Day 318: The Infamous, Notorious, And Dangerous Ned Kelly

originally published November 13, 2012 Many blips on the Wikipedian landscape are considered to be ‘stubs’. They lack substance and detail, either because nobody has gotten around to fleshing out the topic, or because there’s just nothing more to say than yes, this hill in Wales exists. Then you have the story of Ned Kelly, […]

Day 308: The Super-Size McIdiots & The Strip-Search Hoax

originally published November 3, 2012 I’m going to slap this right up front – as I approached the end of my research on this fascinating story, I learned that it has been recently made into a film. If you totally missed this strangeness in the news a few years back, and if you really don’t […]

Day 286: Bungled Justice – The Scott Sisters

originally published October 12, 2012 Every once in a while, the justice system incurs what we might call a ‘hiccup’ in logic. Surprisingly, this can occasionally occur in Mississippi, which I have always believed to be a state known for its progressive intellectualism, its groundbreaking racial tolerance, and its dependable inability to understand sarcasm. For […]

Day 236: The Ghosts Of Omaha’s Dark Past

originally published August 23, 2012 When I was a young, struggling writer, someone told me to write what I know. It turned out I knew almost nothing about anything, and my writing aptly reflected that. Now that I have matured into an old, struggling writer, I prefer the approach of writing whatever the hell interests […]

Day 233: The People vs. Sharktopus – Causation Law In Cheesy CGI Action

originally published August 20, 2012 So I was watching Sharktopus, the exquisitely awful Sci-Fi Channel film, when I began to contemplate the legal ramifications of the story. Not so much what should happen to the evil science-guy who unleashes the shark-octopus hybrid into the world – I didn’t really care about that. But what if […]

Day 195: England’s Master Of Escape – Houdini Hinds

originally published July 13, 2012 Over the past six months I have skimmed through over a dozen Wiki-pages on British criminals. I don’t know if there’s something in the air across the pond, but somehow their criminals seem often to come packaged with cinematic plotlines and quirky twists. I’ve even written about a few of […]

Day 181: Hollywood Forever – A Wretched Hive Of Scum & Villainy

originally published June 29, 2012 Continuing on with this week’s somewhat disconcerting fascination with death (death of people in 1871, death of restaurant franchises, death of our cultural morality thanks to Bob Log III, etc), I will once again be lowering the black tartan of the inevitable over today’s kilograph. I swear, it’s all a […]

Day 164: Titus Oates – Rouser (And Inventor) Of Rabble

originally published June 12, 2012 Titus Oates knew how to get ahead in life. He became famous for riling up the public with fear and paranoia, feeding oxygen into a fire of public distrust of a certain religion’s followers, and displaying a stunning acuity for spewing false bullshit into the realm of public truthiness. Titus […]

Day 121: The First American Murder

originally published April 30, 2012 It is a source of great pride to many Americans that they can trace their ancestry back to the historic voyage by the Mayflower, the ship that first brought white settlers to the shores of America in hopes of establishing a bold new nation, and scout out the best locations […]

Day 117: Bad Bad Eroy Brown

originally published April 26, 2012 Today’s is a story about corruption, murder, cover-up and conspiracy. Ms. Wiki locked me in solitary with Ellis Unit, a high-security prison that served as a Death Row facility from its opening in 1965 until 1999. One tiny paragraph caught my eye enough to actually do some non-Wikipedian research for […]