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 | Dec 22, 2025 | Human Behavior, Items in the News, Rituals, The Wayback Machine, The world around us
Have you heard of the Western Hemisphere tribe that steals hemiparasites from their hosts and uses them as the centerpieces of a ritual that goes back centuries? People hang from the ceiling special organisms that feed on the resources of others. Once situated...
by david allan van nostrand | Nov 17, 2025 | Organizational Behavior, Rituals, The Wayback Machine
Day is done, gone the sun, From the lake, from the hills, from the sky; All is well, safely rest, God is nigh. If we know the tune at all, we know Taps was written to signal lights out to armies spread across large outdoor encampments. Armies used the bugle because it...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 30, 2025 | Fourth of July, Rituals, The Wayback Machine
Most people think the Chinese invented fireworks around 200 B.C. Technically, that’s not true because historians tell us it was an accident, not an invention. As it turns out, when the ancients tossed bamboo* sticks on the fire, they flickered and sputtered while they...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 24, 2025 | Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior, Rituals, The world around us
The first obituaries were published long ago in newspapyri somewhere around the Mediterranean Sea. They were little more than death notices. When someone of great stature died, there would be brief life summaries. Asp Takes Cleo. A Closer Look at Obituaries A month or...
by david allan van nostrand | Nov 25, 2024 | Human Behavior, Rituals, The Wayback Machine
A Closer Look at Executions Serial killer, rapist, and necrophiliac Ted Bundy admitted to killing 36 young women and girls and keeping a dozen of their severed heads as souvenirs in his apartment. Mass murderer John Wayne Gacy raped and tortured 33 young men he lured...
