It just occurred to me that next Saturday, it'll be exactly 200 years since Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de la Fayette, better known as Lafayette, at the time one of the last surviving major-generals of the Revolutionary War, embarked on his 16-month grand tour of the United States. Here is what New York's Woodstock Observer wrote to announce his ( Read more... )

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Heimaeyjargos, the volcanic eruption on the island of Heimaey (part of the Vestmannaeyjar) that started on January 23rd 1973 and that brought much devastation.


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While idly browsing through older TUGboat issues (pdfgrep sure is useful!), I came across an interesting article in TUGboat 26 (1989) - Lexicography with TeX, by Jörgen L. Pind. The author is (was?) affiliated with the Institute of Lexicography at the University of Iceland, and describes how TeX was employed to typeset an Icelandic etymological ( Read more... )

A while ago I read an article, Kulturgeschichte: Abkehr vom Saurausch, that mentioned an interesting bit of bavariana:

Heutzutage ist die Grenze zwischen dem Trinken und dem Saufen, nun ja, fließend. Früher war das anders, da gab es die "Rauschtafel", die in der Wirtstube an der Wand hing und dem bayerischen Bierkonsumenten anzeigte, wie viel ( Read more... )

The end of an era - porsupah notes that the Fursuit mailing list has finally closed down for good:

Fursuit Mail List is now deceased

After many many years, the original fursuit mail list started by Robert King has finally seen itself dissolve into being obsolete. The actual traffic had dwindled to only one post in all of 2014, and hundreds of spam ( Read more... )

You really can find fascinating nuggets of information on the Internet ( Read more... )

This is really cool and deserves a post of its own - Retrospective: An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, 1966-1996, written by Fred Patten (with help from many others ( Read more... )

A fascinating tidbit from Wikipedia, on the intertwined history of certain flap-eared royal fruitcakes and Alfred E. Neuman:

In 1958, Mad published letters from several readers noting the resemblance between Neuman and England's Prince Charles, then nine years old. Shortly thereafter, an angry letter under a Buckingham Palace letterhead ( Read more... )