MiG-31 Foxhound: The Foxbat’s Big Little Brother

Let’s talk airplanes, and let’s be brief about it.
War, whether it’s hot or Cold, seems to make for really rapid advances in technology.  We’ve seen that in our discussions of the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle and General Dynamics (now Lockheed) F-16 Fighting Falcon.  I think it’s been interesting to discover how each mark sort of [...]

Read Full Post »

Krakatoa Cracks up in Massive Eruption

Back in April, we talked about Tambora’s massive eruption in 1815, which happens to be the largest ever recorded.  When discussing it, I mentioned that there were many other volcanoes in Indonesia.  Well, Today’s History Lesson will spotlight another one of them.
Tambora is located on the eastern side of the island of Java.  But if [...]

Read Full Post »

Romancing the Stone

Greek.  Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Egyptian demotic.  Three different written languages.  One of them, the hieroglyphics, had been considered a dead language for two millenia.  The beautiful images and pictorals that comprise the language had been impossible to decipher.
Greek, on the other hand, is one of the more advanced languages in the world.  When studying ancient texts, a strong [...]

Read Full Post »

Tambora: A Mountain-Sized Cold Front

It’s office-painting time.  After more than 2 years of consideration, looking at paint chips, and walking the web checking out furniture, we pulled the trigger.  I usually write out in the living room using a laptop, but it’s still connected to the hub in the office.  The long and short is that, for the next [...]

Read Full Post »

The Ultimate Flying Finn

Juha Kankkunen (pronounced YOU-haw KANK-i-nin) is not a name that’s remotely familiar to most people.  If you were to play “man-on-the-street” and ask people what they knew about him, you wouldn’t even need to carry a notebook and pencil with you.  Unless, of course, you were asking people in Finland.
In Finland, the name “Juha Kankkunen” is revered.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Supergun no Bull to Somebody

On the evening of March 22, 1990, Dr. Gerald Bull got out of a car in Brussels, Belgium and headed back to his apartment. 
Born in Ontario, Canada, Bull had, as a child, endured a series of unfortunate events that saw his parents’ fortune wiped out by the Great Depression, the death of his mother and his aunt, [...]

Read Full Post »

Sowing Sacrificial Oates Yields no Harvest

March 16, 1912 marks the passing of Lawrence Oates.  This relatively unknown explorer was a member of the ill-fated Scott Expedition to the South Pole, which we briefly mentioned back in December when discussing Roald Amundsen.  Amundsen’s discovery of the bottom of the Earth was accompanied by a successful return and an incredible story to tell, [...]

Read Full Post »

“Dear Abbey”

For more than 1,400 years, the Abbey of Monte Cassino had stood more than 1,500 feet above Cassino town in central Italy. Majestically situated with a commanding view of the entire valley, it had for centuries been a place of solitude, study, and prayers.  Established in the 500’s, the Abbey had seen a slow decline since [...]

Read Full Post »

Solving a Problem Like Maria

Whenever I see the phrase “Based on a true story” at the beginning of a movie, I chuckle to myself.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that the producers and directors want to give us a peek, if only through a camera lens, into some event, or life, or situation they want us to see.
But there’s [...]

Read Full Post »

Richard Burns: Born for Speed

As we’ve journeyed down this road, I hope you’ve discovered that we share a common interest or two.  Mine include reading (lots!), baseball, airplanes, and of course, history.  But there’s another love of mine, and while it occupies less time now than it used to, it’s still worth mentioning today.
Rallying.
And what is rallying?  Well, a [...]

Read Full Post »

The Greatest Lake

Happy New Year everyone!
Jan Czerski is a name you probably don’t hear every day.  His face has never graced the cover of a box of Wheaties, and he’s never been in one of those silly Top-20 countdown shows on ESPN.  And the facts that surround his life - that he was born on January 3, 1845 in Lithuania [...]

Read Full Post »

The Polar Express

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but not nearly as frightful as other places around the country…yikes!!  Winter has struck hard and fast.  So this morning I was standing outside the Home Depot, which has a big U.S. flag above it.  It was facing north, almost completely straight, held there by 25mph winds straight from [...]

Read Full Post »

A Northern Light

Today’s History Lesson leaves the tropics of Guadalcanal behind and heads for the cold of Canada…specifically Orillia, Ontario.  Located 80 miles north of Toronto, the city boasts a population of about 30,000 people and is the birthplace of one of Canada’s most famous singers.
Gordon Lightfoot was born on November 17, 1938.  Gordy’s singing and song-writing potential were well-known in local [...]

Read Full Post »

On the Doorstep

Yeah, the title’s not my own.  But as the title of a chapter from ”The Hobbit“, it seems to fit pretty well with Today’s History Lesson.  In Tolkien’s work (which I’ve mentioned before), On the Doorstep finds our hero, Bilbo Baggins, waiting for some revelation that will help him and the dwarves find the secret entrance [...]

Read Full Post »

The Big Bang

Today, let’s talk about the biggest, baddest, most powerful man-made explosion in the history of the human race.  No, I don’t mean the experience you have whenever you bite into one of Taco Time’s Crisp Meat Burritos when they’re hot with that unbelievable salsa they serve (though that would be mighty close).  I’m referring to an actual explosion…and [...]

Read Full Post »

Gregorians Do More Than Chant

Gregorians can also make time disappear, and that’s a really cool power, since we’re all subject to time’s sequential nature.  And what’s more, they changed it the world over, which means their really cool power could be exercised on a massive scale.
Ok, now for all the provisos and caveats of what I just wrote.  First off, [...]

Read Full Post »

Baggins’ Unexpected Party, Tolkien’s Unexpected Phenomenon

It started simply enough, but has become a worldwide sensation.  It was meant to be a story for the author’s son, but millions upon millions of adults have embraced it.  It’s popularity led the publishers to ask for a sequel, and what resulted was one of the most important works of fiction ever created.  But such [...]

Read Full Post »

In the Twinkling of an Eye…

Because I’m a big fan of airplanes, it goes without saying that I like airshows as well.  One of my most favorite was the Blue Angels show in Wisconsin in 2000.  And because a friend of mine was working for one of the sponsors, we got some VIP passes to meet the pilots the night before [...]

Read Full Post »

The Perpetual Deep Freeze

I have to say it feels pretty good to write about the cold on a day like today.  Outside our house, it’s about 80°F with 70% humidity and bright sunshine, which means we might have storms firing up again tonight.  At 3am this morning, we scampered to the basement, accompanied by the sonorous strains of the [...]

Read Full Post »

Unfinished Home Ends Up as Pieces

I’m pretty excited about Today’s History Lesson.  In fact, I’ve been anxiously awaiting June 13th just so I could write about it.  But it’s not because today happens to be a Friday and I have some super-spooky “Friday the 13th” thing, although mystery surrounds the subject.
I want to write a few words about Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm II.  Ludwig II’s [...]

Read Full Post »