It’s August 12, the Glorious Twelfth in England, where it’s the opening day of grouse hunting season. Except when the 12th falls on a Sunday. Then they open the season on Monday because it’s illegal to shoot birds on Sundays there. It’s not clear to me whether Sundays are okay for shooting things other than… Continue reading

If you do the (tedious, but straightforward) math converting a base 20 numbering system to base 10, then count backwards, then interpolate different calendar systems (which have changed regularly over the centuries), you eventually arrive at August 11, 3114 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. Exactly 5,135 years ago today. Technically that’s the “proleptic” Gregorian calendar,… Continue reading

August 10 provides a good object lesson in how fast the world works now compared to the 1700s. It was July 4, 1776 that the British colonies in North America issued the Declaration of Independence. But the anniversary of the news finally reaching England is today, August 10. The phrase “breaking news” didn’t even exist… Continue reading

On August 9, 1899, Pamela Lyndon Goff was born in Queensland, Australia. She grew up to be an actress, and used the stage name “Pamela Lyndon Travers” because her family objected to her acting career.  She was pretty good, though, and joined a traveling Shakespearean acting company in Australia. From there she moved to England,… Continue reading

The Wright Brothers made their first flight on August 8 in 1903. Only five people were there to see it. Their first plane, the Flyer I, only flew that one day, and then a gust of wind flipped it over and wrecked it. All they had was a photograph and the reports of the handful… Continue reading

Around 1936, the US government contracted with E.M.K. Geiling, a doctor and researcher who headed the (new) pharmacology department at the University of Chicago, to look into a series of deaths that seemed to be associated with a sulfonamide drug.  Geiling had a graduate student, Frances Kathleen Oldham, who was there by accident. She’d applied… Continue reading

August 6, 1926 is the day the silent film era ended; that’s when the Warner Bros. movie Don Juan opened, using the new Vitaphone sound system. People had been used to getting their sound from radios and their visuals from movies, but those things were starting to merge. Television was first demonstrated around the same… Continue reading

The USS Maddox was a destroyer operating in the Gulf of Tonkin — next to Vietnam — in August 1964. Its mission was to “collect signal intelligence.” When somebody else’s ship does the same thing, the US calls it “spying.” Aboard the Maddox they saw North Vietnamese gunboats on their radar, and on August 4,… Continue reading

August 4 is the birthday of John Fitch. He was a fighter pilot in WWII, based in north Africa. He and his squadron slept in tents, but being fighter pilots themselves, they felt pretty vulnerable to enemy fighter planes that could strafe the camp with machine gun fire. They didn’t have many resources to protect… Continue reading

Back in 1941, Louis Koch, a retired businessman was from Evansville, Indiana, visited Santa Claus, another Indiana town. It’s not clear whether it had taken him until his retirement to first visit a town with an interesting name just 40 miles away, but maybe he’d been busy. He evidently brought some kids with him, or… Continue reading