by david allan van nostrand | Sep 7, 2026 | Americana, Items in the News, origin story, The Wayback Machine
Clarence Birdseye’s nickname was Bugs. A naturalist and adventurer from Brooklyn, New York, he lived for a time among the Inuit at the very tip of Labrador, Canada, inside the Arctic Circle. There, the fishermen’s catches froze quickly in extreme sub-zero...
by david allan van nostrand | Aug 24, 2026 | Human Behavior, Items in the News, The Wayback Machine, The world around us
Francisco de Goya painted Niños Jugando al Balancín in 1792. They’ve just kids, goofing around, making their own plaything from what’s handy. No GameBoys for these game boys. My first impression was how unstable it must be, one round log teetering on another round...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 13, 2026 | Americana, Items in the News, The 1960s, The Wayback Machine
Hank Ballard and the Midnighters didn’t sing moon-June-spoon songs like most white bands. Their songs were considered by many to be raunchy, a catchall word that captures things earthy, sexual, and vulgar. Their 1954 song Annie Had a Baby was salacious (“She can’t...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 6, 2026 | Actively observing, Items in the News, The world around us
Burmese pythons are ambush hunters that can grow to be as much as 19 feet long in the wild in the Florida Everglades. Females are five or six feet longer than males and may lay as many as a thousand eggs over a typical life span. Burmese pythons rarely move about,...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 29, 2026 | Americana, Inventions, Items in the News, The Wayback Machine
Three very bad man are after the money they think Audrey Hepburn has because her husband stole it from them and he has turned up dead, thrown from a train in his pajamas. The police gave her the small travel bag they found with his body. Inside were a few francs, a...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 22, 2026 | Items in the News, The world around us
Greetings, faithful readers of this space. You don’t know me. I’m Mike Strange, a retired sportswriter, who was once, in a galaxy far, far away, a college fraternity brother of David, your usual host. David asked me to step in for a week while he is tasked with a...
