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Chris Knight's avatar

So it’s December 1st and I’m finally allowing myself to enjoy the music of the holiday season! Not that I’m a grinch or anything. It’s just… I’ve never liked how the Christmas stuff now seems to start coming out the day after Halloween (and lately even before then). It only “feels” like Seasons Greetings when it’s after Thanksgiving, and maybe several days after that just for good measure. I mean, doesn’t the year go by fast enough without it needing any “help”?

Well anyhoo, it being the time properly leading up to Christmas at last, I’ll kick things off with a post I’ve been considering for some time now. It’s a neat lil’ bit of historical lore that I’ve always enjoyed and I like to think that others will appreciate it as well.

So here we go with the strange but true tale of how The Salvation Army from its ...

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Forty years ago tonight, a man calling himself Dan Cooper arrived at Portland International Airport and purchased a ticket for Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305: a short flight to Seattle.

Shortly after taking off, “Cooper” passed a note to the stewardess: “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.”

So began the tale of what has become one of the most brazen and legendary (some have even said heroic) crimes in American history…

Cooper (often referred to as “D.B. Cooper”) showed what he purported to be a bomb (some red cylinders in his briefcase that later turned out to be harmless), demanded $200,000 in unmarked bills, and four parachutes: two loaded in the front of the plane and two in the back. After the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma the demands were met and ...

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Do you want to know why Veterans Day is on this date?

It was November the 11th, 1918, at the 11th hour, that the armistice took effect and the guns of the Western Front fell silent.

World War I, the Great War, the “war to end all wars”, had drawn to a close.

Veterans Day – a day which has come to honor all American veterans – was originally a day set aside to honor the service of the millions of soldiers from the United States who went “Over There” to fight in the trenches of Europe.

And this Veterans Day is the first that we have ever had without even one of those brave men and women among us…

Frank Buckles, the last surviving “doughboy”, passed away in February of this year. He was 110 years old.

They are all gone now.

May we never forget them....

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Forty-three years after it first aired on American television in 1968 as part of Star Trek‘s second season, “Patterns of Force”, the episode that had Kirk, Spock and the crew of the Enterprise looking for a Starfleet historian and finding an alien civilization modeled after Nazi Germany instead, will be broadcast for the first time tonight on public television in Germany.

Why hasn’t “Patterns of Force” been widely aired (it was made available as a pay-per-view episode previously) until now? The official reason is that later in the episode, the Nazi era is described as “the most efficient society” in Earth’s history. But widespread consensus is that the extreme hesitancy regarding “Patterns of Force” mostly has to do with what remains the shocking and startling image of James T. Kirk in an S.S. officer’s uniform (along with Spock’s similar attire, before being captured and tortured in the ...

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Good friend of this blog J.R. Hafer has a keen mind for a vast array of topics: everything from real estate to our mutual admiration of the late Popcorn Sutton! And now J.R. has turned our attention toward another one of his interests: the history of manned aircraft. J.R. Hafer Aviation Blog went live a short time ago and it promises to educate, illuminate and entertain with matters of aviation. Like, I didn’t know until today that the world’s first scheduled commercial flight was on January 1st 1914, made with a Benoist XIV (right) soaring across Tampa Bay in Florida.

Here’s wishing you all the best with your new blog J.R.! Looking forward to seeing what else you’re gonna post 🙂...

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Confederate Soldier’s Prayer

I asked God for strength, that I might achieve,
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked God for health, that I might do greater things,
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.
I asked for riches, that I might be happy,
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.
I asked for power, that I might have the praise of men,
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life,
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing I that I asked for but got everything I hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am among men, most richly blessed.

— Found on the body of a Confederate Soldier, 1861-1865

Good friend, fellow historian and ...

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A team of Italian archaeologists reported yesterday that the tomb of Philip the Apostle, one of the original Twelve Disciples that followed Jesus Christ, has been located in Turkey’s southwestern province of Denizli.

Philip is mentioned in all four Gospels as being among the disciples closest to Christ. He is often associated with that Philip who preached to the Ethiopian eunuch (recorded in Acts, chapter 8), however there is plenty of reason to suspect that there were two Philips who each played a prominent role in the history of the early church. Philip the Apostle is said by tradition to have been martyred at Hierapolis (located in the present-day Turkish province of Denizli). Philip is reported, like his friend and fellow apostle Peter, to have been crucified upside-down.

From the article at World Bulletin…

The tomb of St. Philip the Apostle, one of the original 12 disciples of

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Awright, I’m gonna try to keep this as decent and family-friendly as I can. Meaning that I’m refraining from re-telling any of the corny jokes that we were all sharing with each other back when this happened.

It was twenty years ago today that one of the most darkly comical incidents in pop culture history occurred…

Ahhh yes, Pee-wee Herman. By the end of the Eighties Pee-wee had conquered the world. From an HBO special that is still considered one of the best ever, to star of one of the funniest movies of all time, to the long-running CBS Saturday morning children’s show Pee-wee’s Playhouse. There were Pee-wee Herman dolls and toys in all the major retail outlets. Yes, Pee-wee had it all.

To have climbed so high. And then, to only fall so hard.

It was on July 26th, 1991 that Pee-wee’s real-life alter-ego Paul ...

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For two days now this has been wigging me out. Think y’all will understand why as you read on…

Saturday afternoon my girlfriend arrived at my house. It’s about a hundred miles or so between where we live (only an hour and a half of drive time, and less if the Virginia state troopers aren’t looking :-P). She came at 2 and we were hanging out here when a short while later in the afternoon we noticed something on the front bumper of her car.

At first we thought it might be part of some animal that she had hit (though she couldn’t remember ever hitting one, which is better than can be said about Yours Truly, but anyhoo…) But when we went out to look at it, it wasn’t long before we had wished that it was a piece of roadkill, ‘cuz we can not figure out how this ...

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About the same time that Operation: Desert Storm was going on but before the ground war started in Iraq back in 1991, I read The Hobbit for the first time. Immediately after that I plunged into The Lord of the Rings. And it wasn’t long after that when I thought that since I was on such a hot streak that I’d read The Silmarillion as well.

And my brain immediately got befuddled by the vastness of J.R.R. Tolkien’s cosmology that had only been hinted at in The Lord of the Rings.

The thing which I most couldn’t wrap my mind around was Middle-earth before the fall of Númenor: Tolkien had the world that would eventually be our own as a “flat Earth”, and it stayed that way until the last king of Númenor sailed into the west to try to wrest away an immortality that could never ...

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