Pylimitics

"Simplicity" rearranged


  • October 30

    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

  • Slow down, you move too fast 🎶

    In 1593 Gabriel Harvey wrote a piece called Pierce’s Supererogation, or a New Praise of the Old Ass. It was basically an extended insult of a fellow named Thomas Nashe, and in part he refers to him as “…a dodkin author, whose two swords are like the horns of a hodmandod…”. In this he was… Continue reading

  • Laura Bassi

    Women and men, in western society, have (or at least are supposed to have) equal access to educational advancement. There’s nothing about a PhD degree inherently advantages one gender or the other. But there used to be. In Europe up until about the 1700s, women and girls were typically not welcome in most educational settings.… Continue reading

  • October 29

    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

  • October 28

    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

  • Not as much or many

    If you’re fond of both language and math, you surely already know that in the phrase “5 minus 3” the number 5 is the minuend and the number 3 is the subtrahend. Since that’s not news, it’s a good thing that 5 less 3 is not really the subject of this bit of trivia. No,… Continue reading

  • October 27

    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

  • October 26

    October 26 is notable for several things, but in the US in the early 1800s the most notable might have been the completion of the Erie Canal in 1821. It was a very big deal back in the day; a 363-mile-long waterway connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. It meant that you could… Continue reading

  • October 25

    Today is the 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 pretty… Continue reading

  • Annie Edson Taylor

    It was October 24, 1838 that Annie Edson Taylor was born in Auburn, New York in the US. She grew up to become a schoolteacher. She married, but her husband died fairly soon afterward, and she never remarried. As a widow, she moved around the US for years, working in various cities.  In Bay City,… 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. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.

Privacy policy
No trackers, no ads, no data collected or saved.