history

Chris Knight's avatar

Let’s compare some fiction and fact…

– Jabba’s Palace was first built by the B’omarr Monks, who continued to live within it and practice their religion long after after Jabba the Hutt took over and made it his headquarters.

– The Hagia Sophia was a Christian basilica until 1453 when Ottoman Turks forced their way inside, slaughtering thousands of innocent people whose blood poured into the streets of Constantinople. From that time on Christians were forbidden from worshiping within their own building.

Got that? Good. Because it only makes the claim by a group of Turkish Austrians that LEGO’s new Jabba’s Palace set from its Star Wars line is “racist” and an affront to religion all the more ridiculous.

LEGO version of Jabba’s Palace (left) and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (right)
One is a place that has known murder, slavery and intolerance toward others. The other is a children’s toy.
...
Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

It wouldn’t be at all surprising if trillions of dollars have been spent in the name of combating computer viruses, to say nothing of the countless hours of lost productivity and technical havoc that those malevolent digital prions have wrought.

And it all started thirty years ago this year, with a high school student’s innocent practical joke.

Rich Skrenta in 1989:
Blame HIM for having to buy all that
anti-virus software.

The Register has a fascinating in-depth interview with Rich Skrenta: the creator of Elk Cloner: now recognized as the first-ever computer virus. Skrenta, then fifteen years old in 1982, got a little more interested in the Apple II than might have been healthy for anyone, but it started benignly enough: writing his own text-based adventures and learning advanced coding. Then inspired by a string of “hysterically funny” pranks with disks he would loan to friends, he came up ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

38 children and six adults killed. Several dozen wounded. The assailant killed himself.

That was the toll from the Bath Township Consolidated School Massacre in Bath Township, Michigan. On May 18, 1927…

You can read more about it here.

Incidentally, not a single firearm was used in the worst school massacre in the nation’s history.

It is not what is in the hand so much as what is in the heart.

Thoughts and prayers going out to the people of Newtown, Connecticut this afternoon....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Ignoring the obvious – that soon thereafter he began his downward spiral into cosmetic catastrophe and overall instability – it will forever be acknowledged that once upon a time, Michael Jackson was a musical genius. As well as a masterful performer on stage and in his music videos. It was not without reason that he was dubbed the “King of Pop”. How long he maintained that title is debatable… but Jackson did earn it.

Thriller, Michael Jackson’s masterpiece album, was released thirty years ago today, on November 30th 1982. It remains by a significant margin the best-selling music album in history.

So in honor of Thriller‘s thirtieth anniversary, here is a photo of the artist behind it. Along with two other celebrated figures from a far, far better era…

...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

It was on November 10th, 1975 that the Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest ship on the Great Lakes, sank into the depths of Superior. She carried twenty-nine men down with her.

The following year, Gordon Lightfoot recorded what is almost certainly his best-known song. It’s also one of my personal favorites, and when I found this on YouTube I had to post it here too.

Accompanied by video and photos from her construction on through her tragic end and beyond, here is “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”…

You can read more about the Edmund Fitzgerald at its Wikipedia entry.

And some years ago, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the disater, I wrote a retrospective about the ship and its good crew....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

Good friend “lowbridge” informed me about this a few years ago, so I’ve got to credit him with the find. It’s a story that’s gained renewed interest because of a certain upcoming movie.

So who was Samuel Seymour? He was the last surviving witness of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

And Mr. Seymour lived long enough to talk about it on national television (sharing a stage with Lucille Ball, among others).

From February 9 1956, here is Samuel Seymour’s appearance on I’ve Got a Secret:

Pause for a moment, and consider: Samuel Seymour was five years old when he heard the gunshot in Ford’s Theater and saw John Wilkes Booth jump down to the stage after shooting Lincoln in the back of the head. Seymour was 96 when he passed away two months after being on I’ve Got a Secret.

No doubt there are many still ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

How perfectly fitting, that on the same day that Felix Baumgartner took his 24-mile high skydive, becoming the first person to break the sound barrier in freefall with only a high-tech suit for protection…

…retired Air Force Brigadier General Charles “Chuck” Yeager celebrated the 65th anniversary of the very first supersonic flight – which Yeager accomplished in the X-1 – by flying faster than sound again at the age of 89.

There ain’t enough accomplishments of daring these days, it sadly seems. Reading stuff like this, gives me great hope....

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

That’s not the most weird headline I’ve ever made for a blog post, but I must say: that it’s certainly among the most interesting! It’s not often that the worlds of archaeology, astronomy, chemistry and history come together so boldly.

The statue on the left, dubbed “the Iron Man”, was found in Tibet sometime around 1938, by Nazi scientist Ernst Schäfer. It’s thought that it represents the Buddhist god Vaisravana. The statue isn’t terribly large but given its all-metal composition it is rather heavy. Schäfer thought it would be of particular interest to his superiors because of the swastika symbol carved upon its chest (Schäfer’s expedition was to research the origins of the Aryan race). So the statue was packed up and sent to Germany and eventually found its way into the possession of a private collector.

The statue was likely carved in the tenth century, at most. But ...

Read more

Chris Knight's avatar

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became President after the assassination of William McKinley. The Wright Brothers were still experimenting with gliders and motorized propellers. Tsar Nicholas II reigned in Russia and the British Empire mourned the passing of Queen Victoria. A child named Walt Disney was born in Chicago. Guglielmo Marconi used his newly-invented radio to send the first trans-Atlantic signal.

Meanwhile in England, a photographer named Edward Turner was experimenting with color negatives and the recent advent of motion pictures. Among other things Turner recorded footage of his three children, Hyde Park, and traffic in London.

More than a century later and after exhaustive research, it is now being reported that Edward Turner’s film is the oldest color motion picture that has ever been found.

Wanna see it? Of course ya do!

The palette of the macaw is particularly striking. But after watching the soldiers marching and the Union Jack ...

Read more