It would seem from today's unusual wikipedia article that the british don't have a monopoly on whimsy... Joshua Abraham Norton (c. 1819 – January 8, 1880), the self-proclaimed Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, was a celebrated citizen of San Francisco, California, who in 1859 proclaimed himself "Emperor of these United States" ... Read More...
Month: November 2013
Frank goes looking for trouble... They say the devil is in the detail, but is that a fact? I decided to find out. First of all, though, I wanted to have a better idea of “the detail”. I was pretty sure I would know the devil when I saw him, but ... Read More...
Karyn Reeves is the curator of the A Penguin a Week blog, which gathers reviews of her collection of thousands of Penguin's paperbacks. She wrote about her addiction to Penguins on The Dabbler here, and today she introduces a notable early publication... Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was ... Read More...
How did Thanksgiving evolve from a simple religious ceremony into a violent shopping stampede?... Spaniards have their Running of the Bulls at Pamplona; Americans have their Stampede of the Shoppers on Black Friday. Both are high risk, violent sports that frequently end in severe injury or death. Black Friday falls on ... Read More...
A few years ago bookseller Steerforth came across a remarkable diary, which he began to publish on his blog and which we now serialise on The Dabbler. If you're new to Derek, you can catch up with the previous instalments here. This week: 1980, a year of triumph and shocking ... Read More...
Our cricket correspondent Jon Hotten reveals why magazines - and readers - are obsessed with lists... Back in the mad, bad old days when I worked on magazines for a company that seemed invincible but no longer exists, I had a theory, probably rubbish, that most mags had a maximum of ... Read More...
The Stalinist era's climate of fear shaped the work of dozens of composers. This week, Mahlerman examines Soviet music... A few months ago in Degenerate Music we looked at Adolf Hitler's totalitarian response to anything in 'the arts' that failed to meet the exacting Nationalistic standards he had set out, after ... Read More...
Anthrax is one of those very 20th century, cold war-related scares that doesn't seem to hold the same terror that it once did. Today's weird Wikipedia article reminds us of what happened to a scottish island that was poisoned in the name of science... Gruinard Island is a small Scottish island ... Read More...
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, here's a craft project... Hello readers! I am going to show you how to make a lovely scale model of Dealey Plaza, the site in Dallas, Texas, of the Kennedy assassination fifty years ago today on 22 November 1963. First, get some plasticine. ... Read More...
We reach for the stars in the latest instalment of our Compelling Machinery series (previous posts can be found here). Scott Locklin on an increasingly antique achievement. Rocketry is a field which peaked in the 1960s, probably never to improve appreciably. The space shuttle? A flying brick. The attempted replacement for the ... Read More...