Exploding Aardvark

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TODAY’S LONG MUST-READ: WATERBOARDING

As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds […]

WORD ORIGINS: TERRORIST

If the French Terror had a slogan, it was that attributed to the great orator Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” Saint-Just’s pithy phrase (like President Bush’s variant, “We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself”) could serve as the very antithesis of the […]

IMMUNITY FOR TELECOMS?

In the 1950s, during the sad period known as the McCarthy era, one’s political beliefs again served as a rationale for government monitoring. Individual corporations and entire industries were coerced by government leaders into informing on individuals and barring their ability to earn a living.
I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My crime? […]

18 OCTOBER 1924

Looking at the 1924 local papers was so much fun last week that I decided to do it again. I’m not promising to make this a weekly feature, but it could happen.
Daily Ilini
Pretty much the entire paper is on homecoming and the havoc it was likely to cause. The cities imported cops from Chicago to […]

ILLINOIS DIGITAL NEWSPAPER COLLECTION

The UIUC library’s Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection currently contains digitised versions of two local papers, the Daily Illini and the Urbana Daily Courier, from 1916 to 1925. Holy mackerel.
I just took a spin through the Courier dated 11 October 1924, and here are a few highlights:

Senator Robert M. LaFollette kicked off his presidential campaign in […]

DEAD ANIMALS

Here are the stories and final resting places of almost two hundred famous animals, including Lord Byron’s dog, Arabella the space spider, Napoleon’s camel, Old Rip (the toad who met a US president), a valiant carrier pigeon, Dolly the cloned sheep, Florence Nightingale’s owl, Bubbles the escaped hippo, a cat named Room Eight, the world’s […]

CIVIC DISENGAGEMENT

Civic Literacy is one of those “do-good” subjects often dismissed by supposedly more hard-nosed or more pragmatic people. This is a mistake. Our political system is functioning less well than it could, less well than Americans say they would like it to, because of a drift away from an understanding of, let alone a commitment […]

BLUE EGGS

Eggs of this nature were first seen by missionaries in South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is not widely known that the history of blue eggs in the Cotswolds stretches back as far as the 1920’s, when botanist and explorer, Mr. Clarence Elliott, who toured the world collecting rare plants, brought […]

2007 AND STILL NO FLYING CARS

French prints from 1910, showing life in the year 2000 (Paleo-Future)

16 AUGUST

1884: Hugo Gernsback is born
1920: Charles Bukowski is born
1938: Robert Johnson dies
1956: Bela Lugosi’s dead
1977: Elvis Presley dies