by david allan van nostrand | Jun 15, 2026 | Americana, Herds, Marketing, Rituals
Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang were mostly robbers of banks, stagecoaches, and trains at gunpoint, sometimes dramatically, as portrayed in a dynamite explosion the gang set off when Woodcock stubbornly wouldn’t part with Mister E. H. Harriman’s money. But to...
by david allan van nostrand | Mar 23, 2026 | AISA, Artificial Intelligence, Marketing, The Wayback Machine, The world around us
Marshes are zones of transition between the land on one side and the water on the other, be it ocean, lake, pond, river, or creek. Marshes are flat, low-lying, treeless* land covered mostly by fresh or salt water or a mix of the two. Whatever land is there is always...
by david allan van nostrand | Jan 5, 2026 | Human Behavior, Marketing, The world around us, Young moderns
Billy’s father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish. When he was 23, he married a 40-year old woman who fixed his bad teeth, changed his hairstyle, taught him how to act, and talked him into changing his name. Joan Crawford co-starred with him in eight films. She...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 10, 2025 | Americana, Marketing, The Wayback Machine
Felix Mendelssohn composed The Wedding March (“Here comes the bride”) for a stage production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sixteen years later, it became a wedding must-have when Queen Victoria’s daughter Victoria chose it to be played at her...
by david allan van nostrand | Aug 21, 2023 | Human Behavior, Marketing, Social archaelogy, The world around us
The Guardian tells of a visiting British minister who presented a pocket watch to a Taiwanese official. When asked to comment on the gift, the official said he might sell it to a scrap dealer for some money. The stunned minister sniffed that in the UK a watch is...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 4, 2022 | Americana, Marketing, The Wayback Machine
This is the third of a three-part series about advertising characters in the United States. The first told the stories of the four greatest fictional characters to personify a brand and the second related the histories of the four greatest real-life television...
