Will Rogers, who was born November 4, 1879, didn’t let elections get to him. He did point out that “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.” “Do the best you can,” he also said, “and don’t take life too serious.”  Rogers was an enormously popular star in the… Continue reading

About a thousand years ago, give or take a few centuries, on what’s now called Temwen Island in the Pacific, some people — nobody is quite sure who they were — started building a pretty extraordinary structure. It’s a city, but it’s not built on land. They built it in a lagoon. It’s about a… Continue reading

The second of November is a big day in computer security; it’s the anniversary of the first significant computer worm distributed over the Internet in 1988. It was the “Morris Worm,” created by Robert Morris, a graduate student at Cornell. His intentions weren’t malicious, and the worm wasn’t intended to cause any harm — in… Continue reading

The moon is nearly full at the moment (it’s a very bright “waning Gibbous” moon to be precise) — it’s a nice coincidence that Ansel Adams made his most famous photo, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” on November 1, 1941. At the time, Adams said “I think of it as a rather normal photograph of a… Continue reading

As everybody in the US, at least, knows, today is Halloween. But that’s not the whole story. If you live in Cornwall, England, it’s Allantide. Allantide continues into the next day, and locally they quite reasonably identify the difference as “Allan Night” and “Allan Day.” Cornish mothers don’t raise any dopes, evidently. The Allan in… Continue reading

It’s only two days until Halloween, which primes our psyches for tales of witchcraft and ghosts. But nowadays most of us (at least around here) see these things in a lighthearted way. It hasn’t always been that way. Witchcraft — even though people weren’t all that sure what it was — was something you could… Continue reading

The best response to discovering you’ve awakened on October 28 is to shout “Yahoo!” Since you just woke up, of course, you might first need to clear your throat by going “houyhnhnm” a couple of times. When you settle down with some coffee and check the morning business news, take note of that startup company… Continue reading

Dylan Thomas, who was born on October 27 in 1914, would have found it dramatic and moody that the Boston Red Sox won their first world series since 1918 on this day in 2004. “Do not go gentle into that doomed championship series,” he might have said. When the Red Sox committed four errors in… Continue reading

Today is the 156th birthday of John Francis Dodge, one of the founders of the Dodge Brothers Company — you can still see their name on cars today. But their first efforts in the automobile industry weren’t in building cars. When they started the company in Detroit in 1900, they only made parts. They were… Continue reading