history

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On October 2nd, 1959, CBS premiered a new television series. Its creator, Rod Serling, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the new medium.

But for his new show Serling had something very different in mind. Eschewing traditional drama, Serling chose an anthology format that would not only entertain, but enthrall and tantalize and, at times, utterly haunt the viewer.

So it was that on that evening, millions of viewers crossed over into The Twilight Zone for the first time.

Could this possibly be the greatest television series ever? I mean, it’s hard to think of any other show that has been more influential, or had as tremendous an impact on our modern culture.

Awright, so anyone who notes the anniversary of The Twilight Zone is doubtless going to tick off his/her favorite episodes, right? Well, in no particular order some of mine are “A ...

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From the Anne Frank House channel on YouTube…

Here’s the clip’s description…

July 22 1941. The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor.

This would have been about a year before Anne and her family went into hiding....

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Mike Stimpson is a photographer… and a LEGO maniac. So he combined his love of both and came up with a series of pics replicating some of the most famous images in modern history with LEGO bricks and minfigs (like Stimpson’s take on the classic VJ Day kiss in New York City, shown at right). The Daily Beast has more about Stimpson’s work along with the photos that inspired them. And if you want to check out the rest of his stuff, click on through to Mike Stimpson’s official website.

(Thanks to Lee Shelton for the great find!)...

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In April of 1945, during the final days of the European theater and with the approaching rumble of Soviet tanks heralding the collapse of his “Thousand Year Reich”, Adolf Hitler is said to have committed suicide within his Berlin bunker. His longtime mistress Eva Braun also joined him in death, rather than be captured alive. They took cyanide and then shot themselves. And according to surviving accounts, Hitler’s aides took the bodies outside the bunker, doused them with gasoline and set them ablaze: an attempt to ensure that the Soviets could not make a trophy of the Fuhrer’s remains.

But a year later, bones and skull fragments with bullet holes were found at the site by Russian forces. They were assumed to be all that was left of Adolf Hitler. The fragments sat in Moscow throughout the Cold War, and only in recent years have they finally come under the ...

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If Ridley Scott wants to make a Monopoly movie so bad, he should scrap his plans for a straight adaptation of the board game and film this instead: the ingeniously crazy and TRUE tale of how British soldiers in German POW camps during World War II used Monopoly to escape from prison. Historians are now saying that thousands of British military personnel could have literally gotten “out of jail free” and safely out of Nazi clutches… with a little help from Parker Brothers.

During World War II, as the number of British airmen held hostage behind enemy lines escalated, the country’s secret service enlisted an unlikely partner in the ongoing war effort: The board game Monopoly.

It was the perfect accomplice.

Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it

...
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Has archaeological evidence for the biblical account of Joseph been found? That’s what the Middle East Media Research Institute is reporting in a translation from an Egyptian newspaper. Scholars sifting through countless artifacts stored at the Museum of Egypt are now saying that numerous “charms” are actually coins dating to the time Joseph was said to have been in the court of the Pharaoh chronicled in the Book of Genesis. One of the more intriguing discoveries were coins…

“…that bore special markings identifying them as being from the era of Joseph. Among these, there was one coin that had an inscription on it, and an image of a cow symbolizing Pharaoh’s dream about the seven fat cows and seven lean cows, and the seven green stalks of grain and seven dry stalks of grain.”

Some years ago a tomb was discovered dating back to the same supposed period, apparently of

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It’s a sad irony that late on Friday night this past weekend I wound up watching Norma Rae, the 1979 movie about a woman in a southern factory town who defies her employers by becoming a union organizer. It was on one of the channels coming in from my digital satellite service. I’d seen it plenty enough before, but this was the first time that I felt led to research the background of the film.

And so it was that I learned the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton. And apart from the changed name, that really was her life that we saw portrayed by Sally Field in Norma Rae. Right down to how Sutton actually scrawled “UNION” on a piece of cardboard and brought the textile plant she worked at to a halt.

Sutton was from Burlington, North Carolina: just down the road from here. And ...

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I’ll just let this image and the circumstance surrounding its existence speak for itself.

This is the opening shot of the third-from-last scene of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. This shot and the ensuing dialogue between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace Windu and Yoda are dominated by a brilliant and beautiful sunset, which poignantly echoes the darkness that is now falling across the galaxy…

According to the original online annotations for the Star Wars Episode II DVD on StarWars.com, the background plate in this scene was a photograph made of the Tokyo skyline at sunset.

And this is a photograph that was taken on September 11th, 2001.

If you figure the time zone difference, the dominant element of this pivotal scene in the Star Wars saga was taken from the real world, at about the very same moment that New York City was coming under attack thousands of ...

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Early on the morning of September 1st, 1939, a squadron of Nazi German Luftwaffe attacked the Polish town of Wieluń. More than twelve hundred people were killed. Minutes later a German battleship opened fire on the military depot at Danzig. In the hours that followed dozens of motorized German divisions stormed into Poland along three fronts.

World War II had begun.

Nothing more to say here, other than to remember history… and a prayer that we may be mindful of lessons that are all too often only paid for at the highest of cost....

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Scientific Blogging has an intriguing story up about how one group of scientists is working to reproduce musical instruments that had previously been lost to antiquity… along with the the unique sounds that they produced. One such instrument is the barbiton (right), an early type of bass guitar.

Do you long to hear the dulcet sounds of the salpinx, barbiton, aulos or the syrinx? Of course not, because no one has heard them in centuries. Most people have never even heard of them.

But you will soon have the chance to experience musical instruments familiar to ancient civilizations but long since forgotten.

Ancient instruments probably got lost because they were too difficult to build or too difficult to play. The ASTRA (Ancient instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application) team is tasked with bringing them back to life and already have successfully reconstructed the sound of an earlier instrument called the ‘epigonion’.

The ...

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