It was a mere 402 years ago today, in 1602, that the Bodleian Library at Oxford University was opened to the public. It wasn’t a step the librarians took lightly. The library had been founded nearly as far in its past as 1602 is in our past, in the 1300s, and for its first three… Continue reading

Today is November 6, and it’s a holiday! But I bet you didn’t know that. You see, unlike other holidays that have primarily caught on because of catchy names like Mother’s Day and Halloween — that is, holidays with competent public relations teams — today is the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the… Continue reading

It’s November 5, which in England means it’s the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot. In 1605, Guy Fawkes was arrested in the basement of the Parliament building with a bit of incriminating evidence: 36 barrels of gunpowder. The plot was to destroy the House of Lords while the Lords — including, in particular, King James… Continue reading

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. During his… Continue reading

The moon is nearly invisible at the moment (it’s a “new moon”) — it’s a nice contrast to Ansel Adams’ most famous photo, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, which he made on November 1, 1941. At the time, Adams said “I think of it as a rather normal photograph of a typical New Mexican landscape.”  The… 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

Angelo Siciliano was born on October 30, 1892 in Acri, Italy. When he was 11, his family emigrated to the US and settled in Brooklyn, where, not to be too blunt about it, Angelo got beat up a lot. He was a scrawny little kid and easy for the bullies to pick on. In his… 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