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Born today: Frank Amyot
Nearly all of these Born Today bios are based on Wikipedia, which has a page listing notable births for every day of the year. There are always dozens of well-remembered people who were born on any given day. Nobel prize laureates, heroes, national rulers, great artists and writers — they’re all there. But there are Continue reading
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September 14
September 14, 1914, marked the birth of Clayton Moore — “The Lone Ranger.” His real name was Jack — not short for anything; just Jack Moore. He started using the stage name Clayton around 1940 when he was working as a stuntman and extra in movies as well as doing modeling work. Moore enlisted in Continue reading
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Pandemonium!
In 1667 John Milton published “Paradise Lost,” a poem that in its over 10,000 lines included a number of words that Milton had coined just for the purpose. “Paradise Lost” was a runaway bestseller (or what passed for one in the late 1600s at least), and although Shakespeare gets more credit for expanding the language, Continue reading
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Born today: Oliver Evans
Europe has Leonardo da Vinci; North America has…Oliver Evans? Maybe so; I’ll explain. Oliver Evans was born September 13, 1755 in Delaware, which at the time was not a state but a colony, and mostly wilderness. He didn’t receive any formal education, but was taught the basics, probably at home. He was apprenticed to a Continue reading
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Crown cork
Most glass beverage bottles nowadays are molded with screw threads so you can twist the metal cap off with your fingers. But some — particularly beer bottles — still come with metal caps crimped onto the top. Those caps have a name: they’re “crown corks.” They were invented in 1892 in Baltimore, and not only Continue reading
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September 13
It’s September 13, and as everybody in Great Missenden knows, September 13 has Rules. There are 8 of them. JUST ADD CHOCOLATE is the first rule. This is something that Milton Hershey took to heart in 1900 when he started manufacturing chocolate bars. He had already sold his first company — which made caramel — Continue reading
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Patibulary
Words can have more than one meaning, of course, and sometimes the different meanings are astonishingly different. Take, for example, “patibulary,” a very obscure word derived from the Latin “patibulum.” In Roman times a patibulum was a Y-shaped device that was used to restrain criminals; it was a yoke fastened around their necks in some Continue reading
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Born today: Haskell Curry
Surely you’re familiar with curry, a delicious way of preparing food. And it’s possible to curry favor, if you’re in the sphere of some influential person who could do something to benefit you. But if you’ve ever done any computer programming, maybe you’ve run into a situation where you have a function that takes several Continue reading
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The Maiuetic Method
When you hear about the “Socratic Method,” it almost always refers to a way of teaching. There may well be Socratic Methods for other things — making souvlaki, arranging your toga into erudite-looking folds, skipping rocks across a pond — but those haven’t generally gotten as much notice. Socrates taught by creating a dialog in Continue reading
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September 12
On September 12, 1910, in the Neue Musik-Festhalle (a newly-built hall in Munich with 3,200 seats) an orchestra of 171 instruments and a choir of 852 singers performed Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony Number 8” for the first time. The organizers — including Mahler himself — had started recruiting choirs and musicians to join the performance. The Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
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