Day 968: The Wayward Wanderings Of Thomas Culpeper’s Foolish Dink

originally published August 25, 2014 When one is granted access to the inner circle of England’s royal family, allowed to mingle with the most upper of crusts and graced with the juiciest insider knowledge of the most important goings-on in the British Empire, rule number one would have to be: DON’T BANG THE QUEEN. You […]

Day 965: The Inaugural Road Trip

originally published August 22, 2014 Roll down your windows, crank up the vintage Lindsey Buckingham and ready your innards for a deluge of fast-food grease – we are hitting the open road. In 1903, right around the time those two bike-shop brothers in North Carolina were writing the first stand-up routines about in-flight meals, the […]

Day 951: King Joffrey Was A Pussy

originally published August 8, 2014 I just got through reading a Wikipedia article so poorly written and peppered with so many near-identical names my brain sneezed in agony. But at its heart was a narrative so foul and villainous, I feel it deserves a translation into mostly-coherent English. Seriously, most of the names in this […]

Day 950: Washington’s One-Off Moment Of Calm

originally published August 7, 2014 The 1810’s were a weird time in American history. The capital city burned to the ground, the country was poised to split in half (an east-west rift, not the north-south one that would roll in a half-century later), and it all culminated in a segment of time so groovy it […]

Day 949: Rumble In the Laotian Jungle

originally published August 6, 2014 The air was as thick as a steak and almost as full of blood. Lieutenant, Junior Grade Dieter Dengler stared at each of his fellow P.O.W.s and wondered which of them would be up for the escape. There were three men from Thailand, one Chinese man, and an American “kicker” […]

Day 944: Eight Obsolete Jobs That Are Worse Than Yours

originally published August 1, 2014 More so than usual, lately I have been seriously reconsidering my vocation. Not this writing gig; despite the meagre pay and sparsity of days off (so far, zero), I adore absorbing airborne globs of trivia then regurgitating them here for you, like a mama-bird spewing sports facts into her babies’ […]

Day 930: The Other Foo Fighters

originally published July 18, 2014 I admit it, I frequently dip into the tart, opaque candy bowl of skepticism, filled with lemon drops of doubt and sour-chews of crotchety fact-checking. That said, I like my sour sweets to end with an upbeat aftertaste, a smidgen of optimism that my aforementioned leeriness will be heartily disproven. […]

Day 918: The Historically Misplaced Colony Of Roanoke Island

originally published July 6, 2014 While I’m anything but the most amateur of amateur historians, I’ve got a feeling that people went missing all the time in the 16th century. You dig yourself into some serious debt, maybe sleep with a nobleman’s wife or abscond with the goodies from the church collection plate, making yourself […]

Day 915: The Titanic Conspiracy

originally published July 3, 2014 We all know the story – the RMS Titanic plows into an iceberg, everyone panics, and Leonardo Dicaprio dies because Kate Winslet isn’t willing to scooch over and give him some room. But that purportedly open-and-shut accident may have a little more squeak in its hinges, depending on how deeply […]

Day 901: Yapping With The Dead – The Fabulous Fraud Of The Fox Sisters

originally published June 19, 2014 The perpetual gullibility of the human race provides an unending cavalcade of hilarity. We believe – sometimes because we want to, sometimes because the hoaxsters and peddlers of smarm know how to take advantage of our weak moments. For the born-again skeptics, no phenomenon travels in this world without an […]