Day 252: The Rough Wooing, Or As I Like To Call It, Avenging The Penis!

originally published September 8, 2012 If you were a male in mid-16th century England or Scotland, and you lacked any royal affiliations, chances are you would die because two people you’d never met had an argument with each other. Take this exchange, transcribed verbatim from historical records, between King Henry VIII of England and his […]

Day 238: The Great Pope-Off, 1378!!!

originally published August 25, 2012 I’m about as far away as possible from believing in the Pope as a figure worthy of worship. Not to knock anyone’s faith, but for a disconnected observer, it strikes me that the higher-up Catholic bureaucracy averages somewhere beneath Central American politicians when it comes to quality of character and […]

Day 222: The Unlikely Journey Of Candy Barr

originally published August 9, 2012 I try not to write too many articles about living people or the recently deceased. I unwittingly may have embarrassed a NATO fighter pilot by extolling his work as the founder of competitive finger-jousting, and accidentally unearthed a long-standing feud between the surviving members of the Bobby Fuller Four. I’m […]

Day 211: Holding Back The Years – The Phantom Time Hypothesis

originally published July 29, 2012 Is history a lie? Actually, history is filled with lies, depending on how specific you want to be. The winners tell the story, and those who penned the particulars were often doing so at the behest of someone in charge who was looking for something to inspire, influence, or quash […]

Day 203: The Skies Light Up Over China – The Flying Tigers’ Legacy

originally published July 21, 2012 Inside that gristly cloud prior to an imminent war, men have been known to indulge in some strange undertakings. Those iron-grey months before the Japanese squirted their rage onto the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor carried the distant flugel-blasts of impending battle, and for a group of American servicemen, […]

Day 196: What’s In A Single Name?

originally published July 14, 2012 For a fleeting, candy-floss moment of joy I thought I’d stumbled on to the topic of monogamy. Given that I’m not above trolling The lowest of brows in search of humor, certainly I could divine a kilograph’s worth of tawdry sex jokes and subversive masturbation gags from such an easy […]

Day 191: Grade 5 Report – The Fraud Of Abonoteichus

originally published July 9, 2012 Back in the fifth grade I had an unreserved respect for the finest charlatans and scammers in history. This leaked its way into my scholastic efforts in the form of a presentation I gave when we were assigned by Mr. Foster to research our favorite person in Greek history. After […]

Day 178: Four People Who Are Dead

originally published June 26, 2012 Today’s article is about death. It’s not that I’m feeling especially morbid today, I just find it interesting that the people who died in the 1800s stand a better chance of having an article-worthy death (or sometimes life) story than people who have died since. Take James Holt Clanton, for […]

Day 162: Where The Wallys Are

originally published June 10, 2012 Stonehenge. It’s one of the great mysteries of the earth. And it’s the locale for today’s tome of historical weirdness. This is the story of the Wallys. The original Wally was a British guy called Phillip Russell. Phil fell in with a group of late-era hippie counterrevolutionaries who called themselves […]

Day 161: Zombies To Beer – The Quirky Underside Of The Political Spectrum

originally published June 9, 2012 So you want to be active in politics, but you just can’t bring yourself to care very much. It’s okay, there are ways around this. The most entertaining solution would be to find a hook, and start up a frivolous political party. The world has had its share of frivolous […]