by david allan van nostrand | May 4, 2026 | Americana, Human Behavior, Items in the News, origin story, The Wayback Machine, The world around us
After watching all day, Mork told Orson that today was Woman in Relation to Her Children’s Day. It’s an occasion where overfed Americans stand in line for hours to pay too much much money for a mediocre meal that took far too long to be served by frazzled...
by david allan van nostrand | Apr 6, 2026 | Fads, Human Behavior, The Wayback Machine
The organistrum (the organ I strum) is a stringed musical instrument from the Middle Ages. It was commonly referred to as the “wheel fiddle” and was so large that it took two people to play it. One person turned the crank while another pressed keys that changed the...
by david allan van nostrand | Mar 30, 2026 | Americana, Human Behavior, The Wayback Machine
Skylab was America’s first space station. On July 11, 1979, it ran out of gas (figuratively) and gravity took over. As it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, the 99-foot-long Skylab disintegrated, spewing 154,000 pounds of soon-to-be flotsam over most of the Indian Ocean....
by david allan van nostrand | Mar 16, 2026 | Americana, Human Behavior, The Wayback Machine
A cholera epidemic reached Europe after starting in India and spreading to Asia by land and sea routes. Cholera is an infectious disease caused by bacteria that thrive on rotting food and drinking water contaminated by human waste. Infection occurs mostly in the small...
by david allan van nostrand | Mar 9, 2026 | Behind the curtain, Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior, The world around us
Until he was killed when his single-seat lightweight aircraft crashed, Joseph Overton was a Fellow at The Mackinac Center for Public Policy. A policy analyst, he described the range of topics acceptable to mainstream thinking as the window of discourse. Overton...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 9, 2026 | Human Behavior, Psychology, The world around us, Trivia
The big event of the 14th century was the Black Plague. After killing off half the population of Europe, the Black Death (its street name) left the other half living with hunger, fear, and poverty. Regular people had to make do with scraps while the elites lived in...
