It’s high time we restored a naming convention for political leaders that was popular about 12 centuries ago — when Louis the Stammerer, the King of West Francia, was born on November 1. He was also the ruler of a place called Aquitaine after he succeeded his younger brother Charles the Child. But his father,… Continue reading

Every once in a while a historical figure is remembered not because of any great invention, superior artistry, military prowess, or outstanding statesmanship, but simply because they kept a diary. Samuel Pepys is one of those , and another one, born October 31 in England in 1620, is John Evelyn. Evelyn’s diary is from about… Continue reading

I think it was Hunter S. Thompson who said “there’s no credential a writer needs,” and Fran Lebowitz, whose 73rd birthday is today, is a good example. She’s a New York City-based writer and commentator who’s known for her sardonic observations about American life, and if you’d followed her progress as a girl and young… Continue reading

The lives of extremely wealthy people are often kept under wraps, probably in part because just being extremely wealthy imposes a certain risk. After all, when American gangster Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said “because that’s where the money is.” (Note: he almost certainly didn’t say that, but it makes the… Continue reading

How old do you think video games are? Would you believe…65 years? William Higinbotham, who was born October 25, 1910, invented Tennis for Two, an analog computer game using a video display, in 1958.  If you’re in the US, you’ve heard the legend of Paul Bunyan, the superhuman logger. They have a similar legend in… Continue reading

I don’t know how widely distributed nursery rhymes are in the world, but one that’s repeated for practically every little tyke in the US is Mary Had a Little Lamb. It’s about some kid named Mary and her pet sheep. Nursery rhymes are often just “around;” you don’t think of them having authors — but… Continue reading

Taylor Swift is setting the entertainment world on fire right now, but she’s got nothing on a guy born October 22, 1811, in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary: Franz Liszt. Liszt was born into a musical family — his father played several instruments, and counted a number of famous composers among his acquaintances,… Continue reading

Around the early to mid-1990s, if you had heard of a new Unix-like operating system for your personal computer, it wasn’t a trivial matter to try it. You had to find a source and probably get CD-ROMs sent to you in the mail (you could get in on floppy disks instead, but it needed at… Continue reading

If you look into the history of most European, well, areas (the actual countries have changed over the years), it appears that religion was one of the driving forces behind things that don’t really seem all that spiritual or even associated with religious feelings at all. Looking specifically at England, there was an historical period… Continue reading