by david allan van nostrand | Sep 28, 2026 | Americana, origin story, The iterative process, The Wayback Machine
Nature makes ice by dropping the temperature. The farther north you go, the thicker the ice that forms naturally on freshwater lakes. Ice farmers harvested huge blocks of frozen lake with huge saws and dragged them to the cool, dark areas where they’d be stored in...
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 31, 2026 | origin story, The Wayback Machine
The earth’s outer shell, called the crust, is mostly rock. It’s at its thickest beneath the Himalayan Mountains, where it’s 45 miles deep. Most of the rock contains significant amounts of feldspar, the most plentiful mineral on earth. The word feldspar comes from the...
by david allan van nostrand | Aug 3, 2026 | Americana, Fads, origin story, The Wayback Machine
Throughout most of the 1880s, men wore hats, suits, and ties every day and everywhere. Called sack suits, they had three pieces. The loose, hanging single-breasted jacket, the matching vest, and trousers. Nearly all the shirt was covered by the jacket and vest, but...
by david allan van nostrand | May 18, 2026 | Behind the curtain, origin story, The Wayback Machine
Harry Colebourn (1887-1947) was a lieutenant with the Royal Canadian Army Veterinary Corps. He was on a train taking him to the port where he would board a troop ship on its way to the fighting in Europe. When Colebourn’s train stopped for water in White River,...
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...
