To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Porch Girl posted a This Day In History bit about La noche triste, a night where the Aztecs almost wiped out Cortes and his crew. Huh, I though, that’s not something I’m familiar with, and it’s definitely something begging a historical essay, so I ran right out and grabbed this 600 page academic tome about […]
Don’t call us traitors: descendants of Cortés’s allies defend role in toppling Aztec empire: When people from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala travel to other parts of the country, they are sometimes insulted as traitors by their compatriots. Tlaxcala is Mexico’s smallest state in size, but it played an outsized role in Mexico’s early history, […]
Seen probably on the Facebook wall of my belly-dancing, yoga spouting cousin: The Aztecs built their capital in the middle of a swamp because of a religious vision someone had, and then proceeded to, as Hugh Thomas put it: What was necessary, in the meantime, was a suitable appeasement of Tlaloc, the rain god. He […]
Although tied to recent news: The 1519 Project: How Early Spanish Explorers Took Down A Mass-Murdering Indigenous Cult. Let’s take a brief recess from the 1619 Project to explore another project. Call it the “1519 Project.” A full century before The New York Times’ proposed re-dating of the American founding and 2,200 miles southwest of […]
The first two paragraphs of the book: Twenty-five hundred Missouri troops surrounded the Mormon town of Far West on the night of 31 October 1838. Nearly eight hundred Mormon defenders waited silently behind their makeshift barricade of wagons, house logs, and floor planks, which extended three-quarters of a mile across the southern edge of town. […]
You know, every year I provide a handy little boast list of how much I’ve read in one place. Because of the hiatus, I didn’t get that list out. Until now. Read it and weep (for my lack of a life outside the pages): Friday by Robert Heinlein Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan […]
Well, gentle reader, it has come a time for an accounting. Or a counting. How many books did I read in 2023? Well, I held the accounting period open for a couple extra days, to the end of the year–normally, I call a lid on the counting sometime after Christmas, but I held out to […]
Well, gentle reader, as with the last few sales, I was not sure whether I would schlep all the way to the other side of town to buy records and books that would, maybe, barely fit onto my existing shelves. I asked my beautiful wife Friday night if she would like to go, and she […]
I bought this book seven years ago because I was familiar with the name Lester del Rey, but I think I was most familiar with the name because of the publishing imprint whose juvenile science fiction books in library binding were a staple of my middle school years, at least at M. Gene Henderson Junior […]
I bought this book and little fold-out collection of pictures in 2016, and it’s taken this long for me to get to it because the book contains a bunch of poorly written text around the few full-color photographs of the ruins in Chichen Itza, which means it has gone almost a football season and a […]
This year, I read 104 books, and I’m proud to say they weren’t all genre fiction. As a matter of fact, I’m quite proud of some of the smarter titles I’ve polished off this year, including Existentialism and Thomism; The Gallic and Civil Wars; Discourses, the collection of Aesop, The Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian […]
All right, so here’s the story: A couple of months ago, the dojo where I study changed its policy and allowed students who attain a certain rank to wear a red gi and students who attain a higher rank a black gi (I already wear a black gi because I’m in a class that studies […]
Well, here they are: The 106 books I read in 2011. Buried Treasures of the Ozarks by W.C. Jameson Remembering St. Louis World’s Fair by Margaret Johanson Witherspoon Missouri Bandits, Bushwackers, Outlaws by Carole Marsh A Political Bestiary by Eugene J. McCarthy and James J. Kilpatrick This Is It, Mike Shayne by Brett Halliday Battlestar […]
Well, I read about the rise of one Khan, so it lends itself to a certain symmetry if I were to follow pretty closely with the rise of another. And so I have. This book is an overview of the rise of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire and the empire after Genghis Khan’s death. […]
Professor Bainbridge points to an article that might indicate that the ruling class has almost succeeded in erasing history to its benefit: Who will be the Greatest American? Political giant Abraham Lincoln or Bill Clinton? Sports legend Babe Ruth or Tiger Woods? Media mogul Oprah Winfrey or Walt Disney? These remarkable people, and many more, […]