So I'm home for the weekend, and it's been lovely so far. Dad's been asking me about "those poets you like from World War I," I got to watch the Reds lose terribly play their first preseason baseball game, and there's Robert Redford in the freezer.*

Then my dad flipped to the classic movie station, where Patton was just starting. Now, I am not a ( Read more... )

May 4 is known to the geek world as Star Wars Day--May the Fourth be with you, and all that.

But it's different when you're at Kent State.

I thought it was something that everyone knew about: In May of 1970, student protests at Kent State began to get out of hand. One group set fire to the local ROTC building, and the National Guard was called out ( Read more... )

Today is the 203rd anniversary of the death of Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Now everyone turn to your lieutenant and ask him for a kiss.

I have a presentation to give tomorrow, and no matter how I look at it I have so much work to do omg. It's about plagiarism on the Internet--yeah, I know, could it get any more boring?--and I' ( Read more... )

I had no idea there was so much footage of Robert Kennedy's assassination. I mean, I know a little about it, I'm familiar with that one picture, but...with JFK you've got the Zapruder film, grainy and distant and indistinct. With his brother...you can see him, sometimes, when the crowd around him parts. See him moving, see the blood on the floor. ( Read more... )

So I'm at the Donkey, minding my own business and working on my paper for our Out of the Dust presentation, when the Bright Eyes CD ends and is replaced with a CD by Woody Guthrie, or maybe Willie Nelson. "Oh, how neat," I thought, "it's all old-fashioned and countrified and it fits in perfectly with the paper I'm writing."

And then, suddenly, he's ( Read more... )

On this 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, I wanted to post a link to Bob Brumfield's hilarious comedic saga about trying to prove that Lord Nelson's last words were in fact "Kismet, Hardy," a sober reflection on the outcome of the battle. However, it doesn't appear to exist electronically, although the book it's in is actually available ( Read more... )