915) shows World War I's impact on Germany less than six months after declaring war, primarily economically but also socially. Die…
Unique Hotel
My wife and I visited Iowa City, Iowa last week to attend a University of Iowa women's basketball game, a rather bad loss to Minnesota. Our hotel was Graduate by…
Random Learnings #67
If we know anything about National Socialism, it's that for the first time in German politics human stupidity has been successfully and completely mobilized. -Kurt Schumacher, SPD member of Weimar…
Scary Times, Predicted
I'm still working my way through Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic by Volker Ullrich, in which he gives a riveting account of Germany's inter-war history, from World…
Random Learnings #66
From an article in the Guardian: Seems perfectly reasonable that anyone booking a “Superior Room with Pitch View” at the Blackpool Football Club Stadium hotel, located inside the Bloomfield Road Stadium, would…
Book Review #3
In the translated book Planning in the USSR by I.A. Yevenko, the communist hyperbole and delusion begins immediately with the Author's Notes on page 5: The system of socialist planned…
Book Review #2
A Brief History of Freemasons: the true story of the World's Most Powerful Secret Society: From the back cover: An illuminating and unbiased history of this most enigmatic secret society.…
Random Learnings #65
Reading the otherwise underwhelming The Freemasons: The True Story of the World's Most Powerful Secret Society by Jasper Ridley, the author uses the folk tale Cinderella when discussing the French…