A couple weeks ago I went to the going out of business sale for the Borders bookstore in St. Paul. While being a vulture browsing the sale, I glanced through 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains Your World and saw this story from the Russian Civil War:
The Obamas Make History With Homebrewed White House Honey Ale.
Unfortunately, despite pleas from brewers all over the country, they have not yet released the recipe.
This past weekend mia_mcdavid and I were part of colgaffneyis group at the Scottish
Ramble, held at the Landmark Center
in St. Paul.
Some history, via This Day in Ancient History.
From Hangwomen.
It is reputed that in 1780 a middle aged woman from Co. Kerry called Elizabeth Dolan or McDermott was sentenced to death at Roscommon for the murder of her son. The town’s normal hangman did not turn up for the execution of Elizabeth and her 24 fellow condemned prisoners who were members of the “White Boys” so Elizabeth is reputed to have said to the sheriff “Spare me, yer Honour, spare me and I’ll hang them all.” As in law he would have had to have performed the task himself if no one else could be found, the sheriff agreed. Elizabeth executed her fellow criminals and was appointed Roscommon’s hang-woman and given a room of her own in the goal. She is thought to have operated there from about 1780 until her death in 1807. Her own death sentence was commuted in 1802.
An ex-Weather Underground radical on the Tucson shootings and political violence
….the Weather Underground believed in the absolute necessity of bombs to address actual moral grievances such as the Vietnam War and racism….
Via Ann Althouse
Medieval warfare was just as terrifying as you might imagine
The soldier now known as Towton 25 had survived battle before. A healed skull fracture points to previous engagements. He was old enough—somewhere between 36 and 45 when he died—to have gained plenty of experience of fighting. But on March 29th 1461, his luck ran out.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 