That’s what researchers are now saying about the famous composer. Instead of foul play or fouler pork, it might have been nothing as mundane as an infection of streptococcus that took Mozart’s life at the age of 35.
Read the rest of the story here, including all kinds of neat details about gory death in the Austrian Empire....
Forty years ago today, in the early morning hours of August 9th, 1969, what is still considered to be the most infamous and bizarre act of multiple murder in American history began.
Just after midnight Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian climbed over the fence of 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles and stealthily made their way to the house of movie director Roman Polanski.
Polanski himself was not at home. But his wife was: the stunningly beautiful and nearly nine months pregnant actress Sharon Tate. So were her friend and well-known hairstylist Jay Sebring, Sebring’s girlfriend Abigail Folger (heiress to the coffee fortune) and Polanski’s friend Wojciech Frykowski. Also present ...
On July 24th, 1959, one of the more unusual events of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union took place. At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, visiting U.S. Vice-President (and future President) Richard Nixon accompanied Russian Premier Nikia Krushchev on a tour of a model “typical” American house, complete with all the modern conveniences of the late Fifties. It was meant to be a goodwill gesture on the part of both countries… but soon devolved (or escalated) into a rambunctious argument between Nixon and Krushchev about the pros and cons of their respective countries’ systems of capitalism and communism. The impromptu discussion reached its climax in the kitchen of the model house, where Nixon enthusiastically pointed out American household appliances such as an automatic dishwasher.
And so it was that the “Kitchen Debate” received its more-or-less formal moniker.
Here’s a newsreel clip ...
“…one giant leap for mankind.”
(And before anybody gives me grief over it, in the past few years audio analysis has determined that Armstrong did indeed say “step for a man” 🙂
Forty years ago today, on July 20th, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, with the assistance of a few hundred thousand of their good friends back on Earth, fulfilled an ages-old dream when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Armstrong was the first man to stretch his legs on the lunar surface, while Aldrin has the distinction of being the first person to “drain the main vein” on another world.
I didn’t know until this past year that before they began their “extra-vehicular activity” (in layman’s terms: they went outside the spaceship), that Aldrin also took communion on the Moon. At the time he was an elder of Webster Presbyterian Church and asked that ...
Parag Khanna writes an intriguing essay at the Foreign Policy site in which he makes the case that the concept of traditional nation states as we have come to understand it is breaking down. In its place is what he calls a “neomedieval” paradigm that hearkens back to the Dark Ages…
...Many see the global economic crisis as proof that we live in one world. But as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries.
The state isn’t a universally representative phenomenon today, if it ever was. Already, billions of people live in imperial conglomerates such as the European Union, the Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere, and
On June 6th 1944, Allied forces commenced on the largest amphibious invasion and assault in recorded history as more than 160,000 personnel landed on five beaches of the Normandy coast in the opening assault on Hitler’s supposedly impregnable Festung Europa.
The liberation of western Europe had begun.
Here’s the link to the Wikipedia entry, even though there’s no way that an encyclopedic article could possibly convey the full scope of Operation Overlord: something that had never been done before and Lord willing, will never be needed again.
But to those who did, who waded ashore on Normandy so that others might be free – and especially to those among them who never came back home – this blogger can only give the most reverent of respects....
Millvina Dean was a two month old baby when her family set out from England for America, where her father had dreams of opening a tobacco shop in Kansas. But because of a coal strike they weren’t able to board the ship they had originally intended to take to the New World.
Instead, they found passage as third-class passengers aboard the R.M.S. Titanic. Little Millvina Dean would be the youngest passenger on the ship’s maiden voyage.
Her father felt the impact when the great ship collided with her destiny on April 14th, 1912. Mr. Dean quickly sought to put his wife and two children on one of the lifeboats. They survived, while he remained onboard and drowned with more than fifteen hundred others.
Millvina Dean was the last living survivor of the Titanic.
You know what I find most ironic about this essay?
...It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
(snip)
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their “right” to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our “democracy”. Pride blind the foolish.
Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different “branches and denominations” were for the
What I would give to have a brain gifted enough to handle stuff like math and software coding (and I’ve tried folks, believe you me). ‘Cuz then I could maybe work for a company like Bethesda Game Studios, who not only are very talented at making video games like Fallout 3, but also have a twisted sense of humor.
So I’ve been working my Fallout 3 character through the Capital Wasteland, 200 years after the nuclear exchange between the United States and China. Just levellin’ him up more or less. Well tonight I wound up in the ruins of Arlington National Cemetery…
Out of curiosity I went looking for Arlington House, which was the pre-Civil War home of Robert E. Lee and his family. It wasn’t hard to spot and I gotta give serious props to the Bethesda staff for including such a nice historical location…
Guess ...
1983 was the start of a disastrous period for the once-seemingly indomitable video game industry. With the market overly-glutted from too many competing systems (and a similar brawl wrecking havoc among the nascent personal computer business) many individuals and families completely abandoned home video gaming out of sheer frustration. Neither were matters helped by corporate bungling that has since taken on legendary proportions: witness E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and the Pac-Man port for the Atari 2600. And yeah, the “Atari Landfill” story is completely true. Let’s not even begin to talk about turkeys like Porky’s and Custer’s Revenge (I’m telling y’all kiddies who weren’t around then, that you missed something else…).
All of which makes it the more astonishing that in the dying glow of video gaming’s first burst of prominence, one title was produced which a quarter-century later is still hailed as one of the greatest and most groundbreaking ...